Probably an unpopular opinion, but I don't think most people who buy a Linux phone actually want a Linux phone. They want an open-source phone. The Linux philosophy isn't important to them, they essentially want open-source iOS (with all of the polish and out-of-the-box doodads). They want the ability to make modifications, and they want the freedom and transparency that open-source gives them, but they don't necessarily want to open a PR against the camera app if they want it to more closely match the polish of iOS.
>but I don't think most people who buy a Linux phone actually want a Linux phone. They want an open-source phone.
Both of those are missing the point IMO. What people really want, is a phone that is on their side. iOS doesn't support open standards like Vulkan mainly because it's not in Apple's interest to support them. Not because it's in the user's interest, necessarily.
What people really want is a phone that they can trust to be on their side implicitly. The nugget of brilliance in Free Software is saying "if you do all this stuff, then the power will be so tilted towards you that you will be able to trust your software to be on your side".
People want something that's both polished, and won't [forego polish in one particular area for the sake of the company's interests/$$$].
> What people really want, is a phone that is on their side.
This. No matter how convenient and useful current smartphones are in daily life, there's always the nagging discomfort by knowing you are carrying a half-nefarious spying device. One where even the so-called reputable vendors can't be trusted to not put in malicious adware, planned obsolecense, and do everything in their power to ensure you don't really own the thing.
This hits the nail in the head. For a phone, open source doesn't matter and Linux doesn't matter.
It's all about for who's benefit the product is built. I like the phrasing of having a phone "on my side".
In a recent thread here on obsolete hardware I was commenting how up to the fairly recent past products were built with the idea of competing on features the user wanted (or at least presumably wanted).
But no longer - in the last ten years that has shifted in too many industries to be all about features that the company wants (spyware, tracking, DRM, cloud lock-in, and on and on). The phone duopoly is a poster child of this evil trend. Neither platform puts the user first and into the drivers seat.
So no, I don't want an open source phone nor a Linux phone, specifically. (Not saying I'd mind if one or both are true, that'd be cool, but not a deciding factor.) I want a phone where I the customer are in full control of what it does. I must be able to override anything the OS wants to do and to override anything any app wants to do.
> What people really want, is a phone that is on their side. iOS doesn't support open standards like Vulkan mainly because it's not in Apple's interest to support them. Not because it's in the user's interest, necessarily.
I couldn't agree with "people want a phone that is on their side" more.
I also agree that Linux matters as much as iOS's BSD heart—that is, it doesn't. But this is also why the Vulkan example doesn't serve your point. As with Linux, technical implementation details aren't why people are using iPhones.
Most people use iPhones because of the complete experience. For the few who care whether the iPhone is "on their side", it is clear that Apple's business model is generally aligned with their interests. This is either unknown or untrue for alternatives.
This is where open source phone vendors will fail. Trust is not simply a technology problem.
> What people really want is a phone that they can trust to be on their side implicitly.
Absolutely! These days our computers only do things that align with big company interests. I want a phone that will obey me even if it means ruin for its maker.
> iOS doesn't support open standards like Vulkan mainly because it's not in Apple's interest to support them.
Or maybe because Vulkan was a standard so long and late in the making that Apple released their own graphical stack a year before the Vulkan was even announced?
I want a phone I can own, like my sofa. It is out there in my living room just waiting for me to do whatever I want to do with it.
My Android phone doesn't work that way. The company behind it expects me to do certain tasks with the phone. Some tasks are open for gradual adoption, other aren't, meaning they are mandated. After all those years, I'm beginning to dislike that.
Good point. And the company behind Android mainly wants to ensure they can get as much data from you as possible. You will never fully be able to disable the data upload to Google.
> I want a phone I can own, like my sofa. It is out there in my living room just waiting for me to do whatever I want to do with it.
The reality of this is much different. To the average person buying a Linux phone, their new sofa has 3 legs on Tuesday, they can only invite 2 friends to sit on it if it’s an odd number day, and sometimes the fabric glows in the dark. 1% of the time it works exactly how they dreamed and 99% of the time it’s frustrating.
But they own it and can fix all those problems if they’re so inclined! Or they can be at the mercy of people who can fix those problems and hope they don’t see the random glow in the dark fabric as a feature and that they don’t prioritize the problems they’re having over the problems they’re having.
Or they can buy an iPhone or flagship Android phone and have it work exactly like they want it to 99% of the time and be frustrating 1% of the time.
The average person’s iPhone/Android is the sofa in their living room just waiting to be used.
I like open source too, but I'm not serious about it, I want to be able to fix things or file an issue on GitHub or whatever if necessary, but I don't have the energy to worry about proprietary blobs.
Having control of my phone and its configuration like I do my Linux desktop is what I want, but I'm slightly resigned to perhaps not getting it because of app support (I tried Anbox on my desktop, it was buggy and slow, with a fraction of the RAM I dread to imagine) - so I've been thinking about and occasionally working on a Terraform provider for Android instead. So far I'm using it to install all apps, no Play Store at all; I'd like to have it handle settings too.
So yes, it is Linux more than OSS that appeals to me here, because it's control more than openness that interests me in it. (I suppose some wouldn't see a distinction, and that's partly why it is more important to others.)
I think you have it completely backwards. You want a phone that runs a FOSS operating system. It doesn’t matter to you that it is Linux or a BSD or some other open source kernel.
Android is a Linux phone but it’s decidedly not open.
I've had a Nokia N900 and the few Palm/HP Pre models that were released, the former ran Maemo and the latter webOS. Both OSes were based on Linux.
I want a Linux kernel, because even though today I'd list the modern niceties like namespaces, containers, WireGuard, NFS 4.2+, back in the Maemo days, having a Linux kernel still paid dividends. All of the standard networking and WLAN debugging tools you had on desktop Linux were available in your pocket, FUSE meant you could use sshfs, etc. The userland was the same GNU userland you'd find on most Linux distros, you could use X11 forwarding via ssh, GTK apps worked, and you had apt as the system package manager.
I want that again. Android doesn't come close, and neither does iOS.
At least personally, I want a phone that works similarly to my Linux machines. I have scripts that maintain a synchronized configuration across all of them, and I don't want my phone to be some snowflake that must be treated specially.
I want access to the same applications; I want to be able to run strace on random processes to understand what they're doing; I want to be able to organize my files under $HOME the same way I do in my other machines.
I want a Linux phone (ideally of a similar distro). It being open source is just part of that.
This is also the reason why I'm not really attracted to PineTime, despite it being open source.
If by polish you refer to aesthetic stuff like animations and whatnot, I don't really care about it.
I don't understand this comment. Am I not allowed to use Linux if I haven't ever committed code to an open source project? I've been using Linux for 15 years. Are you taking away my Linux card and am I being banned from the platform?
Because your argument makes no sense at all as to why I might want a Linux phone. I want a Linux phone for the same reasons why I use a Linux laptop and PC. Freedom, control over my computing environment and my data, that sort of thing.
Taking a step back, there is no mobile OS out there that provides the things that I want. The closest that I've seen is Linux for the PinePhone. So, yeah, I want a Linux phone. It's not that my initial premise was "I want a Linux phone". It's "I want control and I want to have the freedom to do what I want with my device, so what system currently offers that kind of freedom while being feasible on technical and usability levels?"
I bought a Pine Phone. I want a Linux phone. I don't want "open-source iOS", whatever that is. I don't care about that kind of "polish", I want access to (a good portion of) the same "Linux software library" that I use on my Linux laptops, VMs and Raspberry Pis. Plus it's nice to be able to make a phone call from it or take a photo occasionally.
Some polish would help. Ubuntu phone OS is just awful. The first thing I did was starting to check what else is available. That is not a step a typical use is willing to make.
And sadly, pine is still not my daily driver. At this time, it is a toy.
I want control over my devices, so linux phone is not a bad idea. We keep missing on execution though.
I'd want one so I can run some Python scripts in the background. Where I can use apt and install whatever I want from the repositories. Use ffmpeg to record audio and video and stream it in the LAN or even over the mobile network.
Some of these devices already have 12 GB RAM and octacore processors, that's more than a Raspberry Pi.
When these devices reach their EOL as a phone/tablet, they would make wonderful SBCs with integrated touchscreen, camera and microphone, and in the future also good AI co-processors for good on-device speech or face recognition. All this with an up-to-date OS, and not an Android version which is over 4 years old.
Whatever I try with Android, sooner or later the processes get killed.
What's worst is that when Chrome gets updated, any app using a WebView gets killed. Why not just let it continue running and make it use the new WebView after it gets started again manually?
