Earlier quoted context omitted.
And so commercial vendors decide to apply to Android instead.
And nothing of value was lost.
How big is the Desktop Linux market again?
The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
181–190 of 225 posts
Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
#182Recently went to a security conference and really wanted a secure low-feature phone to coordinate with friends and keep up with email/web... Speed and features don't matter, don't need games or even video. Can't imagine I'm alone... is this a niche market for a linux smartphone to take off?
The pinephone (and a linux distro) is privacy-oriented at most, but most definitely not secure. For that, choose an iPhone or a Pixel phone with GrapheneOS.
Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
#183Unpopular Opinion: I don't want a Linux Desktop (XFCE, KDE, etc) on my phone. I don't care about being able to run terminals or `chown -R user xyz` or `htop` on my phone. I want a phone with a decently polished OS, smooth (given hardware constraints) that can run apps that I control (deny ads, location info. etc) and provides an alternative to the Android/IOS duopoly. I just hope that the Pine Community will realize…
Ubuntu Touch is closer to that goal.
Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
#184I did a bit of research and it seems that the phone has a removable battery. This got me thinking, how easy is it to find a replacement?
It’s the same battery used by one of Samsung’s phones so it should be trivial
Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
#185What 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?
Firejail is by far the most mature for sandboxing desktop/phone applications. It's available on Mobian and is shipped with hundreds of profiles for popular applications.
I’m no security researcher but have read one who said that due to it being a setuid program, it can potentially turn a bug in firejail into an exploit with root access.
Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
#186Why not just use android on such phone, and remove google dependencies? Android is open source. Android is already using linux. I really don't get it. I wish somebody could answer this question with convincing arguments, because writing another mobile OS doesn't seem like a trivial task.
So, the problem is that Android is open source in concept and name only, not in practice: Code is developed in the dark, and then published later, it's not a collaborative environment. And the important part is that Google fully controls what direction Android development moves in. So they're going to design it to advantage themselves and disadvantage others. So the first problem with that is that the work to remove…
> So they're going to design it to advantage themselves and disadvantage others.
How so?
> you can't really "just fork it" without losing the main perk of running Android: Running Android apps.
> As it is, most Android apps won't work on a device without Google Play Services
Most, so you mean it's still possible to not depend on google play services. Although of course, app developers will always prefer the play store as it's the only way for them to make money in a reliable way.
> for basic functions like location.
What do you mean? All phone have GPS chips, they don't depend on google for that.
Even with all those problems, the main one being that app developers want to make money by participating to the ad ecosystem or with microtransactions, to me it doesn't seem like android is completely tied to the google ecosystem.
Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see that as a sort of capitulation. What is actually needed is manufacturers who remain responsible and responsive when it comes to the quality of their drivers. They need to support them much longer than they currently do, and they need to release security fixes promptly. I think having a sandboxed driver model is a great idea in general, but this will only encourage hardware manufacturers to care even less about…
> What is actually needed is manufacturers who remain responsible and responsive when it comes to the quality of their drivers. They need to support them much longer than they currently do, and they need to release security fixes promptly. That requires a level of investment in engineering competence that they aren’t doing because there is little incentive. How would you suggest changing that?
When the support ends, drivers must be open-sourced.
Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me the PinePhone and other Linux phones are also about performance. Yes the MVP prototypes will always suck and you would only buy these for freedom's sake, but a truly unified software platform encompassing both mobile and mainstream computing all running on openly documented reference hardware, will be far superior technically to what we have today.
As a purism owner, and a long-time linux user... I think that is a fantasy statement. Theoretically, there could be an open platform like the PC (with usb + pcie + ATX case/power supply + etc..) with open interfaces. However the reason this came into existence was by microsoft's design to commoditize the hardware to drive software sales of its (closed) operating system. With cellphones all of those interfaces are bei…
> ...However the reason this came into existence was by microsoft's design to commoditize the hardware to drive software sales of its (closed) operating system.
Don't make the tail wag the dog.
IBM was in control of the hardware design and the rest of the ecosystem, heavily influenced by their previous work on the IBM System/23 DataMaster.
Microsoft just jumped on board for the expected lucrative ride, supplying a CP/M-like OS that they purchased from a local shop (SCP's QDOS).
IBM PC history:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-part-...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/07/ibm-pc-history-part-...
Byte Magazine, Sept. 1990, "The Creation of the IBM PC"
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1990-09/page/n451/...
Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
FOSS UI/UX is at least two decades behind and the gap is growing. A major problem is that people almost always underestimate the difficulty of a good UI. Good UIs can be a lot harder than the rest of a system and a modern UI toolkit has a feature set and difficulty level approaching that of a good 3D game engine like Unity.
i disagree, KDE has one, if not the best ui out there. it is consistent, customizable and not a resource hog. windows's UI has been a mess since the XP days, and osx is atleast consistent, but hides a lot of functionality in name of clean design.
Open any actual application on a pinephone and you'll see that whatever fanciness/usability KDE has falls short instantly. There's quite a way to go still.
Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just about performance: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque... .
I mean, I just stated that I cared about performance. Your opinion may differ.
Which performance exactly? Both phones can play video and provide smooth scrolling in Firefox. They support not too heavy desktop applications (convergence). Are you going to run GPT3 on them?