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Is there hope for Linux on smartphones? [video]

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Re: Is there hope for Linux on smartphones? [video]

#141

Post by seba_dos1 »

colordrops wrote: post #122
seba_dos1 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could have been a reasonable analogy if a very significant chunk of applications "for Linux" only worked (or offered its full functionality) if you had Red Hat's proprietary addons installed.

That's just not true. You'll need to give a specific example of which apps are like this on Android. I'm writing this using a LineageOS phone with no proprietary or closed source apps on it right now.

This is true and can be verified by anyone by installing random applications from Google Play Store without having Google Play Services installed. Since relatively recently, you can use some of them via microG, but compatibility varies.

Sure, there's F-Droid and FLOSS software for Android, but if you're already willing to limit yourself to FLOSS Android apps you may very well limit yourself to FLOSS GNU/Linux apps too. When people say "I can't move to Linux phones because I need these Android apps", they usually aren't talking about ones from F-Droid.

Re: Is there hope for Linux on smartphones? [video]

#142

Post by seba_dos1 »

branon wrote: post #60
ddevault wrote: post #13

I'm typing this comment from a Poco F1 I set up with postmarketOS and Phosh earlier this week and so far it's very promising. Will write up a proper review next week. Much better than the Pinephone so far.

This is interesting. Communities like postmarketOS put in a lot of effort to adapt their distribution to hardware that would otherwise be running Android. Perhaps targeting commodity hardware is a more viable strategy than contending with newer platforms like Pinephone. Sure the device is more open, but most of the software support falls on the same community of developers. Lord knows they have enough build targets t…

PinePhone's hardware is almost at the edge of being usable in 2022, I can agree with that. It's not as bad as Openmoko Neo Freerunner was (thanks Glamo), but it's definitely noticeable. However, with PinePhone Pro (once it matures) and Librem 5 I don't think I'll have to start to worry about hardware not being able to reasonably run sensible software for at least a few years still. Those aren't even close to current flagships of course, but are performant enough to not long for a faster device.

Re: Is there hope for Linux on smartphones? [video]

#143

Post by seba_dos1 »

rvz wrote: post #7

> while we're picky about free software on our laptops, desktops and servers lots of us have a truck load full of proprietary software in their pocket every day. Does it have to be that way? It doesn't have to be like this, but it is also not 'early days' anymore and we have given this idea lots of time to gain any meaningful traction and it's very clear that there is almost no interest from the wider industry. Thus,…

> It doesn't have to be like this, but it is also not 'early days' anymore and we have given this idea lots of time to gain any meaningful traction and it's very clear that there is almost no interest from the wider industry.

I really don't think we did. The last serious effort that didn't rely on Android was Maemo/MeeGo (which wasn't even fully FLOSS), and before that Openmoko. Maaaaybe you could count Tizen too, although it was a project with different enough focus that I'm not really sure about that. I have used Nokia N900 up until I was able to replace it with Librem 5, because there was simply no alternative I considered viable. We have spent many years with no reasonable hardware platform for mobile GNU/Linux efforts and even projects like Plasma Mobile and Ubuntu Touch had to be based on Android stack until Librem 5 and PinePhone appeared on the stage.

Time to give this idea some meaningful traction has just started in the last years, and the fact that this time it actually gets serious backing from major DEs (GNOME, Plasma) and distros (Debian, Fedora, Manjaro, ...) makes it as viable as it never was before. There's a lot of cross-pollination happening these days, which back in the Openmoko days was mostly limited to tech that never ended up being used outside of these communities (such as FSO). The best we got back then was getting SHR stack partially packaged in Debian, while today, whole GNOME and KDE carry this stuff forward (things like libadwaita and Kirigami are major building blocks of desktop apps too these days).

Re: Is there hope for Linux on smartphones? [video]

#144

Post by voltagex_ »

dimensionc132 wrote: post #117
fractallyte wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sony Xperia XA2

good to know it's friendly to sailfish

Just a warning with that one - if you unlock it, it will never receive another Sony OTA, and there's no re-locking. Probably less of a problem now that it's out of support. Sailfish was also really rough on it.