I guess I always looked at Android's propensity to killing processes ultimately not just as a RAM saving tool, but as a battery saving tool.
That whole process lifecycle thing that you have to jump through with activities and bundles and what have you is so that your app disappears not just out of RAM, but out of the scheduler too from a piece of code that can make such decisions at a complete system level. Yes, it kills processes essentially arbitrarily, but the processes should have all of the hooks and places to squirrel away state to come back from the aether as if nothing happened. Programming Android code should embrace that rather than fight it.
As for webview, I think they're generally pushing a security fix and think that your app should be able to pull itself back together, the same as if a browser was refreshed.
> When these devices reach their EOL as a phone/tablet, they would make wonderful SBCs with integrated touchscreen
Try postmarketos, it's designed to run vanilla Linux on old devices such as phones.
CPU and USB OTG generally works, which already make for a pretty general-purpose machine. The touchscreen also works most of the time. The rest is generally hit-or-miss, depending on how much time you or the maintainer spends on making it work, or if there has been a mainlining effort.
You're probably right but— why buy a Linux phone then? There's LineageOS and F-Droid, or even Replicant if you're all-in on free software and don't mind running on a Galaxy 8.
I'm maybe not the guy to ask, I have curiousity and professional interest in open source phone stuff but I've had an iPhone since the 4, and plan to spend a total of less than 5 hours a year debugging my phone for the foreseeable future.
I'm not sure that pruning apps off my homescreen or rebooting a few times a year to solve some heisenbug really counts as debugging, but it's already closer than I care to be.
I think the issue with LineageOS (and CM before it) is that they're always playing catch-up, both in terms of porting to the latest version of Android, and in terms of supporting new hardware. Want to run Lineage on your brand-new phone? Nope. Want the latest version of Android a few months after it's released? Not gonna be LineageOS. (To be fair, most Android manufacturers take more than a few months to get the latest version of Android out to their users, assuming they do it at all.)
You can say "so what, it still works!" but I think there are weird psychological effects at play when you can make a direct comparison like "Android 37 was released 8 weeks ago but LineageOS is still on 36!" It makes Lineage feel like a second class citizen.
In contrast, if you have a phone that is designed specifically to run a custom non-Android-based OS, there's nothing to directly compare it to. Sure, you can say things like "I wish my FoobarOS phone had Google Pay like Android does", but you still inherently get the fact that they are completely different platforms and won't have app/feature parity.
I used to run CM years ago, but quit even before the LineageOS fork/transition, because I was always looking at the latest-and-greatest Android releases (even for my particular phone hardware) and feeling left behind. And it was even worse when things should have worked but didn't because of some peculiarity of CM, or things like apps refusing to run on rooted phones.
I'm really considering getting a PinePhone just to try it out. I know that I will miss Google Pay and some other things, but I'd be going into it not expecting those to be there, and expecting it to be a different platform with a different experience and different features.
Because when you rely on the android ecosystem, the rug gets pulled out more and more. LineageOS works on less and less new and common phones and SaftyNet blocks you from more and more features.
Android also comes with a bunch of anti features like an api to block the user from taking screenshots. Its better to completely replace the OS with something Google doesn't control.
I'm not even sure if most users who use Linux computers actually want Linux computers. If they do, why are there so many attempts towards recreating the macOS UI and UX in Linux, such as with Elementary OS? Or back in the '90s/'00s, attempts towards recreating the Windows UI/UX?
Maybe people also do just want general open-source computing, and Linux just happens to be the one that's furthest along, its philosophy and ideology be damned.
Personally, I'm hoping Haiku eventually gets further along to be usable as a Linux alternative, and it's fun to wonder what it would be like as a mobile OS.
> why are there so many attempts towards recreating the macOS UI and UX in Linux
I imagine it's because, when the year of the Linux desktop didn't arrive, developers everywhere decided they could make it happen if only they tried hard enough to put together the perfect UI, and so the kitchen-sink approach proliferated.
> Or back in the '90s/'00s, attempts towards recreating the Windows UI/UX?
I take exception to this one. In fact it was Microsoft with Windows 7 (released in 2007) which copied much of the UI of older Linux desktops like KDE and GNOME versions 1.0 (circa 1997). See:
Linux desktop environments were better back then. XFce is the only tolerable one I can think of, today. Even there, I hate the defaults and preferred it in the XFce3 days when it was just an (improved) CDE clone. Fluxbox or bust!
>I'm not even sure if most users who use Linux computers actually want Linux computers. If they do, why are there so many attempts towards recreating the macOS UI and UX in Linux, such as with Elementary OS?
Why the hell do you think those things are related? I can easily make my OS look macOS, windows, something weird inbetween or some pink vapourwave hell from the 90's or some minimalist tiling WM and that's the beauty of it. That's exactly one of the things I want.
I don't use Linux because of a particular DE with presets that let's me mimic windows. If that was all why wouldn't I just use windows.
The Linux philosophy is important to me in a desktop, but I don't think I'd really care about it on a phone. If it were eventually to be both, then I would, but I never really believed in that goal. If I'm going to use a computer in desktop mode, I'd rather just have a proper desktop, with hardware that is unrestrained by the smaller form factor.
Linux users want phones with comfortable infrastructure that is hackable, and known, and richly powerful, with a wide base of people generating creative contributions. Linux isn't popular (with the hip crowd) because merely because it's better (though it is), or because it's hackable (though it is) Linux is popular because it's a rich technical ecosystem with robust layers of technology operating together but each modifiable, lovingly adopted by power users, each opting in to trying to improve themselves & their systems.
You can recreate the "ability to make modifications" (although you'll struggle to come to anywhere near the seriously integrated layers of technology Linux environments so robustly build). You can offer "Freedom and transparency" to be able to tinker. But it's the co-participation with other tinkerers, with many venerable but separate & adjustable/hackable layers, that makes Linux so rifely diverse & compelling.
In short, my strong belief is: people want Linux phones. The technical ecosystem is more interesting as a whole than any array of boxes/capabilities one might tick.
I definitely want an open-source phone for all the reasons you mentioned, but I absolutely also want a Linux phone.
I'd love to live in a world where BSD or Minix became The Thing™, but since it didn't I basically live and breath Linux for work and that spills over into my personal usage too. Interoperability between my phone and my laptop is huge. I recently started using KDE Connect (and okay - that doesn't have to be Linux-specific) and being able to seamlessly copy / paste between devices, etc. is a game changer for me.
I agree. I love Android philosophy, but it's getting more and more closed with every year. Just one example: call recording. It was available in the past, in modern Android versions those apps no longer work.
I don't know how representative I am, but I just want something that respects my privacy and doesn't try to monetize my every interaction, while being open enough that I can run what I want on it (apps, not OS). Android fails at the first and iOS fails at the second.
I like in principle that Android is open source (minus all the proprietary junk getting jammed into Play Services). I or someone could verify that it's not sending my data to a sketchy third party, but only to a point. Unless the OS and all apps are completely open source, any closed source component could be secretly betray me. Ironically, though, I trust Apple a lot more to write privacy-respecting code even though it's all proprietary. But on Android I do what I can to mitigate these issues, by running as much tracking- and ad-blocking software as I can (a thing that isn't really possible on iOS, at least not to the same extent). And I do have some apps sideloaded that I'd miss if I had an iPhone. But I still assume that Google is not being a good steward of any data it gleans from my Android usage, and that sucks.
I don't care too much about the ability to make modifications. The hurdle to jump to go from a stock to custom ROM is pretty high nowadays, as I expect most financial apps (and probably some others) to aggressively detect enabled root access and refuse to run. And the process of building your own OS images to make tweaks is not particularly fun, and can be a mess to clean up if you make a mistake. It's critical to me that my phone doesn't have downtime, so I'm less likely to mess around with it.
The problem with the current crop of "Linux phones" is that (while they do respect privacy, don't try to monetize every interaction, and are open enough to run what I want on them) they don't have anywhere near the polish of iOS or Android, and are (understandably) missing key applications that I use daily. So anything I use will have trade offs. For better or worse (probably worse) I've chosen the easier path of Android, at least for now.
Having said that, I do think I want to get a PinePhone, not to use as my primary mobile device, but as something to tinker around with. Maybe it's something that eventually could be a primary device, at least for some situations, but I don't see that as being the case without a lot of work, and a lot of customization that I have to do myself, which I don't really care to do all that much.
I guess? But Linux provides those things. Break it apart, what this is saying is, "you don't want X, you want something that doesn't exist that theoretically provides all of the advantages of X."
