Is there hope for Linux on smartphones? [video]

I took a real interest in 6 or 7 years ago, when it was first coming out. I was excited in part by how much it (as a downstream project of MeeGo) resembled Real Linux™ internally: systemd, RPM/zypper, Wayland.

It was awesome. The way it all fit together felt thoughtful and sane. The terminal environment was like a real desktop Linux userland. And the Sailfish UI was really outstanding. It was simple, uniform, and thoroughly gesture-based. That stuff felt decidedly ahead of Android and iOS at the time.

But it's basically been impossible since then to get it on flagship or even just relatively recent hardware, and getting it distributed with the unfortunate but crucial Android app runtime has been very hard to do since it's only available on commercial distributions.

It's never felt like a real option for me, at least in the US. Since I followed it more closely, I don't know where the project stands. Last I heard, they were pivoting to other markets (developing economies, business/enterprise use) that made it seem unlikely I'd ever get to have a decent Sailfish experience.

Yes, Android is absolutely not GNU enough. This terminological goofiness is the flipside of using the term 'Linux' to refer to a whole bunch of GNU/Linux operating systems.

Here's the thing though, this is not even about abstract ideals. When we say Android is not 'real Linux', what it comes down to is this: there's a certain peace, a sense of relief— of being respected— that comes with running Linux on your personal desktop or server. It feels really, really different from using an OS whose main function, which has driven its evolution, is just to sell you paid apps and services. That makes it fun, and it lends itself to a certain fluency.

Running any variety of Android is just an alien experience to all of that. Android doesn't feel good to use the way that Linux does for people who like running Linux on other contexts. And that's why it makes perfect sense to say it's 'not Linux enough'. The experience speaks powerfully enough for itself that it hardly seems worth explaining tbh. If you actually get what is good about running Linux and you've ever sought those virtues in Android, you already get it.

AIUI, GSI's are not quite "generic", there are a few architectural variants. Plus they only give you a "system" partition, so the kernel and low-level userspace code (driver HAL, init-system etc.) are still Android-native and device-specific. Droidian is trying to implement something that's as-close-as-possible to Linux as GSI's, and it's not easy.

>When we say Android is not 'real Linux', what it comes down to is this: there's a certain peace, a sense of relief— of being respected— that comes with running Linux on your personal desktop or server. It feels really, really different from using an OS whose main function, which has driven its evolution, is just to sell you paid apps and services. That makes it fun, and it lends itself to a certain fluency.

Might just be me, but I don't feel any respect coming from whoever are the devs that made this week's flavor of Linux I might be trying out.

Yeah, Windows 10/11 and iOS, and to a slightly lesser extent MacOS and Android, all aim primarily to sell me their shit. I hate them all for that. I run an OS to run the shit I want on my computer, not the shit they want on their computer.

Linux, though, aims to primarily sell me their ideological shit: FOSS, free as in freedom, GPL, Command Line Interface or bust. Instead of commercial pursuits, it's dogmatic pursuits.

They're all the same sides of the same shit sandwich. I get to choose what's in the sandwich, but it's still a shit sandwich until the heat death of the universe. Fuck that noise.

That all being said, Android is Linux. Because it runs the Linux kernel. End of. QED. Anyone who argues to the contrary is just being spiteful of Android succeeding where the wider Linux community could not.

You can still have a useful experience on a pure AOSP build.

You'll miss features like push notifications, Google accounts outside of the browser, an app store and various other features.

But there's no reason the open source community couldn't add these, a package repo/app store equivalent and push messaging would probably be the deal breakers for me as a phone where chat apps don't work isn't useful to me.

The binary blobs to get driver support are also a problem, but it's also true in desktop linux, see for example Nvidia's graphics card driver.