Re: Is there hope for Linux on smartphones? [video]

#145

Post by faisalhackshah »

dimensionc132 wrote: post #102

A typical Linux distro ISO is about 2Gb in size and this distro has all the necessary drivers and hardware devices to run on thousands of different computers with different configurations. Android "AOSP" however has to be customized for every single cell phone model because it doesn't have the device drivers added but it does use the Linux kernel. Why can't AOSP just include all the necessary device drivers for all t…

Because mobile (basically ARM) is not a standardized platform like the PC. PC architecture has dozens of interoperability standards the entire PC ecosystem adheres to. Everything from boot up, to DMA controllers, to protocols for device capability discovery, and more .. You can think of each ARM board as its own bespoke platform (needing it's own device tree/bsp).

Re: Is there hope for Linux on smartphones? [video]

#146

Post by charcircuit »

JCWasmx86 wrote: post #6
rbanffy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erm... Android is Linux.

Just the kernel is Linux, but with the "Linux" that is meant here, it has basically nothing in common, be it e.g. in the userland or "the spirit". The Linux from "Linux Smartphones" e.g. fosters an open, user-first ecosystem, as opposed to the often very closed and locked Android Smartphones. Another examples are e.g. Safetynet or the Google Play Integrity API. Those primarily don't server the users. Or apps that eit…

>Those primarily don't server the users.

Not having your images and messages scraped or getting tons of spam is in the interest of users. Those API allow developers to offer a better experience to users by being able to know if people are running a trusted version of the software.

Re: Is there hope for Linux on smartphones? [video]

#147

Post by charcircuit »

jrockway wrote: post #8
rvz wrote: post #7

> while we're picky about free software on our laptops, desktops and servers lots of us have a truck load full of proprietary software in their pocket every day. Does it have to be that way? It doesn't have to be like this, but it is also not 'early days' anymore and we have given this idea lots of time to gain any meaningful traction and it's very clear that there is almost no interest from the wider industry. Thus,…

Is this the one time people should be calling it GNU/Linux?

You could bundle GNU software with Android and these people still wouldn't be happy.

Re: Is there hope for Linux on smartphones? [video]

#148

Post by colejohnson66 »

johndough wrote: post #42
Havoc wrote: post #16

Inclined to say no - mainly because of the camera. The gap between ability to mechanically take a pic and what the flagships are doing with AI driven post processing seems not only big but growing. Short of die hard linux/FOSS fans noticably worse pics is going to be an absolute show stopper

The problem is not AI - many of the best "AI" publications are open source after all. The problem is that hardware vendors do not provide access to their signal processing chip's internals. It is damn near impossible to even make a phone call these days without some obscure binary blob or magic chips that nobody knows what they do but are able to control every aspect of a phone.

> It is damn near impossible to even make a phone call these days without some obscure binary blob or magic chips that nobody knows what they do but are able to control every aspect of a phone.

That’s always been the case for wireless phones; It’s nothing new. Your SIM card is running literal Java programs (hence where the “3 billion Java devices”) and can ask the baseband to send data for it with you having no way to know. Here’s one researcher’s diggings into it: [0] and the discussion: [1].

Some baseband processors can even DMA the main memory. IIRC, Apple has put in effort to firewall said processors.

[0]: https://scribe.rip/telecom-expert/what-is-at-t-doing-at-1111...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29135559

Re: Is there hope for Linux on smartphones? [video]

#149

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

hrbf wrote: post #92
jnwatson wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You underestimate the size of the opportunity. The mobile game market was $119 billion in 2021.

Given the complexities involved in such an endeavor, I'm still confident in my assessment, especially when confronted with a one-liner just throwing a large number against the wall. If Microsoft couldn't get a mobile OS off the ground, despite trying, I don't see what the opportunity size has anything to do with it. Focusing on (even casual) gamers with specialized hardware works for a gaming-focused company, whereas…

> "If Microsoft couldn't get a mobile OS off the ground, despite trying..."

Google was actively sabotaging access to their services, like Youtube, at that time. With the amount of regulatory scrutiny they're under today, they wouldn't dare try it again.

Re: Is there hope for Linux on smartphones? [video]

#150

Post by charcircuit »

MartijnBraam wrote: post #63

I think this talk does a great job of explaining why AOSP is not a solution

I disagree. It does a bad job. From what I understood it boiled down to.

1. It is hard to upstream changes to AOSP.

2. Google also has proprietary apps and services.

Android has tremendous value and those seem like petty reasons to throw it out. You are going to be remaking proprietary phone stuff entire way. Why not utilize the massive amount of work Android provides. It will also speed up the process of bringing up devices since the manufacturer likely already has Android drivers ready to go.

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