Which, sure. I could (and do) use LineageOS right now. It's not as good. I still need to go through the Android app development process, I'm still fighting the system every step of the way. It's still a pain to de-Google things, I still have to deal with an architecture that if fundamentally designed to work best with Google services. I still have to deal with what I see as design flaws in Android itself.
So I don't technically need this to be Linux. I recently bought a smartwatch that runs on an ESP32 chip and is programmed using Arduino code/C++. It's not running Linux, but it fits a lot of my needs and it will communicate well with my Linux computer. And you're right, I didn't have serious qualms about that because of the kernel. In fact, the simpler dev process was what made it attractive.
However, there isn't that kind of thing for phones. If you want an Open Source phone that is easy to modify and develop on, Linux is the option that's pushing in that direction.
> but they don't necessarily want to open a PR against the camera app if they want it to more closely match the polish of iOS.
It's deeper than that: I want the ability to fix my own problems. I don't want to open a pull request, I want software that is understandable enough and an ecosystem that is open enough and broad enough that it is reasonable for me to fix my own problems. I (personally) can do that on Linux, but I can't (currently) do it on Android devices, they're a pain to work with and I hate them.
I am used to Linux on my computers, including the fragmentation of software. Sometimes the fragmentation is an advantage because it means there's a diversity of software that is hyper-specialized rather than one or two solutions that are built to kind-of satisfy "most" people's needs. More than Linux itself, what I am used to is the idea that if something goes wrong or if I want my computer to do something, I can make it happen without asking anybody else's permission, without building a giant project that I need to invest serious time into, that I can pull things apart and build pipelines with Unixy tools.
I want that on my phone. It doesn't have to be Linux, but nothing else is providing it, so it does have to be Linux unless someone else is going to build a better OS. I'm not holding my breath for that.
I bought one because I was hoping to tinker with things, and also I wanted to be able to do things that iOS won't allow. (like have a filesystem)
I had imagined that because KDE was so solid on my desktop that it would be really solid on the phone, but I think the phone is not just fast enough.
I was really happy with my feature phone, but had to give it up because I kept pocket dialing the emergency services. I wish I could find a shell that was as simple.
It allows me to run any linux desktop program, which includes programs that can be run with wine, anbox or even a virtual machine. If it's fast enough i wouldn't need a PC at all.
So I would say that is the long term goal: convergence. Linux has a major advantage over other operating systems in this regard.
Most of those need apps re-signed all the time and can't do push notifications.
iSH almost looks usable and then you try compiling something or cloning a git repo and your iphone will get hotter than a pinephone watching youtube (and whatever you do can be fairly precisely measured in ~15 minute increments because it takes ages.)
I think they mostly just want a cheaper iPhone that they can mostly play with the cosmetics and have free apps. For most, the ability to improve the code is not really a thing.
My home is top to bottom Linux. Linux media server. Linux laptop for work. My wife is on Linux. My parents are on Linux (since i have to support them).
Linux's rough patches on the desktop/laptop is one thing, and for me - easy to deal with.
on a mobile device, the polish matters in usability in big way. Running into a problem on a phone is infinitely more of a PITA than a machine with a sizeable screen and a full keyboard attached, where remote access is easy if necessary.
Exactly. They want a phone that, to the extent possible, is not a surveillance device vacuuming up all their data and sending it to apple and google. Obviously the phone companies and ISPs can still vacuum up data even with a linux phone, but you've got to start somewhere.
I don't want a Linux phone because I don't really need a terminal on my phone, I have other devices for that, and the rest of the Linux ecosystem is built for server/desktop, so I don't need that on my phone either. Canonical made the best attempt at getting Ubuntu there, but it started to impact the desktop users and Canonical has limited resources. Apple is trying to converge iOS and MacOS with their iPad Pro and Apple Silicon, we'll see how that goes in the next decade.
I want to know that the source code on my phone has been peer reviewed. However, this does not always mean backdoors are caught. For example, the NSA injected a potential back door into openSSL. It was caught, but only a small number of people are smart enough to catch something like this. STILL: it was open source. I like that. I would buy a linux phone even if it sucked a little, knowing that I could view the source code.
>Probably an unpopular opinion, but I don't think most people who buy a Linux phone actually want a Linux phone. They want an open-source phone.
That's true, but to some degree. I'm OK with LineageOS, wouldn't care if that has Linux or BSD. As long as I can switch distro, reinstall and do not lose warranty or permanently damage bootloader.
> but I don't think most people who buy a Linux phone actually want a Linux phone. They want an open-source phone.
Would be very strange that in the vast group of Linux users you can make a claim that "most of them want X". Seeing the amount of fragmentation happening out there, a lot of them have different priorities.
I have a phone, I don't use it for too many purposes, whatever software that is installed on it doesn't bother me much because there are larger pie to fry.
Now desktop OS and laptop choices/ cloud native stuff is a hill I'm willing to die on, because I'm a lot more invested.
Laptops and desktops are being replaced by phones. The appeal of a FOSS phone is that it makes the world safe for general purpose computing by taking back some of the territory lost to phones.
OK I'll bite. I wrote a plugin to get mmsd to function with modem manager and I wrote a reference implimentation to integrate MMS functionality into chatty. I also took the time to make sure my patches were upstreamable, and I have taken and worked on every feedback to ensure my patches are upstream able. I filed the ITP bug to include mmsd into Debian proper.
I did all of this back from December to February.
I still have no idea when Debian will bother to look at the mmsd packaging to include it into their repository, nor when my changes for chatty will be integrated. The ofono mailing list and IRC channel (i.e. the original authors of mmsd, but i think they abandoned it as they have said it hasn't been maintained in 8 years) have ignored me, so I doubt my changes will ever go back into upstream mmsd (I just consider what I have a fork now). I'm waiting on the chatty dev to finish off a current project to then get to integrating my MMS patches into chatty.
I still really want to help, but there's not much for me to do except wait for upstream devs to get around to integrating my work.
Being frank, I'm frustrated that I spent all of that time to implement a feature I want and I know a lot of other folks want, but now I'm just in a limbo hoping that others will get around to it.
So I'll ask, if you want folks to help on the boring things or missing functionality, how do you prevent that from happening?
A ton of people want mms support, I really appreciate your work on it. The MMS support is also one of the hard problems nobody wanted to pick up, like the camera support.
The mms stuff in postmarketOS is also still in progress as far as I know, I'm un europe myself, like a lot of the pinephone developers and mms just isn't really a thing which makes integrating these thing quite hard.
> A ton of people want mms support, I really appreciate your work on it. The MMS support is also one of the hard problems nobody wanted to pick up, like the camera support.
I get it, and I get your frustrations too, that's why I just picked it up myself. I really do want to help.
I understand your frustration. I'd imagine this is probably the wrong time to be trying to (presumably) be a new Debian developer trying to get new features integrated with everyone focusing on Bullseye. I suspect they'll get around to it once Bullseye is done (thought you might have to ping them to remind them)
If I can ask, who do I flag down? Despite using the ITP bug and proper Debian process, I haven't gotten an acknowledgement from anyone that seems to control the packaging.
Yes I want a Linux phone. But I also want one that has similar app support to Android and iOS.
The problem is not with the Linux phones that are out there, it is that no apps are and likely never will be compatible with (non-Android) Linux phones. Until that is solved, most people (like me) could not switch out their phone for a Linux phone as a daily driver, however much they would like.
Having Linux as an alternative for Windows is a lot easier than having Linux as an alternative for Android/iOS. A lot of the Windows applications we use can be replaced by opensource applications on Linux. And browser based applications already work on both.
However, apps on Android/iOS are mostly tied to cloud services. Unfortunately services that most people need in this age. Messaging systems like WhatsApp and Signal are usually tied to your phone, and going without them would result in social isolation for a lot of people. But also for banking and sometimes government services, you likely need to use their apps. And there will never be opensource alternatives for such apps.
Yes, Anbox exists, and has done some amazing things. But can this run apps that require Google Play Services, such as WhatsApp, most banking apps, and governmental apps?
It is very unfortunate that so much of the Android ecosystem relies on a very proprietary and cloud-connected piece of software. Without it, most apps simply refuse to work. MicroG has done amazing things here, but unfortunately a lot of things still break when using it, to no fault of the MicroG developers.
Let's not pretend that Anbox is some kind of magical drop in solution. I tried it many times and it's completely hit-and-miss at this stage, and development is very slow. Relying on Anbox for the future would be foolish unless someone steps in to massively increase the funding and resources on this project.
