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Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

laforge.gnumonks.org

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Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

#21

Post by subway »

notspanishflu wrote: post #9
mozartoz wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile hardware is a nightmare. The best thing we have to cope with it, so far, is libhybris. And I don't see things getting much better. All we have is Pyra, the incoming Neo900 and semi-closed Jollas with Sailfish.

There's a "collaborative project to unify the Hardware Abstraction Layer for projects which run GNU/Linux on mobile devices with pre-installed Android" called Halium. https://halium.org/

Complete with the device mfg's unpatched 3.10 kernel.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

#22

Post by jghn »

A friend of mine had one of those. He was making fun of my then fairly new iPhone and was trying to show me how he could run X Windows on his device. After about 30 minutes of trying to get it to work he gave up. I then sent him a text message, which took him another long period of time to figure out.

He finally concluded his defense of the device by saying "Well, this isn't a phone for people who like to get stuff done".

Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

#24

Post by audi100quattro »

subway wrote: post #21
notspanishflu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a "collaborative project to unify the Hardware Abstraction Layer for projects which run GNU/Linux on mobile devices with pre-installed Android" called Halium. https://halium.org/

Complete with the device mfg's unpatched 3.10 kernel. Thanks, but no thanks.

I wouldn't write it off so easily, it makes sense as an open source alternative to google's project treble albeit with parts of android still running underneath. A stable linux HAL on a few widely used devices would make all the upstream dev easier. Even if you are stuck on an older kernel because of a blob driver, it's progress and similar to when you can't upgrade the kernel on your laptop now because nvidia haven't updated their drivers.

Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

#25

Post by vsviridov »

emilsedgh wrote: post #4
vsviridov wrote: post #2

It had vision but lacked constraints. The open source bazaar style development delivered 9 projects completed to 10% instead of one completed to 90%. The whole "enlightenment vs qt vs gtk" ui environment all half baked and with spotty feature coverage... But hey, they were the ones that tried.

1) There are still ongoing efforts, including Plasma Mobile. 2) The whole "Qt vs. GTK+" worked perfectly fine on desktop. We have several kickass graphical user interfaces on the desktop. 3) What is preventing FOSS on phones is not software stacks. It's the closed hardware.

Yeah, but they had a small time window to deliver a working product to have a small chance to penetrate the market. Instead the efforts were spread on tons of competing solutions. The resulting product was unusable. As much as I was an enthusiast and a fan of the idea the device I received was nowhere near ready for any kind of sensible use.

Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

#28

Post by ekianjo »

subway wrote: post #13
ekianjo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Pyra is not going to be released anytime soon, the Neo900 is overpriced... but we do have Plasma Mobile running on a few devices.

The Pyra is a helluva lot closer to shipping than the Neo900. A great many of the components have seen production runs already. I'm not sure Neo900 has even figured out how competently handle their donated funds, let alone how to get a device to production. ( https://neo900.org/funds-transfer )

The Pyra s overheating problems on the sandwhiched SOC have not been resolved at all and now they are even considering adding a fan so late in dev stage. Far from finished I tell you.

Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

#29

Post by wolfgke »

ekianjo wrote: post #28
subway wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Pyra is a helluva lot closer to shipping than the Neo900. A great many of the components have seen production runs already. I'm not sure Neo900 has even figured out how competently handle their donated funds, let alone how to get a device to production. ( https://neo900.org/funds-transfer )

The Pyra s overheating problems on the sandwhiched SOC have not been resolved at all and now they are even considering adding a fan so late in dev stage. Far from finished I tell you.

> The Pyra s overheating problems on the sandwhiched SOC have not been resolved at all and now they are even considering adding a fan so late in dev stage.

I'm watching the Pyra project very closely, but I have never heard of these problems. Can you give me a source on this?

Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

#30

Post by Nursie »

I had a freerunner.

It was great if you wanted to show someone the linux bootup text on a tiny screen. It was kinda fun to play with raw GPS data, running xterms and stuff onscreen, and various toy things.

But IMHO the change of "desktop" environment about three times during the first year of release was a killer. The platform devs seemed to be switching around massive parts of the lower stack at the time they should have been stabilising so folks at other layers could build on it. Instead we were told over and over not to get too comfortable as it was all going to change (again) any day now. Eventually I had to buy a dumbphone to make calls, and switched out entirely to the Nokia N900 when it turned up.

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