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The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

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Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#161

Post by hedora »

m4rtink wrote: post #13
CogitoCogito wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be totally fine using such a phone for almost everything I do. The only big gap would be using Sweden's identification app BankID and the money transferring app Swish. Unless these were ported to the phone, I would unfortunately lose one of it's most important functionalities for me. Of course I could just have an Apple/Android phone sitting at home for such purposes, but it is definitely less convenient.

This is one of the things I worry about - a duopoly not just backed by two wealthy and shady megacorps but also effectively by law as it mandates a mobile app for some things yet the app only exists for iOS and Android & no public API is available.

The short stories in Caroline M Yoachim’s Shadow Prison trilogy explore the implications of locking society in to a single mobile platform:

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-shadow-prison...

Great stuff. (No affiliation.) I need to dig into her other work. Apparently quite a bit of her other stuff is also available online for free.

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#162

Post by kelnos »

spankalee wrote: post #100
posguy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuchsia has separated the drivers from the kernel[1], enabling proprietary drivers that are never updated to become acceptable. This can result in Blueborne[2], GPU vulnerabilities[3], and any other proprietary driver remaining permanently vulnerable as the hardware manufacturer has no incentive to update the driver. In Fuchsia's model, you can run the latest OS with these vulnerable, non-updated drivers, or your dev…

Those types of driver vulnerabilities are exactly why Fuchsia's sandboxed driver model is needed.

I see that as a sort of capitulation. What is actually needed is manufacturers who remain responsible and responsive when it comes to the quality of their drivers. They need to support them much longer than they currently do, and they need to release security fixes promptly.

I think having a sandboxed driver model is a great idea in general, but this will only encourage hardware manufacturers to care even less about supporting their drivers beyond the initial more-or-less-working release.

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#163

Post by nexuist »

tetrisgm wrote: post #5

I want the PinePhone to work. The Librem too. In fact I had preorders for both. I canceled them looking at the performance. They’re excellent toys. Great effort to ship such a difficult product. But if your phone is going to struggle with running things besides terminal, it’s not going to be a great daily phone. I’d love them to be on par with the latest Android flagships in terms of power. Cost is not an issue. I ju…

> things besides terminal

I think this (terminal) might be a key market segment to focus on, though. Lots of people are turned off by the colorful yet wasteful designs of modern smartphone apps. Third parties are never going to get anywhere trying to compete with Android or iOS. If you want buy-in, you have to target the people who want to leave the mobile app paradigm. This is either people who want all-in on web (Firefox OS) or people who want all-in on CLI (nothing really exists here except SSHing into a Linux VM).

It might honestly be pleasant to use a smartphone with a terminal-like interface if you can provide vim-esque keyboard shortcuts to accomplish complicated tasks, like creating content (documents / todos / calendar events / songs / photos / videos / websites / etc). It would only ever appear to power users, but those power users would become life long customers.

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#164

Post by ergocoder »

JackMorgan wrote: post #103
ergocoder wrote: post #51

I want something small like Palm Phone, which is beautiful and refined. But Palm Phone totally screws it up by marketing themselves as "companion phone" (your second mobile phone, why would I have 2 phones??) and the battery life is 5h (wtf is this??). Other minimal phones focuses on calling, and guess what? 99% of my calls in the past few years were with spam. Currently, there is absolutely no minimal small smart ph…

What about the Palm phone? It's waterproof, 2oz, and has a feature that cuts power to the cell and wifi chips when the screen is turned off, so no calls or texts until you turn it back on. I love it as my daily driver for a year now. https://palm.com/

If the battery life can stay the whole day, I will buy.

I think it's like 5h max

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#165

Post by lmm »

new_realist wrote: post #151
znpy wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think Linux will always be behind commercial/proprietary platforms. the dumb thing of this whole situation is that 50% of the "commercial/proprietary platforms" in this market are android phones, still using Linux as kernel.

That's because the kernel is a commodity. Whether it's Linux or Mach, the user can't tell the difference. It's just plumbing.

The whole phone will be a commodity soon if it's not already. When was the last time something felt like a significant innovation/differentiator in a phone?

(Personally I haven't been excited about a new phone feature since the S7's notification LED - and that apparently wasn't important enough to keep in newer versions).

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#166

Post by lmm »

mbreese wrote: post #133
kazen44 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i disagree, KDE has one, if not the best ui out there. it is consistent, customizable and not a resource hog. windows's UI has been a mess since the XP days, and osx is atleast consistent, but hides a lot of functionality in name of clean design.