Gradually making Chrome the only OS that really matters.
The web is already almost as closed (for apps) as phones are - you can choose Chrome, Safari if you're on Mac, or Firefox. Everything else is just repackaged Chrome. Edit: forgot Opera Mini, for what it's worth.
Firefox is dying out, and Google is pushing for less and less user freedom in Chrome, while Apple is extremely reluctant to implement new features that make Safari a better app platform.
This is true for some people, but not for others, which is why this is so hard to generalize. a "linux phone" means different things to different people.
In a perfect world I'd have a phone that is analogous. As iPhone is to Apple, and android is to windows, my phone would be to whatever linux I use. Well, that's a tall order.
And because it's a tall order, the most efficient way to go through features is to start off with easy highly requested features and very slowly move toward the less important features that are harder to implement.
Phones with linux hits both sides of this equation. On one hand it turns out EVEN THOSE things are hard. On the other hand, people don't WANT to work on those things as much because free developers rarely want to work on other people's problems. I mean, some will, and those people are simply better people IMO, but rarely do they WANT to.
There are some apps that are really necessary....a good messaging app, a ride hailing app, a map app, a decent browser, a notepad, a money sending app, maybe a couple others. The others are just a waste of time and I would actively prefer a phone ecosystem that does not support them. It's what I loved about Windows phones.
It's a shame Mozilla just cut SSB support or at least you could easy make some web apps into lightweight apps on this sort of platform where Electron apps aren't small-screen-optimized but the website is.
Which are both Android ROMs/distributions. Still requiring Google Play Services to do any of the things I want Android for. And they definitely do not have the same kind of hackability that full on Linux phones have.
LineageOS is what I'm currently using on my daily driver, as a compromise. I would very much prefer a Linux phone, but in the current state it can't even fulfill half my needs in a smartphone.
> There are 18 distributions now for the PinePhone ... Still people want to create more distributions instead of actually implementing missing features in the existing distributions or fixing issues in the upstream applications those use.
If I’m working on something for fun I’m gonna choose to work on the puzzles I enjoy... if it’s work and I’m being paid I’ll probably consider your less interesting bugs:)
This in essence is the tragedy of the commons for consumer Linux applications. Contributing to complex consumer software is hard, the people who do it in their spare time are inclined to satisfy their own itch.
Linux works exceptionally well in the areas where large companies with many developers pay to make it work well.
Which is ok when you are frank and say you are not doing something for most people. I guess the problem is assuming that PinePhone is usable to the majority of consumers.
Sounds exactly like what happened with the Openmoko phones too. A proliferation of half finished platforms, few of which could even reliably take a call.
Yeah, though PinePhone has chosen manjaro + kde as their default moving forward. I’m guessing that’ll improve the polish for that specific combination of software, and they’ll hit critical mass. After that, having more diversity of choices would be nice, but there needs to be one working option first.
Hopefully they won’t repeatedly change their minds before then, like openmoko did.
Many of those distros are just focused on making their preferred distro work on ARM, it's not like they are targeting the PinePhone. They even count Gentoo as one of the 18.
As they should- provided a strong binhost,, it's the distribution that has brought me the most joy to run on mine, and it's been a delight to see Gentoo users come together over time to make easier as it's evolved alongside other pinephone distribution c:
And there's no reason that in OSS software like this that distros can't borrow the best features from other distros. I'm sure that if, given time to mature, there will and up being a few core distros many people turn to and then a whole bunch of others that meet the specific preferences of other users.
It's not yet a mature ecosystem, but desktop linux is, and there's plenty to borrow from there.
Here we go again. App developers now have to 'define' support for a distribution target and test each of them to show it is actually 'supported' and not showing 'experimental support'.
Fantastic news for the technical consumer and the whole open-source crowd, Not so good for the app developers who need to test their apps on these numerous distros and bewildering for general users looking at this technical contraption that is likely not to have the same apps on their old phones.
If they want to solve this like it or not, supporting the Flutter ecosystem sounds like a good idea.
> Do you want Linux phones?
If it gets in the way of things and is harder to use than the alternatives, then no thanks and no deal. There is more things to consider than just 'open-source' or the 'free software' argument.
Probably close to that percentage are either better as a website or actually harmful garbage.
> Is the app ecosystem ready?
Here's the question you ask: Would you be happier if your thinkpad running Alpine Linux fit in your pocket and could do sms/calls? It has the same answer.
It sounds like a paper characterizing the problem with Lisp as being that (to paraphrase) "the kind of person who uses Lisp would rather create a new DSL than learn to re-use yours".
The author complains about a lack of people interested in developing for the Pinephone, but IMHO the elephant in the room is simply that the PinePhone is too underpowered to enjoyably develop on. Its A64 processor is weak as fuck, and some of us who ordered the PinePhone got the original version with just 2GB of RAM. Not only does it take a long while to build software on the phone, but UI lag for your finished program is long – you will probably have to wait a good 5 seconds just for a window to open.
Back in the Nokia N900 days I did a great deal of hacking on that phone, but that device (even though its specs are much lower than a modern phone’s) had a much more responsive UI and it was actually enjoyable to test out what you had developed.
> It's basically my first C project, first v4l2 project and first GTK3 project but I started it because nobody who actually knows any of these things want to, and so far nobody who knows these things has stepped in to do better (...)
(I probably do not know any of these things better - but if I did, and wanted to help, I'd probably click on the link to the github profile, not find megapixels source... And move on?)
Seconded with building Megapixels on the PinePhone - though I do the actual editing itself on another machine. I have however found that doing clean builds of libraries like libhandy (specifically for building flatpaks) is a lot faster using qemu on a desktop.
I don't think this is an insurmountable problem, but it definitely is a problem. I got a (3GB) pinephone late last year with plans to hack on it and write some nice user facing applications as well as exploring ways to help make sure that a phone can help users preserve their privacy.
What's quickly become clear to me is that all of that stuff is futile until we have a better way to build and run applications. The existing shells and toolkits for building applications are simply too heavy for the hardware, and I don't see the situation changing much any time soon. The hardware ought to be powerful enough to do more than it can, but it's going to take a lot more effort to build more efficient underlying components.
Unfortunately, as an individual developer with several other large side projects going on at the moment I don't expect to be able to contribute much to this anytime soon, but I hope that the discussion will prompt some people with the spare cycles to pick this up and run with it.
This mystifies me. Why would you not use a cross-compiler running in your favorite desktop development environment, and run gdb in place, there, with gdbserver to control the runtime on the phone?
sshfs gets executables automatically exported to the phone as they are linked.
Doing native builds on the phone seems like deliberately choosing to do it the hard way. [But somebody says GTK will not cross-build. Could that be possible?]
Cross-compiling is frequently harder than compiling natively and you cannot run the build-time tests while compiling, so you will have less confidence in the results.
GTK 3 cannot currently be cross built due to some sort of dependency issue with Python, but random GTK apps can be cross-built just fine, and have been by Debian cross-build QA efforts:
I have used a Linux phone for 12 years or so. First the N900 and later the Jolla/Sailfish ones.
None of them has been a great product. The software has limited features and there are few apps. The lack of manpower in development cannot be hidden. I cannot buy a subway ticket in several cities and I get difficulties with banks, because I have no Google playstore and we live in a world worse than Orwell's 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 could imagine.
When I want to tinker I have a shell, can become root and I know what I am doing.
> I have used a Linux phone for 12 years or so. First the N900 and later the Jolla/Sailfish ones.
> None of them has been a great product.
Likewise, and I disagree. The phones that support Sailfish X or later are all great. With Xperia XA2 or Xperia 10, you can install micro-g via f-droid, and then most android apps should work fine. Yes, it is not ideal that we need android/ios apps to function properly in a society. Blame it on SV. Oh, that's us?
Anyway, back to Jolla. A good example is that if the LCD screen breaks, I can just buy a replacement, ssh into the old phone, and scp from it to the new phone (this actually happened). That's a Linux phone.
>A good example is that if the LCD screen breaks, I can just buy a replacement, ssh into the old phone, and scp from it to the new phone (this actually happened). That's a Linux phone.
Exactly. When I read the headline, I immediately thought of my N900, and having pretty much a full computer in my pocket at all times. Yes, I really, really want a Linux phone.
It's hard to imagine what you're missing, given the present absolute dominance of user-friendly locked-down devices, but a proper Linux phone really is worth it.
>> I have used a Linux phone for 12 years or so. First the N900 and later the Jolla/Sailfish ones.
>> None of them has been a great product.
