Will Linux phones stay around this time? • Hacker News Board

Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?

#421

Post by username90 » Sun, May 02, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

strictfp wrote: post #420

username90 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE6 was far behind the curve on features, Chrome is way ahead. The situation isn't comparable at all.

That's not the whole story. IE was innovative (albeit through embrace and extend) until they won and stagnated.

IE could stagnate since they bundled it with their OS, meaning people on an old OS used the old IE meaning IE6 lived on for over a decade. Chrome is dominant since people download it and people receive free updates, so the situation isn't comparable there either.

The situation when every webdev was forced to support IE6 would be like if developers today had to support Chrome from 2011.

Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?

#422

Post by EvilEy3 » Sun, May 02, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #402

EvilEy3 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you're throwing jabs at Android while literally every other OS in existence behaves the same way regarding network access.

This thread is in response to why we need a Linux OS, which is because they are all bad.

Android is infinitely better than anything you can come up with Linux OS on mobile. It is much easier to "fix" Android's "issues".

Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?

#423

Post by sergeykish » Sun, May 02, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #340

herbst wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Popups, weird confirmation dialogs nobody reads, configurations hidden in X different uis without console interface, the amount of screen space wasted for whatever reasons and the possibility that the wasted space contains text and icons that suddenly start to blink and move (attention seeking apps), .... I feel distracted working on Windows or Mac. As if someone is putting stones everywhere and i have to mangle inbe…

Funny, absolutely everything you said applied to Ubuntu last time I tried it.

There are so many groups in Linux. Ubuntu was oriented towards Windows users. Check out Arch Linux pkgstats [1]:

* gnome-shell is GNOME

* plasma-workspace is KDE

* i3-wm and sway — tiling WM and its Wayland successor

* xmonad — WM building framework

Note: these are installed packages among those who opted in, does not strictly reflects usage. Some fun statistics [2].

[1] https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/compare/packages#packages=gnom...

[2] https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun

Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?

#424

Post by myself248 » Sun, May 02, 2021, 5:58 PM UTC

setum wrote: post #300

_0w8t wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern UI on the phones makes discovering features really hard. One often ends up with searching obscure forums just to know very useful feature like IPhone trick with holding the space bar to move cursor. I can understand that on 4” inch phones there were no space for extra buttons, but with 6” screens this became ridiculous. So much for “good” design.

thank-you, I didn’t know of this feature. And I am using iPhone for over a year now. It was such a pain to get cursor to correct spot up until now. Please share if know of any catalog of such tricks.

Swipe left and right on an SMS to reveal the timestamp and other stuff.

Blew my mind after tearing my hair out that this information was just gone. It's not gone, just hidden in a place you'd never think to look for it.

Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?

#425

Post by myself248 » Sun, May 02, 2021, 5:59 PM UTC

drums8787 wrote: post #283

gspr wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The FOSS development paradigm seems to be allergic to good UI design I'm having a hard time understanding what it is about the development paradigm that's allergic to good UI design. In good faith I'll assume you meant that "FOSS projects seem to lack good UI design". This I'll agree with, if we're talking about G UI design (others have pointed out that the CLI interfaces are usually great). I really don't think th…

Also don’t know about the paradigm per se, but I suspect a lot of FOSS developers are CLI first type users. Secondly, they are mostly not working in environments where GUI UX designers are part of the process. Thirdly, good UX design doesn’t happen by committee. Pure speculation on the first two.

Case-sensitive filesystems. Quod erat demonstratum.

Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?

#426

Post by mpol » Sun, May 02, 2021, 6:08 PM UTC

swilliamsio wrote: post #267

mpol wrote: post #154

And yet I am using a Linux Phone since 2014 as a daily driver :) And no, it is not for everyone, just like the Linux desktop. It would need a company like Nokia to put its weight behind it to bring it that far. But if a smaller company like Jolla can do it, it can be sustainable. If there are users and enough money coming in, all it needs to do is exist. And maybe some day there will be a company like Nokia putting i…

How are you finding app availability and system stability? About four or five years ago, I had a BQ Aquaris E4.5 which ran Ubuntu Touch and used it as my daily driver. I really struggled with the lack of app support - no Messenger, no Snapchat, no Instagram, no WhatsApp. There were also lots of little bugs that really showed the operating system hadn't had the massive amount of testing a mainstream OS would get. So I…

App availability is good for my needs. For Android apps I only use Whatsapp and Firefox (as backup browser). I am not someone wanting to use apps for everything, I never used a banking app for example, and have no desire to use one. I am quite happy with Whisperfish as a third-party Signal client that is now in beta, though it needs a few more things to be more useful to me. I use an OSM app for maps, mpd client for remote music, and some default Jolla apps are quite okay.

