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.
About a year ago I switched from Windows to Linux for my home media PC, and it's such a relaxing experience. My computer just does what I tell it to do, and nothing changes unless I want it to.
By contrast, whenever I do have to boot into Windows to run some specific application, it's like I've invited a corporate representative from Microsoft into my home. Things are changed for me on updates. The OS suggests things to me I have no interest in. When I want to use Microsoft software, I have to log into accounts for some reason, which often means a round trip through email to reset the password. Once Windows even changed firmware settings without asking me which broke things in Linux.
The best things about Linux are not what it does, but what it doesn't do. I want this for my phone as well.
Its time to upgrade your PC. Now. We don't care you're running a presentation. yeah We'll let you delay it... for now.
Its time to dim your screen. We don't care if you're reading a recipe while you cook. No we won't put a widget to allow this temporarily. We think its better buried in the settings. And you'll have to set it back later.
Its time for feature X to not work or not exist anywhere. We don't care that it worked in the old version. We don't like it.
> Summed up in the following:
> Its time to upgrade your PC. Now. We don't care you're running a presentation. yeah We'll let you delay it... for now.
My roommate in college refused the Windows update request enough times that it just took the decision out of his hands and _told_ him it was rebooting...in the middle of a LAN Starcraft game we were having. (Hilariously, Starcraft also ran perfectly on my Wine/Ubuntu and had all sort of weird bugs and visual artifacts on his Vista/7)
I truly can't imagine how anyone can consider a system that reboots without your consent, no matter whether you're playing Starcraft or giving a presentation or launching nuclear warheads, to be appropriate for serious work. It seems like one of the very basic jobs of an OS to _not turn off while you might be doing something important_. Perhaps the answer is as simple as "there's a setting buried somewhere that all technically-literate Windows users change", but the default behavior is beyond insane.
I heard RMS once say "proprietary software subjugates people" and at the time I thought it was over-the-top, sort of out-of-place like "the people's front of judea" opinionating in the middle of a software meeting.
But wow, phones and computers nowadays are like a giant steamroller, squashing users common sense, interests and privacy.
The "settings app" is a convoluted mess which is made worse by the fact that it wholeheartedly embraced the weird "everything is an app, except for some things" philosophy.
There are settings that only apply to some "apps", there are "app wide settings", there are important settings hidden 4 layers deep under some category where one would never suspect them to be.
Then there's the fact that MS has the tendency to just silently revert settings, often privacy and telemetry related, after updates. On that end, Windows 10 very much feels like it's actively working against the user, it feels like you are only a tolerated guest on your own system.
> MS has the tendency to just silently revert settings
This is so user-hostile it's not even funny. Imagine if you had someone in your life who silently went back on agreements when you weren't looking. You would work to remove them from your life as soon as possible.
I don't, but MS ships an annual update that for the past couple years has included expansion of the Settings App and remove of Control Panel widgets. The original Settings App that shipped with Windows 10 was, as the op said, useless.
As MS has slowly whittled down and removed features from the Control Panel, they have simultaneously added analogs where appropriate in the Settings App. The Settings App in 20H2 is very different and far from useless when compared to what shipped a year ago, or when Windows 10 launched.
The main criticism of Windows settings is the silent reversion of settings which is tantamount to ignoring them. If Microsoft improved the clarity of the settings menu then that's nice, but ultimately irrelevant.
You shouldn't need a third-party utility for re-disabling settings after updates, and it's pretty clear at this point that Microsoft just doesn't give a damn about respecting the user's choices.
You have summed my feelings about it excellently. The other day I installed an app in Linux that logs my activities, such as documents opened and programs used, and indexes it into a searchable database ("I can't remember that pdf I was reading last weekend, let me get it"). The most jarring feeling about that was... that for once I wasn't not thinking how privacy invasive all that data collection was! I'm used to seeing programs and websites attempting to collect all sorts of nefarious data and trying my best to stop that collection (including not using the product at all). I was stunned how useful it was once I realised it was all local and serving my interests, not those of its manufacturer.
> About a year ago I switched from Windows to Linux for my home media PC, and it's such a relaxing experience. My computer just does what I tell it to do, and nothing changes unless I want it to.