> Likewise, and I disagree. The phones that support Sailfish X or later are all great. With Xperia XA2 or Xperia 10, you can install micro-g via f-droid, and then most android apps should work fine
I am still on Xperia X and since last fall I cannot even update Firefox any more. The few commercial apps I did try like my bank say they won't run on a rooted phone.
The models with the newer kernel/Android had their own share of issues what I read from the forums. So I did not feel any urge to upgrade to a hardware that does not fit into my pocket.
Of course the blame is on the kernel misery for phone SoCs, Google de-facto monopoly accepted by companies and governments publishing apps. So I could say I have a great phone and all the others are wrong...
> ssh into the old phone
Sure, you don't have to tell me, that's those reasons why I use it.
I did finish 1984 on 31-Dec-83. Maybe I need to read it again, don't remember too many details...
For Fahrenheit 451 I have seen the movie twice and I remember it quite well. No idea how much it is different from the book, have not read it.
Of course not all aspects of those fiction works apply, especially outside of China, Russia and the like. But Orwell would be not have foreseen how Google/Apple/Facebook can use positioning info or face detection of their users or how Russian internet trolls can influence US presidential elections or German vaccination opponents.
>I get difficulties with banks, because I have no Google playstore and we live in a world worse than Orwell's 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 could imagine.
It's such a shame we're locked into platform-specific apps. If only there was some way banks etc could make some kind off app that runs on any platform.
What if we had some sort of... app like thing - documents with interactive elements and media, even code that runs (safely sandboxed), but not tied to any one platform.
We could have one central app, a platform within a platform, that fetches and displays these documents, which are made according to a set of specifications and standards that can be implemented freely by anyone. It wouldn't be easy or cheap to do so, but the engines could be open source so that new OSes could still run them.
I don't know... it's probably a crazy, unrealistic idea.
Sadly, since no such thing exists, the banks have no choice but to lock us into the Android-iPhone duopoly.
The a1200 ming was pretty slick for its time. It had a 2MP camera when everything else shipped with 0.3MP at best. Touch screen, stylus, see through flip so you could see the screen when closed. That was a pretty cool phone.
Almost all budget and mid range android phones come with invasive tracking, bloat, and ads now. The worst part is you cannot flash a custom rom without crippling your device to almost a feature phone. Many apps use safety net now. You can temporarily bypass it using magisk but Google will get rid of it soon through hardware key attestation.
Flagship phones are too expensive for me and they don't come with features like a good charger, headphone jack, big battery, etc. Most of them also suffer from Android ecosystem problems. Slow security updates and trash apps in the playstore.
iPhone is expensive too and iOS limits your freedom even more. You cannot customize the layout or app drawer too much. You cannot use non-web kit browser. Adblockers are crippled on iOS. Notch and suffers from the same problem as Android flagships. Lack of easy side loading.
All I want is a phone which respects me. I don't care if it's Linux based or not.
This is one of the reasons I highly respect Xiaomi and Google Pixels. They are basically the only phones left that make this painless to do without resorting to dodgy hacks.
Xiaomi have an official bootloader unlock and are simple to put LineageOS on. Pixels are the only phones that are supported by GrapheneOS, which offers substantial security benefits over any other Android phone.
It's giving the consumer freedom and environmentally friendly for when the updates run out/planned obsolescence kicks in. I have a spare phone lay around from 2014 running up-to-date 2021 Android patches and it works perfectly fine, the battery went bad once but this was the days of replaceable batts and it cost $15 online for a new one. If you can accept the tradeoff with no further physical firmware updates it's a much better deal than the rampant consumerism and e-waste that plagues the mobile market.
> Many apps use safety net now. You can temporarily bypass it using magisk but Google will get rid of it soon through hardware key attestation.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this isn't really a criticism of Android as a platform but that apps use DRM for tamper proofing. I suppose Android could try to make this harder but I'm sure hardware vendors would step in with their solutions. You're totally free to do as you please with android/rooting as long as you don't care about those apps -- which I have a strong feeling will never be available on more open platforms, unless somehow they gain market dominance.
There is a very popular Linux phone OS. It's called Android.
This sounds somewhat pat and snarky, but I am trying to make a real point. Let's go to some of what the article says:
==================
Having an "one true way" to use the UI and tons of preinstalled apps is the reason I dislike the android ecosystem...
Megapixels has a fully user-configurable post-processing pipeline basically since the start. It allows you do anything you want after clicking the shutter button in the app since it's a shell script. Still people complain about how they don't like that there's an extra file they don't want (the dng) or photo upload is missing. ITS A SCRIPT, CHANGE IT. Do you really want a Linux phone?
==================
If you're defining "a Linux phone" as "a phone that uses bash scripts for configuration and where nothing works out of the box", then no. People don't want a Linux phone. But then, by that standard Ubuntu isn't catering to a "true" Linux audience. I don't think this is a useful definition of the word.
Readit News
Both of those are missing the point IMO. What people really want, is a phone that is on their side. iOS doesn't support open standards like Vulkan mainly because it's not in Apple's interest to support them. Not because it's in the user's interest, necessarily.
What people really want is a phone that they can trust to be on their side implicitly. The nugget of brilliance in Free Software is saying "if you do all this stuff, then the power will be so tilted towards you that you will be able to trust your software to be on your side".
People want something that's both polished, and won't [forego polish in one particular area for the sake of the company's interests/$$$].
This. No matter how convenient and useful current smartphones are in daily life, there's always the nagging discomfort by knowing you are carrying a half-nefarious spying device. One where even the so-called reputable vendors can't be trusted to not put in malicious adware, planned obsolecense, and do everything in their power to ensure you don't really own the thing.
It's all about for who's benefit the product is built. I like the phrasing of having a phone "on my side".
In a recent thread here on obsolete hardware I was commenting how up to the fairly recent past products were built with the idea of competing on features the user wanted (or at least presumably wanted).
But no longer - in the last ten years that has shifted in too many industries to be all about features that the company wants (spyware, tracking, DRM, cloud lock-in, and on and on). The phone duopoly is a poster child of this evil trend. Neither platform puts the user first and into the drivers seat.
So no, I don't want an open source phone nor a Linux phone, specifically. (Not saying I'd mind if one or both are true, that'd be cool, but not a deciding factor.) I want a phone where I the customer are in full control of what it does. I must be able to override anything the OS wants to do and to override anything any app wants to do.
I couldn't agree with "people want a phone that is on their side" more.
I also agree that Linux matters as much as iOS's BSD heart—that is, it doesn't. But this is also why the Vulkan example doesn't serve your point. As with Linux, technical implementation details aren't why people are using iPhones.
Most people use iPhones because of the complete experience. For the few who care whether the iPhone is "on their side", it is clear that Apple's business model is generally aligned with their interests. This is either unknown or untrue for alternatives.
This is where open source phone vendors will fail. Trust is not simply a technology problem.
> What people really want is a phone that they can trust to be on their side implicitly.
Absolutely! These days our computers only do things that align with big company interests. I want a phone that will obey me even if it means ruin for its maker.
100% this.
Why is it so difficult to copy files to/from my phone?
Why is it so difficult to list all the files in a folder?
Why is it so difficult to get a list of what's running?
_Why is it so difficult to know that my phone is working for me_?
Or maybe because Vulkan was a standard so long and late in the making that Apple released their own graphical stack a year before the Vulkan was even announced?
My Android phone doesn't work that way. The company behind it expects me to do certain tasks with the phone. Some tasks are open for gradual adoption, other aren't, meaning they are mandated. After all those years, I'm beginning to dislike that.
The reality of this is much different. To the average person buying a Linux phone, their new sofa has 3 legs on Tuesday, they can only invite 2 friends to sit on it if it’s an odd number day, and sometimes the fabric glows in the dark. 1% of the time it works exactly how they dreamed and 99% of the time it’s frustrating.
But they own it and can fix all those problems if they’re so inclined! Or they can be at the mercy of people who can fix those problems and hope they don’t see the random glow in the dark fabric as a feature and that they don’t prioritize the problems they’re having over the problems they’re having.
Or they can buy an iPhone or flagship Android phone and have it work exactly like they want it to 99% of the time and be frustrating 1% of the time.
The average person’s iPhone/Android is the sofa in their living room just waiting to be used.
I like open source too, but I'm not serious about it, I want to be able to fix things or file an issue on GitHub or whatever if necessary, but I don't have the energy to worry about proprietary blobs.
