Sadly... The compromise is AOSP or copperhead OS, CM equivalents. With daydream tightly controlled by Google/Play perhaps genuine FOSS lovers need to live in 2D world.
Open-source is quite alive on top of Android and you don't need Play:
The Rise and Fall of the Open Source Mobile (2014)
11–20 of 27 posts
Re: The Rise and Fall of the Open Source Mobile (2014)
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://neo900.org/
That might be the first hardware crowdfunding I ever buy into. I've got a seething rage at just about every aspect of current phones and a huge nostalgia for Nokia's early smartphones. Physical keyboard? Yay. Messages in natural language are one thing, ssh'ing into a machine or writing code is an entirely different topic. Open systems thrive with exactly the kind of software I use almost exclusively. I can live witho…
Related project:
Re: The Rise and Fall of the Open Source Mobile (2014)
#13Obviously this publisher hasn't heard of the Ubuntu Phone.
> the increasingly popular Ubuntu distro (released in 2004 and since 2013 branching out to mobile phones itself)
Re: The Rise and Fall of the Open Source Mobile (2014)
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you notice about the 'complete Linux experience'? I cannot find too much on the Sailfish OS homepage; going to Mer shows it's a minimal Linux with QT on top. For me a complete Linux experience would be xterm and sudo apt-get install build-essential. Is their anything like that? I would buy a phone/tablet device that runs Ubuntu (or Debian) smoothly (all hardware supported) in a heartbeat but seems nothing is…
> For me a complete Linux experience would be xterm and sudo apt-get install build-essential. Is their anything like that? Pretty much yes. With developer mode on you gain access to a terminal with bash and other expected utils. There is a mobile terminal application with custom keyboard which is more or less usable, you can also ssh into the phone without any problem. As for the package manager there is pkcon (proba…
I found Jolla comparatively very stable and the Android support was good enough for my purposes, given that it makes little sense to buy a Jolla phone for the sole purpose of running Android apps. People judge Jolla harshly for things they will forgive Android for. "has unfortunately stopped" is disturbingly common in the Android world, coming from Jolla, even before we get into the horrible quality of the vast majority of apps on the Google Play Store. Clearly if your #1 priority is apps from Google Play Store, you should buy an Android phone. But if you want anything different, or if you want an actual Linux phone.... my only objection with Jolla is that they seem starved for resources to regularly release hardware and to target markets like North America at all. So no matter how great a job they do, almost nobody sees their work.
Re: The Rise and Fall of the Open Source Mobile (2014)
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://neo900.org/
That might be the first hardware crowdfunding I ever buy into. I've got a seething rage at just about every aspect of current phones and a huge nostalgia for Nokia's early smartphones. Physical keyboard? Yay. Messages in natural language are one thing, ssh'ing into a machine or writing code is an entirely different topic. Open systems thrive with exactly the kind of software I use almost exclusively. I can live witho…
You're dead right on the games front. You can get a GBA for ~$20-$40, and have 100s of games that are a hell of a lot better than most of what sees release on mobile.
Re: The Rise and Fall of the Open Source Mobile (2014)
#16Three days ago, a Jolla C replaced an iPhone 5S as my main phone. To be fair, me using iOS was just a kind of an experiment. Before that, I was using a CM build without Google Apps using FDroid as unique app repository. I must say that, while still needs some polishing, Sailfish OS (which is not 100% free, but is quite there, and provides a complete Linux experience), does the job. My Pebble works, my BT car kit work…
I have a Jolla too, and while I love it as an N9 successor, I'd lie if I didn't say I'm disappointed they didn't opensource the whole system. This failed to attract a critical mass of developers and has made the platform quite stagnant. I understand their investors were afraid of opensourcing key assets, but their alternative plan hasn't worked well either.
Does it make sense to go the N900 route now? Anyone has any experience on this? Some worthy successors like Pyra and Neo900 are coming out, and N900 can be still found easily to use while waiting for these newcomers. How good is Maemo these days?
An obvious alternative is to get a Nexus and install CopperheadOS + FDroid. The ecosystem is very polished and lively, plus hardware is very good albeit with planned obsolescence due to the lack of long-term kernel updates.
Re: The Rise and Fall of the Open Source Mobile (2014)
#17"At the end of the story Nokia entrusted the project “to the community”, which was equivalent to abandoning it. [...] I am happy with a bleeding edge, open source, but much more limited ZTE Open phone running the Firefox OS."
History repeating. I loved Firefox OS, now Windows Mobile and I think Microsoft is not far away from releasing it "to the community". I don't want to live in a world without choice.
Re: The Rise and Fall of the Open Source Mobile (2014)
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For me a complete Linux experience would be xterm and sudo apt-get install build-essential. Is their anything like that? Pretty much yes. With developer mode on you gain access to a terminal with bash and other expected utils. There is a mobile terminal application with custom keyboard which is more or less usable, you can also ssh into the phone without any problem. As for the package manager there is pkcon (proba…
I found Jolla comparatively very stable and the Android support was good enough for my purposes, given that it makes little sense to buy a Jolla phone for the sole purpose of running Android apps. People judge Jolla harshly for things they will forgive Android for. "has unfortunately stopped" is disturbingly common in the Android world, coming from Jolla, even before we get into the horrible quality of the vast major…
Just to clarify: I was not speaking about application stability, I spoke about the whole OS. I've never seen native Jolla apps crash, the Android apps also seem to be rather stable when they work. However the whole phone can die - the screen goes balck and the status LED starts to blink red - in the middle of usage or just when it seats in the pocket. The phone will restart in a half of a minute or so, but it's a rather infuriatingly when it does so when you try to answer a call.
Re: The Rise and Fall of the Open Source Mobile (2014)
#19Sadly... The compromise is AOSP or copperhead OS, CM equivalents. With daydream tightly controlled by Google/Play perhaps genuine FOSS lovers need to live in 2D world.
The only compromise I see with open source Android is the proprietary firmware blobs. With the exception of http://www.replicant.us/, this is true for most open source mobile operating systems. Cyanogenmod adds in closed source analytics but those parts can be removed with https://github.com/nvllsvm/freecyngn
While I cannot attest to daydream, I have happily been building a custom version of Android from source for years without Google Apps or other closed source applications. Everything I need is either part of Android, on Fdroid.org or Github.
Re: The Rise and Fall of the Open Source Mobile (2014)
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
That might be the first hardware crowdfunding I ever buy into. I've got a seething rage at just about every aspect of current phones and a huge nostalgia for Nokia's early smartphones. Physical keyboard? Yay. Messages in natural language are one thing, ssh'ing into a machine or writing code is an entirely different topic. Open systems thrive with exactly the kind of software I use almost exclusively. I can live witho…
Related project: https://pyra-handheld.com/
Mandatory warning: PowerVR.