451–460 of 539 posts
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After September, will you still be able to install F-Droid on phones with Google accounts?
https://developer.android.com/developer-verification/guides/... , it's tied to the Google account so afterwards any device owned by the user can install F-Droid and any APK made by "unverified" devs.
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I've been daily driving a Linux phone for three years. The suffering was real. It's mostly gone now, I love it and will definitely never go back.
That sounds very interesting to hear about! What diminished the day-to-day difficulty for you? Is it because the ecosystem became more mature, or did you "crack the code" for how to interface with everything you needed from your phone? Is your use-case for a phone wildly different from that of a typical user? It's really cool to hear that someone is successfully daily driving it and making this ecosystem work for the…
Neither! I just got accustomed to doing without stuff. That’s an effect I wildly underestimated.
Many things are still difficult (looking at you, CloudFlare [0] and DataDome [1]!) but I think I’ll manage.
> Is your use-case for a phone wildly different from that of a typical user?
Not really, I guess.
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Do you take photos or use Bluetooth? What's the experience like for multimedia SMS (assuming no RCS), Whatsapp, banking or other apps normal people expect you to use, or file transfer? Are there any devices that can do NFC?
Taking photos is one of the things I got accustomed to not having. The picture quality on my Librem 5 is just too disappointing [0]. In the past I used Bluetooth for keyboard and mouse when I connected the phone to a monitor. (I no longer do because the USB port on my L5 has broken down so badly that it can no longer maintain a DisplayPort Alt mode connection.) I’ve never used Bluetooth for music or similar, it keeps…
The quality of taken photos is fine (as long as you keep the lens clean :)), it's the quality of raw data to JPEG pipeline that's underwhelming. The default pipeline has been significantly improved recently, but it's still very basic, which really shows in low light. There's a huge room for software improvement there. You can always open the DNG file in something like Darktable or RawTherapee and develop it better, with proper denoising etc.
I've been shooting lots of photos and videos on my L5: https://social.librem.one/@dos/tagged/shotonlibrem5
> I’ve never used Bluetooth for music or similar, it keeps stuttering horribly
I've experienced that when using 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi together with Bluetooth, but never when connected to a 5 GHz AP.
I've come to the conclusion that I actually really like Android as an operating system, the internals seem remarkably well thought out and ideal for the mobile use case (so long as you're running a userdebug build with the ability to adb root in when needed), most of people's issues aren't really with Android (although Google reducing the AOSP release schedule isn't a good sign). I think the real problem is Google Pl…
I have spent the past 2 years off and on modifying AOSP (for "reasons") and I am constantly amazed the poor quality of the code base and badly architected the overall system is.
It's a bunch of re-inventions of the wheel (start-up daemon manager, IPC, HAL, GUI, etc) with the "upper layers" written in Java with a mix of C/C++. Mixing the metaphor of a Java "run time environment" with a Linux-based kernel results in a hodepodge of pieces and having seen it up close it makes sense why "Android" user experience varies so much device to device.
Did Android need it's own bastardized libc for example (bionic)? Did Android need to have it's own start-up daemon manager? A "HAL" in C++ (wrapping Linux kernel capability) with a bunch of bridges to Java via JNI?
Writing an application for Android is also a byztantine mess of NDK, SDKs, Java build systems (Maven, Gradle, etc), XML files, Java, Kotlin, etc. Why can't icons just be SVGs, why do these have to be in some XML-formatted resource? The list goes on.
If they ever figure out how to get Linux onto a phone with a good camera, I'd pounce on it. I would be willing to put up with app issues and weird bugs and all the jankiness that comes with early adoption, but I simply can't give up being able to take really good photos with my phone.
Is this a good enough camera for you? https://social.librem.one/@dos/tagged/shotonlibrem5
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Agreed. Despite endless assertions from someone that Pine and Purism are where we should place our hope for better mobile devices, I can't put my trust in either company. Their track records are too hard to overlook.
I don't think the feelings are so much towards the companies themselves. They've just been the only ones to ship Linux phones that don't depend on anything Android nor significant closed source code at all. I for one just want to see the same distro diversity with the same amount of open-source OS control over HW on phones and other devices that I do see on desktops/laptops. Linux phones in general are kind of a mira…
I respectfully disagree. Pine's MO was basically "create hardware and hope people create software for it". A bit tongue in cheek, but that's it. Which is fine as long as they're up front about it, which they are.
But in order for this to work, a community needs to form around the device. Pine doesn't have to be the ones to manage it, and some would say it's better if they don't, but they're surely a big part of it if for no other reason than they're the makers of the hardware. The infant PP community was doing quite fine until they announced the PPP and confused the hell out of everything. Couple that with some seriously brain dead choices (IMHO) around booting and charging, led to them not only torpedoing the pro but sinking the original PP as well. Probably in no small part because they split what little community had formed.
The pro was obviously rushed. I personally think they saw an easy way to grab some quick cash and took it.
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> I developed for android for a long time When was that?
I stopped in 2018. I realize that a lot has been done since then, but the base code wasn‘t changed, otherwise old apps wouldn‘t run anymore. My gripe with android is that I think it wastes a lot of resources by being very inefficient in software. Just enable the debug mode to see what portion of your screen refreshes and repaints and stand back in awe while nothing changes and you still get hundreds of repaints.
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Is this a good enough camera for you? https://social.librem.one/@dos/tagged/shotonlibrem5
No, it's not even close to good enough. Beyond the photos, the video he posted would have been disappointing in 2003.
That said, what's there already is enough for me to have plenty of fun with the camera anyway.
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Is this a good enough camera for you? https://social.librem.one/@dos/tagged/shotonlibrem5
Those are probably the best I've seen from a Linux phone, but still far too much of a downgrade for my uses. Even some of the photos taken in decently well-lit locations are noticeably grainy, so I can only imagine how poorly it'd fair in worse lighting. Tons of props to this photographer -- I have great respect for the art of getting good shots out of low-end equipment, but it's not what I want for my daily carry de…
The reason some of them are grainy is that there's no denoising applied to them at all. The current GPU-based pipeline only does debayering, lens shading correction, highlight clipping, color matrix application, tone mapping and barrel distortion correction so far. You get the raws though, so you can apply whatever you want post-factum. Patches are welcome too.
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Agreed. Despite endless assertions from someone that Pine and Purism are where we should place our hope for better mobile devices, I can't put my trust in either company. Their track records are too hard to overlook.
I don't think the feelings are so much towards the companies themselves. They've just been the only ones to ship Linux phones that don't depend on anything Android nor significant closed source code at all. I for one just want to see the same distro diversity with the same amount of open-source OS control over HW on phones and other devices that I do see on desktops/laptops. Linux phones in general are kind of a mira…
The Librem 5 even goes way beyond that - ECAD and MCAD designs are available on a free license as well: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/hw/l5-schematic & https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/hw/3D_designs