Having control of my phone and its configuration like I do my Linux desktop is what I want, but I'm slightly resigned to perhaps not getting it because of app support (I tried Anbox on my desktop, it was buggy and slow, with a fraction of the RAM I dread to imagine) - so I've been thinking about and occasionally working on a Terraform provider for Android instead. So far I'm using it to install all apps, no Play Store at all; I'd like to have it handle settings too.
So yes, it is Linux more than OSS that appeals to me here, because it's control more than openness that interests me in it. (I suppose some wouldn't see a distinction, and that's partly why it is more important to others.)
Android is a Linux phone but it’s decidedly not open.
I want a Linux kernel, because even though today I'd list the modern niceties like namespaces, containers, WireGuard, NFS 4.2+, back in the Maemo days, having a Linux kernel still paid dividends. All of the standard networking and WLAN debugging tools you had on desktop Linux were available in your pocket, FUSE meant you could use sshfs, etc. The userland was the same GNU userland you'd find on most Linux distros, you could use X11 forwarding via ssh, GTK apps worked, and you had apt as the system package manager.
I want that again. Android doesn't come close, and neither does iOS.
NFS on a phone? What's the use case for that? Isn't it easier at that point to use small linux laptop?
I want access to the same applications; I want to be able to run strace on random processes to understand what they're doing; I want to be able to organize my files under $HOME the same way I do in my other machines.
I want a Linux phone (ideally of a similar distro). It being open source is just part of that.
This is also the reason why I'm not really attracted to PineTime, despite it being open source.
If by polish you refer to aesthetic stuff like animations and whatnot, I don't really care about it.
I couldn't give two flips if it is the Linux kernel that accomplishes that, but I think it's pretty obvious that Linux is our only reasonable hope.
Because your argument makes no sense at all as to why I might want a Linux phone. I want a Linux phone for the same reasons why I use a Linux laptop and PC. Freedom, control over my computing environment and my data, that sort of thing.
Taking a step back, there is no mobile OS out there that provides the things that I want. The closest that I've seen is Linux for the PinePhone. So, yeah, I want a Linux phone. It's not that my initial premise was "I want a Linux phone". It's "I want control and I want to have the freedom to do what I want with my device, so what system currently offers that kind of freedom while being feasible on technical and usability levels?"
And sadly, pine is still not my daily driver. At this time, it is a toy.
I want control over my devices, so linux phone is not a bad idea. We keep missing on execution though.
Some of these devices already have 12 GB RAM and octacore processors, that's more than a Raspberry Pi.
When these devices reach their EOL as a phone/tablet, they would make wonderful SBCs with integrated touchscreen, camera and microphone, and in the future also good AI co-processors for good on-device speech or face recognition. All this with an up-to-date OS, and not an Android version which is over 4 years old.
Whatever I try with Android, sooner or later the processes get killed.
What's worst is that when Chrome gets updated, any app using a WebView gets killed. Why not just let it continue running and make it use the new WebView after it gets started again manually?
That whole process lifecycle thing that you have to jump through with activities and bundles and what have you is so that your app disappears not just out of RAM, but out of the scheduler too from a piece of code that can make such decisions at a complete system level. Yes, it kills processes essentially arbitrarily, but the processes should have all of the hooks and places to squirrel away state to come back from the aether as if nothing happened. Programming Android code should embrace that rather than fight it.
As for webview, I think they're generally pushing a security fix and think that your app should be able to pull itself back together, the same as if a browser was refreshed.
Try postmarketos, it's designed to run vanilla Linux on old devices such as phones.
CPU and USB OTG generally works, which already make for a pretty general-purpose machine. The touchscreen also works most of the time. The rest is generally hit-or-miss, depending on how much time you or the maintainer spends on making it work, or if there has been a mainlining effort.
I'm maybe not the guy to ask, I have curiousity and professional interest in open source phone stuff but I've had an iPhone since the 4, and plan to spend a total of less than 5 hours a year debugging my phone for the foreseeable future.
I'm not sure that pruning apps off my homescreen or rebooting a few times a year to solve some heisenbug really counts as debugging, but it's already closer than I care to be.
You can say "so what, it still works!" but I think there are weird psychological effects at play when you can make a direct comparison like "Android 37 was released 8 weeks ago but LineageOS is still on 36!" It makes Lineage feel like a second class citizen.
In contrast, if you have a phone that is designed specifically to run a custom non-Android-based OS, there's nothing to directly compare it to. Sure, you can say things like "I wish my FoobarOS phone had Google Pay like Android does", but you still inherently get the fact that they are completely different platforms and won't have app/feature parity.
I used to run CM years ago, but quit even before the LineageOS fork/transition, because I was always looking at the latest-and-greatest Android releases (even for my particular phone hardware) and feeling left behind. And it was even worse when things should have worked but didn't because of some peculiarity of CM, or things like apps refusing to run on rooted phones.
I'm really considering getting a PinePhone just to try it out. I know that I will miss Google Pay and some other things, but I'd be going into it not expecting those to be there, and expecting it to be a different platform with a different experience and different features.
Android also comes with a bunch of anti features like an api to block the user from taking screenshots. Its better to completely replace the OS with something Google doesn't control.
Maybe people also do just want general open-source computing, and Linux just happens to be the one that's furthest along, its philosophy and ideology be damned.
Personally, I'm hoping Haiku eventually gets further along to be usable as a Linux alternative, and it's fun to wonder what it would be like as a mobile OS.
I imagine it's because, when the year of the Linux desktop didn't arrive, developers everywhere decided they could make it happen if only they tried hard enough to put together the perfect UI, and so the kitchen-sink approach proliferated.
> Or back in the '90s/'00s, attempts towards recreating the Windows UI/UX?
I take exception to this one. In fact it was Microsoft with Windows 7 (released in 2007) which copied much of the UI of older Linux desktops like KDE and GNOME versions 1.0 (circa 1997). See:
https://linuxgazette.net/165/misc/laycock/gnome.pnghttps://images.channelpartner.de/bdb/490847/1066x600.jpg
Linux desktop environments were better back then. XFce is the only tolerable one I can think of, today. Even there, I hate the defaults and preferred it in the XFce3 days when it was just an (improved) CDE clone. Fluxbox or bust!
Why the hell do you think those things are related? I can easily make my OS look macOS, windows, something weird inbetween or some pink vapourwave hell from the 90's or some minimalist tiling WM and that's the beauty of it. That's exactly one of the things I want.
I don't use Linux because of a particular DE with presets that let's me mimic windows. If that was all why wouldn't I just use windows.
Yes, KDE has copied Windows features.
But: they made it better (for people like me). I didn't get Windows, but something that happened to look similar but work better.
And the latest big Windows update copied a good deal of styling from KDE Plasma so they are clearly doing something interesting :-)
I personally use Elementary daily and I really don't like OSX, they only superficially look similar but it's a very different mindset and UX.
I just wanted a phone that works as a phone and then I can plugin to a dock and I get a full linux desktop experience.
It's still a thing, but nowhere near what it was when they were trying to launch an actual phone.
https://ubports.com/devices/promoted-devices
You can recreate the "ability to make modifications" (although you'll struggle to come to anywhere near the seriously integrated layers of technology Linux environments so robustly build). You can offer "Freedom and transparency" to be able to tinker. But it's the co-participation with other tinkerers, with many venerable but separate & adjustable/hackable layers, that makes Linux so rifely diverse & compelling.
In short, my strong belief is: people want Linux phones. The technical ecosystem is more interesting as a whole than any array of boxes/capabilities one might tick.
I'd love to live in a world where BSD or Minix became The Thing™, but since it didn't I basically live and breath Linux for work and that spills over into my personal usage too. Interoperability between my phone and my laptop is huge. I recently started using KDE Connect (and okay - that doesn't have to be Linux-specific) and being able to seamlessly copy / paste between devices, etc. is a game changer for me.
I like in principle that Android is open source (minus all the proprietary junk getting jammed into Play Services). I or someone could verify that it's not sending my data to a sketchy third party, but only to a point. Unless the OS and all apps are completely open source, any closed source component could be secretly betray me. Ironically, though, I trust Apple a lot more to write privacy-respecting code even though it's all proprietary. But on Android I do what I can to mitigate these issues, by running as much tracking- and ad-blocking software as I can (a thing that isn't really possible on iOS, at least not to the same extent). And I do have some apps sideloaded that I'd miss if I had an iPhone. But I still assume that Google is not being a good steward of any data it gleans from my Android usage, and that sucks.