My experience with Linux on the Desktop is that it wants to install updates. It doesn't force me to install updates, which I appreciate. However, eventually I also want to install updates. Unfortunately, on numerous occasions these updates have rendered the system unbootable. This is not a worthwhile tradeoff.
This has never happened to me with Windows. I'm aware that it does happen to some users, but I have trouble believing that I'm just really unlucky with Ubuntu/Debian/PopOS and Fedora.
However, eventually I also want to install updates. Unfortunately, on numerous occasions these updates have rendered the system unbootable. This is not a worthwhile tradeoff.
Are these "updates" or "upgrades"? If the problems are with updates, I would say that your experience is not typical of most Linux users.
Its a shame that you are having problems because the modern Linux experience is pretty slick.
I had the same experience with ubuntu upgrades. Something was always broken.
I don't think you can blame linux, it's just a specific distro trying to do a task which is too hard and fail.
Not sure if it's still the case with ubuntu, I just run Arch which is a rolling release distro; I decide when to upgrade and what it implies + their info on breaking updates is always punctual.
Linux Mint has addressed this specifically. They enabled auto-updates in 20.1 only after they launched and tested Timeshift, which is a backup tool that enables you to boot into a past snapshot of the system much like FreeBSD's snapshots. It's geared mainly towards btrfs however, as ext4 doesn't support snapshots.
And to be fair, updates broke my Windows systems multiple times in the past as well. This isn't really a problem by itself since errors and mistakes happen, the problem is that the state of recovery tools in both systems is somewhat lacking. Linux can be repaired from Live USB and has Timeshift, but it doesn't have an easily accessible built-in rescue environment that's actually useful. Windows has DaRT, but all decent Live USB's for it are third-party and it's very hard to repair its internals if the existing tools don't work. FreeBSD is probably the closest to being bulletproof, but it has its own problems.
> I'm aware that it does happen to some users, but I have trouble believing that I'm just really unlucky with Ubuntu/Debian/PopOS and Fedora.
"Unlucky" is probably the wrong word, since I doubt all those failures were independent, but you're presumably in some niche with a high probability of update failure (just as the users failing their Windows updates are). For a counter anecdote, I've used Linux laptops/workstations (primarily Debian/Ubuntu, but dabbled in others) exclusively for 15 years and have never had an update break _anything_.
If I had to guess, I'd say that it's a hardware compatibility issue? Linux can still be a _terrible_ experience relative to Windows if you have strong opinions about the hardware you want to use. IME, all the people who talk about Linux being a vastly superior user experience to OS X/Windows are those whose hardware preferences line up with good Linux support.
Lucky you! When this happened to me with Windows last time, I had no idea what to do and how to diagnose it even though I spent a lot of time on it and had the knowledge of all of the Internet available. I had to reinstall and painstakingly redo my whole setup.
When it happened to me with GNU/Linux, it gave me enough rope to actually debug what happened, so I could fix it and get back to where I was before. And I went through several Ubuntu and Debian dist-upgrades, and now I'm even using Arch which is a rolling distro that's somewhat expected to break from time to time.
So sure, it does happen more often than it did on Windows - but I don't think I actually waste more time with that than I did when using Windows.
I had Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on a Dell Inspiron 3137. I ran apt-get update and it crashed and would not boot. I was preparing to lend the laptop out to family so I had to put Windows back on it. It happens. Your personal experience is not everyone's experience.
I would be intrigued to know what happened with this one.
Across well over a decade of using Apt on Debian, Ubuntu & Mint, the amount of times I have seen Apt crash, is never. By contrast I have seen Apt tasks fail leaving packages partially installed. If relevant, it may seem a trivial, semantic difference, but I think it is a little more important than that.
Following the typical Microsoft paradigm of 'just reboot and hope for the best' will rarely result in the desired outcome, and in the case of something like grub could well end up with a system that will not boot.
For me a key difference in this case, is I have never encountered an unbootable Linux system (outside of hardware issues), that I could not fix with some basic tools. I can't say the same of Microsoft products (Personally, I don't consider a fresh install a fix :) ).
I also would love to know more about this. The thing I do is wait for LTS version 20.04.1 or 20.04.2 before installing so all the kinks will be ironed out.
I've been running linux on the desktop for 3 years now and have never had an update break anything. If you stick to the more stable debian derivatives and forgo some of the bleeding edge features in a rolling distro like Arch (btw I do not use Arch), the update process should be pretty seamless.
