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The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

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Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#71

Post by ognarb »

lupire wrote: post #57
fabrice_d wrote: post #35

The biggest threat to Linux on phones could be Fuchsia. If/when Google decides to switch to a Fuchsia base for Android, all the chipset vendors will follow suit and that will make it even harder to find chipsets that can be used with a Linux kernel - upstream or not. That will dry up the amount of effort put into making Linux a good mobile platform. Maybe the stable binary api of Fuchsia drivers will be usable on Lin…

Is something wrong with using Fuchsia kernel insted of Linux? It's open source and it has a modern, secure capability architecture. Running Linux binaries , not just source code, is a design goal of Fuchsia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26104667

Most (all?) the drivers will be closed source since the license allows it.

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#72

Post by mhitza »

meristohm wrote: post #17

Since I no longer play games on my mobile device, I’m comfortable with lower performance (to run Anki, a password manager, Firefox, text editing, play music and podcasts and audiobooks and text-to-speech ebooks—this might be resource-intensive?, record and view photos and videos, send and receive texts and calls). Battery life is also important, though most of my phone use is while it is plugged in.

The biggest performance issue is going to be the browser. Because for any type of rendering performance hardware acceleration is a must. And Firefox disables that by default on Linux (needs to be manually enabled in about:config).

The second issue, which I saw based on reviews alone was a very slow camera interface.

One surprise with PinePhone optimized distros is Ubuntu Touch (ubports). Not sure what type of magic they are on, but accelerate 1080p video in the browser and fluid mobile interfaces.

Check out the Short Circuit youtube channel for their PinePhone video. Watched it expecting to see just laggy interfaces, but ubports really takes it to the next level.

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#73

Post by Google234 »

ognarb wrote: post #71
lupire wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is something wrong with using Fuchsia kernel insted of Linux? It's open source and it has a modern, secure capability architecture. Running Linux binaries , not just source code, is a design goal of Fuchsia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26104667

Most (all?) the drivers will be closed source since the license allows it.

At least they won’t break with every minor update.

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#75

Post by zozbot234 »

amelius wrote: post #70

What sandboxing/app-deployment systems does Linux offer today, and which one is the most promising? Are they secure, and do they offer fine-grained permissions?

FlatPak is working on adding support for fine-grained sandboxing, but they're not there yet.

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#76

Post by posguy »

lupire wrote: post #57
fabrice_d wrote: post #35

The biggest threat to Linux on phones could be Fuchsia. If/when Google decides to switch to a Fuchsia base for Android, all the chipset vendors will follow suit and that will make it even harder to find chipsets that can be used with a Linux kernel - upstream or not. That will dry up the amount of effort put into making Linux a good mobile platform. Maybe the stable binary api of Fuchsia drivers will be usable on Lin…

Is something wrong with using Fuchsia kernel insted of Linux? It's open source and it has a modern, secure capability architecture. Running Linux binaries , not just source code, is a design goal of Fuchsia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26104667

Fuchsia has separated the drivers from the kernel[1], enabling proprietary drivers that are never updated to become acceptable. This can result in Blueborne[2], GPU vulnerabilities[3], and any other proprietary driver remaining permanently vulnerable as the hardware manufacturer has no incentive to update the driver.

In Fuchsia's model, you can run the latest OS with these vulnerable, non-updated drivers, or your device ODM could even release nothing and you don't have the GPLv2 to fall back on to get the Board Support Package for your hardware to build your own updates with.

1 - https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/8/22163225/google-fuchsia-o...

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueBorne_(security_vulnerabil...

3 - https://redd.it/s48lz

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#78

Post by posguy »

ognarb wrote: post #71
lupire wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is something wrong with using Fuchsia kernel insted of Linux? It's open source and it has a modern, secure capability architecture. Running Linux binaries , not just source code, is a design goal of Fuchsia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26104667

Most (all?) the drivers will be closed source since the license allows it.

Worse yet, the OS itself is non-GPL, an OEM can modify Fuchsia outside just the drivers to support their device (eg: create a board support package) and never release their modifications to their customers, meaning the community can't compile their own updates to the software running on the device (worse than our current Android situation).

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#79

Post by ergocoder »

butz wrote: post #53
ergocoder wrote: post #51

I want something small like Palm Phone, which is beautiful and refined. But Palm Phone totally screws it up by marketing themselves as "companion phone" (your second mobile phone, why would I have 2 phones??) and the battery life is 5h (wtf is this??). Other minimal phones focuses on calling, and guess what? 99% of my calls in the past few years were with spam. Currently, there is absolutely no minimal small smart ph…

I've got Unihertz Jelly 2. It is smaller than "Palm Palm" in width and heigth, but a bit thicker in depth, which is a good thing. Screen is a bit tad too small, but good enough for calls and other basic functions. Typing in portrait mode is tricky, at least.

I look at it. Its design looks bulky...

Small is good though.

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#80

Post by posguy »

testific8 wrote: post #46
fabrice_d wrote: post #35

The biggest threat to Linux on phones could be Fuchsia. If/when Google decides to switch to a Fuchsia base for Android, all the chipset vendors will follow suit and that will make it even harder to find chipsets that can be used with a Linux kernel - upstream or not. That will dry up the amount of effort put into making Linux a good mobile platform. Maybe the stable binary api of Fuchsia drivers will be usable on Lin…

The pine64 position on binary drivers is not as hard as the purism one (perhaps they try to balance more with cost), but there are still projects to reverse-engineer and replace some non-free firmware, such as the modem firmware: https://github.com/Biktorgj/pinephone_modem_sdk . I agree that Fuchsia will become a problem going forwards, even if Fuchsia drivers can be reverse-engineered. It's also possible that phone…

The PinePhone has the same security properties as the Nokia N900 where the modem is connected over USB rather than an interface with direct memory access (eg: PCIe) where the proprietary software running on the modem can read anything in main memory.
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