I don't care too much about the ability to make modifications. The hurdle to jump to go from a stock to custom ROM is pretty high nowadays, as I expect most financial apps (and probably some others) to aggressively detect enabled root access and refuse to run. And the process of building your own OS images to make tweaks is not particularly fun, and can be a mess to clean up if you make a mistake. It's critical to me that my phone doesn't have downtime, so I'm less likely to mess around with it.
The problem with the current crop of "Linux phones" is that (while they do respect privacy, don't try to monetize every interaction, and are open enough to run what I want on them) they don't have anywhere near the polish of iOS or Android, and are (understandably) missing key applications that I use daily. So anything I use will have trade offs. For better or worse (probably worse) I've chosen the easier path of Android, at least for now.
Having said that, I do think I want to get a PinePhone, not to use as my primary mobile device, but as something to tinker around with. Maybe it's something that eventually could be a primary device, at least for some situations, but I don't see that as being the case without a lot of work, and a lot of customization that I have to do myself, which I don't really care to do all that much.
Which, sure. I could (and do) use LineageOS right now. It's not as good. I still need to go through the Android app development process, I'm still fighting the system every step of the way. It's still a pain to de-Google things, I still have to deal with an architecture that if fundamentally designed to work best with Google services. I still have to deal with what I see as design flaws in Android itself.
So I don't technically need this to be Linux. I recently bought a smartwatch that runs on an ESP32 chip and is programmed using Arduino code/C++. It's not running Linux, but it fits a lot of my needs and it will communicate well with my Linux computer. And you're right, I didn't have serious qualms about that because of the kernel. In fact, the simpler dev process was what made it attractive.
However, there isn't that kind of thing for phones. If you want an Open Source phone that is easy to modify and develop on, Linux is the option that's pushing in that direction.
> but they don't necessarily want to open a PR against the camera app if they want it to more closely match the polish of iOS.
It's deeper than that: I want the ability to fix my own problems. I don't want to open a pull request, I want software that is understandable enough and an ecosystem that is open enough and broad enough that it is reasonable for me to fix my own problems. I (personally) can do that on Linux, but I can't (currently) do it on Android devices, they're a pain to work with and I hate them.
I am used to Linux on my computers, including the fragmentation of software. Sometimes the fragmentation is an advantage because it means there's a diversity of software that is hyper-specialized rather than one or two solutions that are built to kind-of satisfy "most" people's needs. More than Linux itself, what I am used to is the idea that if something goes wrong or if I want my computer to do something, I can make it happen without asking anybody else's permission, without building a giant project that I need to invest serious time into, that I can pull things apart and build pipelines with Unixy tools.
I want that on my phone. It doesn't have to be Linux, but nothing else is providing it, so it does have to be Linux unless someone else is going to build a better OS. I'm not holding my breath for that.
I had imagined that because KDE was so solid on my desktop that it would be really solid on the phone, but I think the phone is not just fast enough.
I was really happy with my feature phone, but had to give it up because I kept pocket dialing the emergency services. I wish I could find a shell that was as simple.
I would love a shell that was as fast and responsive and had the features of my Nokia 3310. I love these phones https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_in/feature-phones
The only thing they are missing in my opinion is a browser.
...back when I felt the need to jailbreak at least - now with altstore, ios improvements, or my own dev-ish - I am good.
So I would say that is the long term goal: convergence. Linux has a major advantage over other operating systems in this regard.
iSH almost looks usable and then you try compiling something or cloning a git repo and your iphone will get hotter than a pinephone watching youtube (and whatever you do can be fairly precisely measured in ~15 minute increments because it takes ages.)
Do they really? iOS isn’t just not open source because we don’t have the source.
It’s also not open source because it isn’t developed in the open or intended for a community to work with.
It seems like the thing you are saying people want just isn’t real.
This isn’t to say you are wrong - but if you are right, it just means the people who are buying these phones don’t just don’t understand open source.
Linux's rough patches on the desktop/laptop is one thing, and for me - easy to deal with.
on a mobile device, the polish matters in usability in big way. Running into a problem on a phone is infinitely more of a PITA than a machine with a sizeable screen and a full keyboard attached, where remote access is easy if necessary.
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That's true, but to some degree. I'm OK with LineageOS, wouldn't care if that has Linux or BSD. As long as I can switch distro, reinstall and do not lose warranty or permanently damage bootloader.
Would be very strange that in the vast group of Linux users you can make a claim that "most of them want X". Seeing the amount of fragmentation happening out there, a lot of them have different priorities.
> They want the ability to make modifications, and they want the freedom and transparency that open-source...
Look at all the answers about caring about the user's freedom, privacy and security.
This is exactly what Free Software is about.
I have a phone, I don't use it for too many purposes, whatever software that is installed on it doesn't bother me much because there are larger pie to fry.
Now desktop OS and laptop choices/ cloud native stuff is a hill I'm willing to die on, because I'm a lot more invested.
Linux gives that option. None of the other phones do.
I did all of this back from December to February.
I still have no idea when Debian will bother to look at the mmsd packaging to include it into their repository, nor when my changes for chatty will be integrated. The ofono mailing list and IRC channel (i.e. the original authors of mmsd, but i think they abandoned it as they have said it hasn't been maintained in 8 years) have ignored me, so I doubt my changes will ever go back into upstream mmsd (I just consider what I have a fork now). I'm waiting on the chatty dev to finish off a current project to then get to integrating my MMS patches into chatty.
I still really want to help, but there's not much for me to do except wait for upstream devs to get around to integrating my work.
Being frank, I'm frustrated that I spent all of that time to implement a feature I want and I know a lot of other folks want, but now I'm just in a limbo hoping that others will get around to it.
So I'll ask, if you want folks to help on the boring things or missing functionality, how do you prevent that from happening?
The mms stuff in postmarketOS is also still in progress as far as I know, I'm un europe myself, like a lot of the pinephone developers and mms just isn't really a thing which makes integrating these thing quite hard.
Do you have a link so I can look it up?
I get it, and I get your frustrations too, that's why I just picked it up myself. I really do want to help.
https://source.puri.sm/kop316/mmsd/
There is my mmsd fork.
https://source.puri.sm/kop316/chatty/-/tree/wip/sadiq/mm-acc...
This is where I have my reference MMS implementation for chatty.
You are also welcome to get a hold of me on Matrix, I am on the pmOS matrix channel!
I know a lot of people were looking for MMS support.
At their suggestion, I have been working to get my mmsd package into Debian proper.
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The problem is not with the Linux phones that are out there, it is that no apps are and likely never will be compatible with (non-Android) Linux phones. Until that is solved, most people (like me) could not switch out their phone for a Linux phone as a daily driver, however much they would like.
Having Linux as an alternative for Windows is a lot easier than having Linux as an alternative for Android/iOS. A lot of the Windows applications we use can be replaced by opensource applications on Linux. And browser based applications already work on both.
However, apps on Android/iOS are mostly tied to cloud services. Unfortunately services that most people need in this age. Messaging systems like WhatsApp and Signal are usually tied to your phone, and going without them would result in social isolation for a lot of people. But also for banking and sometimes government services, you likely need to use their apps. And there will never be opensource alternatives for such apps.
It is very unfortunate that so much of the Android ecosystem relies on a very proprietary and cloud-connected piece of software. Without it, most apps simply refuse to work. MicroG has done amazing things here, but unfortunately a lot of things still break when using it, to no fault of the MicroG developers.
The web is already almost as closed (for apps) as phones are - you can choose Chrome, Safari if you're on Mac, or Firefox. Everything else is just repackaged Chrome. Edit: forgot Opera Mini, for what it's worth.
Firefox is dying out, and Google is pushing for less and less user freedom in Chrome, while Apple is extremely reluctant to implement new features that make Safari a better app platform.
(Likely wrong terminology but you hopefully get the idea)
In a perfect world I'd have a phone that is analogous. As iPhone is to Apple, and android is to windows, my phone would be to whatever linux I use. Well, that's a tall order.
And because it's a tall order, the most efficient way to go through features is to start off with easy highly requested features and very slowly move toward the less important features that are harder to implement.
Phones with linux hits both sides of this equation. On one hand it turns out EVEN THOSE things are hard. On the other hand, people don't WANT to work on those things as much because free developers rarely want to work on other people's problems. I mean, some will, and those people are simply better people IMO, but rarely do they WANT to.
Replicant? https://replicant.us/
LineageOS? https://lineageos.org/
LineageOS is what I'm currently using on my daily driver, as a compromise. I would very much prefer a Linux phone, but in the current state it can't even fulfill half my needs in a smartphone.
Sounds like linux to me!
Linux works exceptionally well in the areas where large companies with many developers pay to make it work well.