And I disagree with you. And it’s not because I think KDE is horrible… it’s not. I prefer the Gnome style but KDE is quite polished. But I disagree because it is really rare to have a completely unified UI with Linux. We have separate applications for Gnome and KDE for most tasks. Sometimes one is better than the other, or one has a feature you need, but you have many different competing applications. If you want to…

> So, you say KDE has a unified style. That’s great. But KDE != Linux. And Linux is never going to have a unified style. That’s just the nature of the beast. There isn’t one group out there that can make UI/UX decisions for all of Linux. No group that can set priorities and make decisions about what features stay and what can be removed

You can run a complete desktop on KDE and have a good, well-integrated experience. Maybe some people will try to tell you that Firefox would be a better browser or whatever, but as long as Konqueror is good enough for you then why do you care? (Personally I actually think it's significantly better, and a lot of the KOffice tools are better than their LibreOffice counterparts, but taking it as a given that there are "best" versions of some things that are not on KDE).

Maybe you value one particular tool that doesn't fit into your integrated desktop, but that's a common experience on other platforms as well. But if a unified UI is what you want, you absolutely can have that.

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#167

Post by fragileone »

fabrice_d wrote: post #83
lupire wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is something wrong with using Fuchsia kernel insted of Linux? It's open source and it has a modern, secure capability architecture. Running Linux binaries , not just source code, is a design goal of Fuchsia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26104667

Fuchsia has a lot of good features technically, there is no doubt about that - it was time to revisit how an OS should be designed given the usage patterns of devices it powers. I hope the capability model will put to rest the insanity that is SELinux (just look at the amount and complexity of SELinux rules in AOSP). The license choice for the kernel is more controversial, but no one expected Google to ship under the…

Except there still won't be long-term support from OEMs, you've instead just pushed the security responsibility onto Fuschia and hoping that the kernel maintaining a strong sandbox will be sufficient to mitigate all driver security vulnerabilities (hint: it won't be).

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#168

Post by fragileone »

posguy wrote: post #80
testific8 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pine64 position on binary drivers is not as hard as the purism one (perhaps they try to balance more with cost), but there are still projects to reverse-engineer and replace some non-free firmware, such as the modem firmware: https://github.com/Biktorgj/pinephone_modem_sdk . I agree that Fuchsia will become a problem going forwards, even if Fuchsia drivers can be reverse-engineered. It's also possible that phone…

The PinePhone has the same security properties as the Nokia N900 where the modem is connected over USB rather than an interface with direct memory access (eg: PCIe) where the proprietary software running on the modem can read anything in main memory.

IOMMU groups are supposed to compartmentalise modems here, but as far as I know this tends to be blackboxed on Qualcomm processors.

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#169

Post by zepto »

zozbot234 wrote: post #131
m463 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a purism owner, and a long-time linux user... I think that is a fantasy statement. Theoretically, there could be an open platform like the PC (with usb + pcie + ATX case/power supply + etc..) with open interfaces. However the reason this came into existence was by microsoft's design to commoditize the hardware to drive software sales of its (closed) operating system. With cellphones all of those interfaces are bei…

> I think Linux will always be behind commercial/proprietary platforms. One could arguably say that the iphone is a multi-billion dollar platform One could have expected the same wrt. proprietary *NIX workstation and server hardware in the 1980s and 1990s, and where are those today? Linux is dominating that market. Embedded brings more trouble because the hardware, far from being a "multi billion dollar" endeavor, is…

> One could have expected the same wrt. proprietary *NIX workstation and server hardware in the 1980s and 1990s, and where are those today?

Server hardware is of course commodity and dominated by Linux.

The high end workstation proprietary workstation market seems pretty alive and dominated but a closed Unix still.

> Embedded brings more trouble because the hardware, far from being a "multi billion dollar" endeavor, is all-too-often entirely undocumented and sloppily hacked together, where a barely workable state is considered "good enough" for shipping. But even there, Linux is easily gaining ground over proprietary OS's.

This is true of ‘embedded’ but phones are not embedded.

> The underlying dynamic is clear enough.

I think this is wishful thinking. Embedded and servers are quite different from phones and workstations.

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#170

Post by heavyset_go »

mbreese wrote: post #133
kazen44 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i disagree, KDE has one, if not the best ui out there. it is consistent, customizable and not a resource hog. windows's UI has been a mess since the XP days, and osx is atleast consistent, but hides a lot of functionality in name of clean design.

And I disagree with you. And it’s not because I think KDE is horrible… it’s not. I prefer the Gnome style but KDE is quite polished. But I disagree because it is really rare to have a completely unified UI with Linux. We have separate applications for Gnome and KDE for most tasks. Sometimes one is better than the other, or one has a feature you need, but you have many different competing applications. If you want to…

Plasma Desktop comes with adaptive theming for GTK that makes it match the rest of the UI.
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