Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PostmarketOS Revolutionizes Smartphone Hacking

drewdevault.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 36 posts

Re: PostmarketOS Revolutionizes Smartphone Hacking

#21

Post by sleepysysadmin »

onkoe wrote: post #19
sleepysysadmin wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought the pinebook pro and ya it just doesnt quite have the power I want it to, but on flipside the lack of power gives the giant battery tons of runtime. But for the pinephone. I really want >= 32mp camera. Whereas 5MP is ridiculous and 2MP selfie? You're right it's slow, it's not quite figured out entirely. Pinephone pro coming soon and also doesn't quite hit the wants for me. It does look fast though in specs.

A beefy camera would be very interesting to work with. As of now, our phones do a ton of proprietary processing which makes open source/external solutions... suck. I'd love to have a decent open source camera app with the capacities of something like GCam.

>A beefy camera would be very interesting to work with. As of now, our phones do a ton of proprietary processing which makes open source/external solutions... suck. I'd love to have a decent open source camera app with the capacities of something like GCam.

I'm a big fan of open source, literally have open source projects with many stars on github. However, I'm not one of those 'no proprietary blobs' folks.

Sony has a camera chip that's awesome, available, but comes with a blob? Fine with me.

Re: PostmarketOS Revolutionizes Smartphone Hacking

#22

Post by ognarb »

fsflover wrote: post #17
ognarb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Pinephone Pro coming soon is probably a way better deal than the Librem 5. Pine64 is also way more trustworthy than Purism, who is constantly lying about their products.

> who is constantly lying about their products This is a bold claim. They have a history of delays, but lying is not what they do.

Just look at the latest post on r/Purism on how people have a really hard time to get some refunds.

* https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/r1n6a9/this_is_a_pu...

* https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/qyhc04/i_will_avoid...

* https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/quz8t4/a_year_and_a...

Re: PostmarketOS Revolutionizes Smartphone Hacking

#23

Post by fsflover »

ognarb wrote: post #22
fsflover wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who is constantly lying about their products This is a bold claim. They have a history of delays, but lying is not what they do.

Just look at the latest post on r/Purism on how people have a really hard time to get some refunds. * https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/r1n6a9/this_is_a_pu... * https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/qyhc04/i_will_avoid... * https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/quz8t4/a_year_and_a...

They've been having a hard time with the funds, so they probably have to delay refunds in order not to go bankrupt. Recently they got some inestments, so it should get better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27949435. This is not exactly "constantly lying about their products".

Re: PostmarketOS Revolutionizes Smartphone Hacking

#24

Post by mindslight »

nynx wrote: post #2

I love the ideas behind pinephone, but I think it's just not powerful enough. I'm not sure if there's enough access to more powerful mobile phone processors though.

Powerful enough for what? Get rid of regressive virtual machines and surveillance framework bloat and there's much less computation to be done. I'd love for the Free software mobile ecosystem the coalesce around lower power processors and resource-respecting languages.

Re: PostmarketOS Revolutionizes Smartphone Hacking

#25

Post by ollieparanoid »

When looking back like that, it's mind boggling to realize how far we've come. I sincerely thank everybody who is mainlining their devices, reporting bugs, sending patches, reviewing and testing patches, maintaining packages, updating the wiki, helping out others. Without such a huge and skilled community, we wouldn't have made it this far.

And yes we have a challenging road ahead, as the blog post mentions. But at the same time, I believe the wider Linux Mobile community has reached critical mass of developers and projects. There are so many great projects in this space now (which collaborate quite a lot, Mobian developer kop316's MMS efforts is just one great example). Multiple phones where mainline support has a bright future. Even if a few of these projects or even phones should fail, Mobile Linux can still carry on. Let's find out where we all can carry this effort in 2022 and the years to come!

Thanks for this post, Drew!

Re: PostmarketOS Revolutionizes Smartphone Hacking

#26

Post by onkoe »

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #21
onkoe wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A beefy camera would be very interesting to work with. As of now, our phones do a ton of proprietary processing which makes open source/external solutions... suck. I'd love to have a decent open source camera app with the capacities of something like GCam.

>A beefy camera would be very interesting to work with. As of now, our phones do a ton of proprietary processing which makes open source/external solutions... suck. I'd love to have a decent open source camera app with the capacities of something like GCam. I'm a big fan of open source, literally have open source projects with many stars on github. However, I'm not one of those 'no proprietary blobs' folks. Sony has…

Me neither, though if there's a decent and open source solution available, you know that's going on my devices ;)

Re: PostmarketOS Revolutionizes Smartphone Hacking

#27

Post by xrd »

After reading this post I decided to go buy an old Android phone and install pmOS on it.

But then I looked at this list. Is there really no device that supports a camera? This seems like an incredible omission if true. Am I misreading this list?

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

Is there a good device for another distribution that at least has calls/texts, camera and network support so I can browse the web?

Re: PostmarketOS Revolutionizes Smartphone Hacking

#28

Post by MartijnBraam »

fsflover wrote: post #18
paulcarroty wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PostmarkerOS currently support some Snapdragon 845 and Snapdragon 821 devices, so you're not limited by pinephone.

But AFAIK in this case, you're limited by the proprietary firmware tied to old Linux kernels.

No, 845 runs on mainline, my OnePlus 6 is on an 5.16 release candidate at the moment.

Re: PostmarketOS Revolutionizes Smartphone Hacking

#29

Post by cosmojg »

MartijnBraam wrote: post #28
fsflover wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But AFAIK in this case, you're limited by the proprietary firmware tied to old Linux kernels.

No, 845 runs on mainline, my OnePlus 6 is on an 5.16 release candidate at the moment.

How's the experience so far? Does everything work?

Re: PostmarketOS Revolutionizes Smartphone Hacking

#30

Post by tata71 »

neilv wrote: post #11

I was always horrified by XDA solutions, and wondered how apparently so many people didn't find that scene incredibly sketchy and suspicious. And when more credible community open source models were already widely known. I'd be very happy if PostmarketOS got more progress towards solid mainline kernel support for some devices -- including for the nascent 4G hard requirement of my carrier. (I tried to help a short whi…

> I probably won't spend more time on it until I can be doing userland app and UI/UX development atop a solid foundation.)

I wonder what you could do with GrapheneOS, maybe make it convergent, USB C dock?

Post reply on HN