Hopefully they won’t repeatedly change their minds before then, like openmoko did.
It's not yet a mature ecosystem, but desktop linux is, and there's plenty to borrow from there.
Here we go again. App developers now have to 'define' support for a distribution target and test each of them to show it is actually 'supported' and not showing 'experimental support'.
Fantastic news for the technical consumer and the whole open-source crowd, Not so good for the app developers who need to test their apps on these numerous distros and bewildering for general users looking at this technical contraption that is likely not to have the same apps on their old phones.
If they want to solve this like it or not, supporting the Flutter ecosystem sounds like a good idea.
> Do you want Linux phones?
If it gets in the way of things and is harder to use than the alternatives, then no thanks and no deal. There is more things to consider than just 'open-source' or the 'free software' argument.
Probably close to that percentage are either better as a website or actually harmful garbage.
> Is the app ecosystem ready?
Here's the question you ask: Would you be happier if your thinkpad running Alpine Linux fit in your pocket and could do sms/calls? It has the same answer.
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And also: cryptocurrency. ~4,000 coins as of today.
Back in the Nokia N900 days I did a great deal of hacking on that phone, but that device (even though its specs are much lower than a modern phone’s) had a much more responsive UI and it was actually enjoyable to test out what you had developed.
The build time for megapixels for a clean build is maybe 5 seconds, way less on incremental builds. Editor runs fast, Test cycle is incredibly fast.
It's certainly a lot faster than I've ever been able to test android apps.
It's a bit odd considering phrases like:
> It's basically my first C project, first v4l2 project and first GTK3 project but I started it because nobody who actually knows any of these things want to, and so far nobody who knows these things has stepped in to do better (...)
(I probably do not know any of these things better - but if I did, and wanted to help, I'd probably click on the link to the github profile, not find megapixels source... And move on?)
What's quickly become clear to me is that all of that stuff is futile until we have a better way to build and run applications. The existing shells and toolkits for building applications are simply too heavy for the hardware, and I don't see the situation changing much any time soon. The hardware ought to be powerful enough to do more than it can, but it's going to take a lot more effort to build more efficient underlying components.
Unfortunately, as an individual developer with several other large side projects going on at the moment I don't expect to be able to contribute much to this anytime soon, but I hope that the discussion will prompt some people with the spare cycles to pick this up and run with it.
sshfs gets executables automatically exported to the phone as they are linked.
Doing native builds on the phone seems like deliberately choosing to do it the hard way. [But somebody says GTK will not cross-build. Could that be possible?]
GTK 3 cannot currently be cross built due to some sort of dependency issue with Python, but random GTK apps can be cross-built just fine, and have been by Debian cross-build QA efforts:
http://crossqa.debian.net/src/gtk+3.0http://crossqa.debian.net/src/xdemorse
Here are some links related to cross-building for Debian:
http://crossqa.debian.net/https://wiki.debian.org/CrossCompilinghttps://wiki.debian.org/DebianBootstraphttps://wiki.debian.org/HelmutGrohne/rebootstrap
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None of them has been a great product. The software has limited features and there are few apps. The lack of manpower in development cannot be hidden. I cannot buy a subway ticket in several cities and I get difficulties with banks, because I have no Google playstore and we live in a world worse than Orwell's 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 could imagine.
When I want to tinker I have a shell, can become root and I know what I am doing.
Yes, I want a Linux phone.
> None of them has been a great product.
Likewise, and I disagree. The phones that support Sailfish X or later are all great. With Xperia XA2 or Xperia 10, you can install micro-g via f-droid, and then most android apps should work fine. Yes, it is not ideal that we need android/ios apps to function properly in a society. Blame it on SV. Oh, that's us?
Anyway, back to Jolla. A good example is that if the LCD screen breaks, I can just buy a replacement, ssh into the old phone, and scp from it to the new phone (this actually happened). That's a Linux phone.
Exactly. When I read the headline, I immediately thought of my N900, and having pretty much a full computer in my pocket at all times. Yes, I really, really want a Linux phone.
It's hard to imagine what you're missing, given the present absolute dominance of user-friendly locked-down devices, but a proper Linux phone really is worth it.
>> None of them has been a great product.
> Likewise, and I disagree. The phones that support Sailfish X or later are all great. With Xperia XA2 or Xperia 10, you can install micro-g via f-droid, and then most android apps should work fine
I am still on Xperia X and since last fall I cannot even update Firefox any more. The few commercial apps I did try like my bank say they won't run on a rooted phone.
The models with the newer kernel/Android had their own share of issues what I read from the forums. So I did not feel any urge to upgrade to a hardware that does not fit into my pocket.
Of course the blame is on the kernel misery for phone SoCs, Google de-facto monopoly accepted by companies and governments publishing apps. So I could say I have a great phone and all the others are wrong...
> ssh into the old phone
Sure, you don't have to tell me, that's those reasons why I use it.
You have read those books right?
For Fahrenheit 451 I have seen the movie twice and I remember it quite well. No idea how much it is different from the book, have not read it.
Of course not all aspects of those fiction works apply, especially outside of China, Russia and the like. But Orwell would be not have foreseen how Google/Apple/Facebook can use positioning info or face detection of their users or how Russian internet trolls can influence US presidential elections or German vaccination opponents.
It's such a shame we're locked into platform-specific apps. If only there was some way banks etc could make some kind off app that runs on any platform.
What if we had some sort of... app like thing - documents with interactive elements and media, even code that runs (safely sandboxed), but not tied to any one platform.
We could have one central app, a platform within a platform, that fetches and displays these documents, which are made according to a set of specifications and standards that can be implemented freely by anyone. It wouldn't be easy or cheap to do so, but the engines could be open source so that new OSes could still run them.
I don't know... it's probably a crazy, unrealistic idea.
Sadly, since no such thing exists, the banks have no choice but to lock us into the Android-iPhone duopoly.
>None of them has been a great product
The a1200 ming was pretty slick for its time. It had a 2MP camera when everything else shipped with 0.3MP at best. Touch screen, stylus, see through flip so you could see the screen when closed. That was a pretty cool phone.
Flagship phones are too expensive for me and they don't come with features like a good charger, headphone jack, big battery, etc. Most of them also suffer from Android ecosystem problems. Slow security updates and trash apps in the playstore.
iPhone is expensive too and iOS limits your freedom even more. You cannot customize the layout or app drawer too much. You cannot use non-web kit browser. Adblockers are crippled on iOS. Notch and suffers from the same problem as Android flagships. Lack of easy side loading.
All I want is a phone which respects me. I don't care if it's Linux based or not.
Xiaomi have an official bootloader unlock and are simple to put LineageOS on. Pixels are the only phones that are supported by GrapheneOS, which offers substantial security benefits over any other Android phone.
It's giving the consumer freedom and environmentally friendly for when the updates run out/planned obsolescence kicks in. I have a spare phone lay around from 2014 running up-to-date 2021 Android patches and it works perfectly fine, the battery went bad once but this was the days of replaceable batts and it cost $15 online for a new one. If you can accept the tradeoff with no further physical firmware updates it's a much better deal than the rampant consumerism and e-waste that plagues the mobile market.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this isn't really a criticism of Android as a platform but that apps use DRM for tamper proofing. I suppose Android could try to make this harder but I'm sure hardware vendors would step in with their solutions. You're totally free to do as you please with android/rooting as long as you don't care about those apps -- which I have a strong feeling will never be available on more open platforms, unless somehow they gain market dominance.
Even games, social, and news apps use safety net now. Google should discourage blatant misuse of it which they don't.
If Google cared about security, they would push OEMs to provide proper security updates which none of them do.
> Almost all budget and mid range android phones come with invasive tracking, bloat, and ads now.
This is what tempts me to install a custom rom. Solving this could be great for security.
This sounds somewhat pat and snarky, but I am trying to make a real point. Let's go to some of what the article says:
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Having an "one true way" to use the UI and tons of preinstalled apps is the reason I dislike the android ecosystem...
Megapixels has a fully user-configurable post-processing pipeline basically since the start. It allows you do anything you want after clicking the shutter button in the app since it's a shell script. Still people complain about how they don't like that there's an extra file they don't want (the dng) or photo upload is missing. ITS A SCRIPT, CHANGE IT. Do you really want a Linux phone?
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If you're defining "a Linux phone" as "a phone that uses bash scripts for configuration and where nothing works out of the box", then no. People don't want a Linux phone. But then, by that standard Ubuntu isn't catering to a "true" Linux audience. I don't think this is a useful definition of the word.