Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linux phones are more important now than ever

feddit.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 515 posts

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#431

Post by ysnp »

fsflover wrote: post #380
codethief wrote: post #315

While I share the concerns about Android, it feels silly to me to go back to Linux's (nonexistent) security model and bad mobile UI/UX. Why not try to fork AOSP or GOS (for broader device compatibility, even if it means giving up some its sexy security properties)? Note that this could include packaging Linux GUI applications as Android APKs (with some additional glue code and Wayland/DBus integration of course), so…

> I share the concerns about Android > Why not try to fork AOSP or GOS Which concerns do you share? Both AOSP and GOS must follow the Google development strategy, they aren't exactly independent on Google (which is a problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45208925 ). Nevertheless GOS on Librem 5 or Pinephone would be a nice idea, except the GOS developers are against that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=…

>Nevertheless GOS on Librem 5 or Pinephone would be a nice idea, except the GOS developers are against that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45101400

GrapheneOS are against using their development resources on a platform that is drastically, significantly worse than the hardware platform they already have, which is quite fair. It is not about Pine64 or Purism's products specifically. They would not be against them if they met 95% of the requirements detailed in https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices. It would more sense to explain which of those requirements you think are unreasonable.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#432

Post by deivid »

liendolucas wrote: post #427
deivid wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried scrcpy? https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy I ran this with a custom fork to expose the device screen as a VNC server for years, no problems

Thanks for reminding me about scrcpy. I knew it but I've completely forgot about it. Will give it a shot. Why the custom fork? You added the VNC support to scrpy?

I had this old patchset: https://github.com/DavidVentura/scrcpy/tree/dev

Which added vnc support directly onto scrcpy, so I could leave a tablet plugged in to my headless server and access the tablet remotely via VNC

The alternative was to use X11vnc but it was janky and had some issues, plus higher cpu usage

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#433

Post by tsimionescu »

meiuqer wrote: post #217
tsimionescu wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does have a particular meaning, but it is one that's not relevant in this context, and it's probably narrower than what the poster intended. For example, Belgium is not a nation state, but I'm sure the GGP would be surprised by an answer like "no, it wasn't a nation state, Belgium asked them to do it".

What do you mean by 'Belgium is not a nation state', if i may ask?

I mean that there is no Belgian nation - native Belgian citizens are mostly either Dutch-speaking Flemish people or French-speaking Wallons, and generally don't have any significant notion of a shared national identity.

Note that this doesn't mean that a state with multiple ethnicities/languages can't be a nation state. Indians, for example, generally have a clear national identity, despite being citizens of a huge federal republic with dozens if not hundreds of languages spoken, some of which don't even share a common language family. So, India is a nation state, unlike Belgium.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#434

Post by Katzenmann »

VariousPrograms wrote: post #116

As someone willing to put up with all manner of nonsense (overpriced/underpowered hardware, clunky UI, endless troubleshooting), battery life on mobile Linux devices alone prevents me from using them in the real world. Is there a single Linux phone/tablet that can last an 8 hour day of actual use? Librem/Pinephone/Juno can't. My uConsole can't. Different category, but my MNT mini laptop lasts like 4 hours and can't b…

Hi. I have a Google Pixel 3a running PostmarketOS https://postmarketos.org/ and it holds up pretty well. My phone lost 20% today with light usage and will maybe lose 60% if I scroll social media a lot.

I was actually surprised it is this good. I reinstalled recently and before the reinstall I had much worse battery life (Maybe 8 hours with normal usage). I think it was because of Syncthing running in the background.

It is also possible to use s2idle suspend which will improve the battery life even more but you will not be able to receive calls during suspend (though that may also be fixed in the future)

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#435

Post by mschuster91 »

nicman23 wrote: post #423
jbstack wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not?

because half of the internet is there

That's why I explicitly wrote: "for stuff that should only be done by legitimate users".

That means Netflix et al can (and do) ban everything that even remotely smells like a datacenter IP range and not a residential one, because that is a common method of evading regional bans or undermine pricing structure.

And on top of that... if the focus of your website is humans, you might want to cut off all datacenter originating traffic as well. Save yourself the hassle of dealing with AI scrapers.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#437

Post by 3nt3 »

stronglikedan wrote: post #425
masfoobar wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After just submitting my recent post --- I do like your suggestion. Maybe 2 phones are the way forward. Maybe a PAYG phone which stays at home on my network for particular needs like banking. Then a standard phone which is essentially a GNU/Linux distro.... mmm... Emacs on my phone sounds lovely!

> Maybe a PAYG phone which stays at home on my network for particular needs like banking. If you're only doing banking at home, why would you do it on such a tiny little device?

They probably mean for TAN apps

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#438

Post by teaearlgraycold »

shmel wrote: post #338
mr_mitm wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the threat model here is that a different, malicious app (compromised, installed accidentally or by the means of social engineering) might take screenshots of your screen and forward them to take advantage of you. You can file this under one's "own stupidity" as well, sure, but in the end they're not protecting you, they're protecting themselves, because banks might be liable for these kind of things, and by…

Are you implying that Google is unable to distinguish whether a screenshot is triggered via a combination of hardware buttons vs via a software call from another app that isn't even on the foreground in their own ecosystem? That's a quite sad state of affairs, isn't it?

When you don’t control the hardware a lot is off the table.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#439

Post by butz »

fsflover wrote: post #422
butz wrote: post #420

Forget Linux phones for a moment, let's start with Linux PDA. As telephony part is probably the hardest to solve due to proprietary drivers and regulations, how about building tiny PDA device that does everything else except "phone stuff" - get a dumbphone for calls and SMS, maybe some will have wifi tether. And after this PDA projects grows traction, it will be time to push for telephony support.

What are you talking about? The telephony part has been solved in Librem 5 and Pinephone. Also, this question has already been asked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45257448

Looking at postmarketOS devices page only 20 community supported devices have "Calls" listed as "fully implemented". Clearly this is the main hurdle for true "Linux Phone". And those devices are a bit old, ranging from 2014 to 2020, and that makes them harder to obtain, also battery might be in need of replacing. And Pinephone is currently out of stock. Cannot comment about Librem 5, but its price is quite high. So, ignoring my silly idea of "PDA" - which Linux phone should I buy and how could I contribute to its success?

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#440

Post by SirMaster »

dvh wrote: post #220

EU should fork Android. Fund a small team of devs, nothing fancy, no major changes just keep it secure.

Does the EU even want you to be able to use government and banking apps on a non-secure device? Or do they want the device to have SafetyNet Attestation?

Doesn't the EU want encryption backdoors and such too?

Post reply on HN