System stability overall is really good, I hardly ever get into a situation that a reboot is required. Some years ago on my Jolla 1 this did happen more, often when the network would not come back. There are some issues, like power drain on 4G and other small bits. The development team is small, it's not a billion dollar company, I think it's all relative.

I have never used Ubuntu Touch and I cannot really comment on it. If you would be interested in trying that again, I think Axolotl is a Signal client for UT that is also in development. For Android apps, there is Anbox, but that is a very slow moving target with some rather big issues currently, from what I hear.

Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?

#427

Post by slver » Sun, May 02, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

swiley wrote: post #394

slver wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple Camera app has no manual focus. It has autofocus, tap to focus and it has focus lock if you tap and hold. How come your “favorite example” isn’t even a real example...

It turns out I was thinking of the exposure/brightness controll. Sorry I don't use iOS very often (and very rarely use the camera app.) I think my point still stands though. The UI is not at all discoverable (and not all that ergonomic either which is why most people might tolerate some lack of discoverability.)

The exposure/brightness control is not it either.

When you tap on your screen, the camera focuses on the point you tapped. It also adjusts the exposure to the point you tapped. And right next to where you tapped, a simple slider with a SUN ICON appears, and you can drag that slider to adjust the exposure.

The fact you don't use iOS and the Camera app, I'm fine with that. But you're telling everyone how bad the iPhone UI is without using it and misleading people about how it works. Not quite fair.

In any case, it's easy to pile on Apple, until you try to do it yourself. Let's see this Android OS match something at least half as usable as what the iPhone UI is. It took Android a decade to get there.

Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?

#428

Post by awiesenhofer » Sun, May 02, 2021, 6:18 PM UTC

frosted-flakes wrote: post #364

rkagerer wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really miss Palm's zen. Great sweet spot of discoverability with a clutter-free design that didn't sacrifice functionality. I could even make the buttons do useful things instead of just opening a Bixby TOS I've declined a dozen times.

I have the Bixby button set to play/pause, and a long-press to turn on the flashlight. It works great.

Which you can only do if you agree to the tos...

Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?

#429

Post by codeflo » Sun, May 02, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

zxzax wrote: post #362

codeflo wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s even worse, I think. Good UX design looks deceptively easy, but is actually incredibly hard. So hard that a lot of programmers don’t even recognize how terrible they are at it, or how high the skill ceiling actually is. They think UI design is pretty colors and rounded buttons. In a functioning software company, the managers recognize this skill difference and simply order the developers to implement what the de…

>In a typical OSS project, no one can give orders. The programmers ignore any good design suggestions because they don’t recognize those, and implement their own crappy ideas instead. Sometimes while arrogantly dunking on the designer who tried to make a contribution. Consequently, UX quality is abysmal, and anyone who could fix that is driven away. I don’t see a solution to this. Generally, going into an open source…

No need to be sorry, I'm not the designer in this story -- I'm the grumpy sofware engineer, and nowadays sometimes the manager. I'm also a desktop Linux user who is regularly annoyed by the sad and confusing state of opensource UX. What makes me so pessimistic is that I know the social dynamics that typically cause this, and have seen them play out in lots and lots of mailing list discussions.

Of course that's not a logical inevitability, things can change with more understanding. Your link actually makes me very happy, I hadn't seen this. Let's hope that this works out, and becomes a model that more OSS project can follow.

Re: Will Linux phones stay around this time?

#430

Post by alexanderdmitri » Sun, May 02, 2021, 6:26 PM UTC

deadelvis wrote: post #238

rjzzleep wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it's neither. Demoscene is a good example of when designers and programmers were working well together. Deviantart was a huge platform where people would share art and designs/skins. To some extent that still exists for iOS views. I think one thing that's different about the deviantart model was that back then apps used to have skinning interfaces. And then designers could focus on just skinning. You could ar…

This totally proves the point above of programmers not having the first clue about UX design, why it's hard and makes a the whole difference. It is everything BUT "skinning". It's about the users and their ability to understand how to work with your software to address their needs and expectations... not about your code, the designer or the manager. Those people are the product, NOT the user. If I had a dollar for ev…

If there's an OSS funded by developers cooking up crappy unwanted MVPs, I want in.

Right now I have ten crappy MVPs to donate and can put down $20 to sponsor others. I could probably have another 5 MVPs out within the next week if work is slow.