Is that not the point here? Labeling something a "trope" isn't a self-contained argument. The reliability of Linux systems is terrible for certain contexts: modern gaming[1], universal hardware compatibility, taking advantage of bleeding-edge software updates (the analogue to which doesn't exist on Windows), etc.
IME, there's a lot of talking past each other when it comes to OSes. The vastly superior experience that Linux fans describe requires a couple of one-time boxes to be ticked, like constraining yourself to known compatible hardware platforms and stable software versions. There are plenty of people who don't realize this dynamic exists and trip over it, and it's not dodging the question to make them aware of these limitations and let them decide whether the cost/benefit fits their situation. Eg, in my case, I like Thinkpads, don't game, and need a stable, reliable, and performant system that I can be productive on. The pitfalls of Linux don't affect me personally, and I obviously can't meet the needs I describe with a Windows system (or to a lesser extent, OS X).
[1] I hear this is getting much better with things like Valve's Proton, but I assume that Linux is still far worse than Windows for a dedicated PC gamer that wants to play new games.
I think you make an excellent point. Many of the posts admonishing Windows speak to the loss of freedom but, as you pointed out, you have to willingly give up a great deal of freedom if you want stable Linux.
I'm not trying to bash on Linux, merely point out that for everything it does right there's just as much it does wrong. The same is true of Windows and MacOS.
No arguments there! It's a pretty good rule of thumb that the no-exceptions maximalist view is wrong, on almost any topic over which there's meaningful disagreement.
I never said they were doing it wrong. I said the distribution matters. If, for example, you are running Arch Nightly and constantly pulling in the latest and greatest features, you're likely to see some stability issues. If you're using something like Ubuntu LTS, you'll miss out on a few new bells and whistles, but you'll get a very stable OS.
Saying "linux" has a poor update process or stability issues is meaningless.
> If, for example, you are running Arch Nightly and constantly pulling in the latest and greatest features, you're likely to see some stability issues. If you're using something like Ubuntu LTS, you'll miss out on a few new bells and whistles, but you'll get a very stable OS.
"You're doing it wrong, if you did it right it would work"
That's true of software in general. You can use (often older) more stable tech and lose access to some newer features, or you can used the latest and greatest and get a few more features and accept a reduction in stability in exchange.
I've been running Debian testing for a long time, where I kind of expect things to break now and again; and I'm pretty surprised by your experience. The only breakage I've experienced were minor inconveniences, maybe it's familiarity with the OS? Modern Linux DE experience is quite good now a days.
I totally get your point regarding Windows, but does Android do this, too? The only thing mine does is auto-update apps, and only because I told it to. I didn't have to turn on auto updating. OS updates are still only suggested, never applied automatically.
But it spies on you. And transmits data about you to Google. And has pre-installed apps you cannot fully uninstall. And it changes your privacy settings without you knowing when new features are added.
Google spying on you is the least of your worries, they are the most transparent of all the big tech companies if you ever manage to dig into your Google profile these days.
If anything Google is so far ahead they are advocating more privacy and less data being sent if you choose, because they don't sell it directly to people like a local grocery store with its own app or Amazon does.
Federated learning AI is basically making it where Google can continue to have all the benefits of massive data mining without any personal information ever having to leak out
> OS updates are still only suggested, never applied automatically.
The parts involved with spying on you will update regardless of what you want or say. Unless of course you're not using the play store (or any other google services).
my android phone has a nagging "security update" popup that I cannot delete. I don't update so it stays with my phone all the time (it takes a huge amount in the pause screen), i have to deny the updates each time i restart my phone (which doesn't happen often). Nonetheless, it's true I can still use my phone (and the appstore)... huh, now that I take a closer look at this annoying update it appears to be from samsung not from google.
Why would you not update your phone security updates? Do you even read anything about Android updates. It's extremely important for vital security flaws if you use any sort of modern apps.
It's a huge advocate of keeping all my data private but now knowing how useful it is to anonymize, encrypt and use it all on my device with things like Google Pay, I strongly advocate if you're using Google or Samsung services to update.
Plus these updates usually are Android level and not related to Samsung or Google
Most of those updates only apply to the latest. So it isn't just Android it is all the other parts too. For a few months you can only get security, but eventually they decide the only version they support is the one with whatever changed google made to the core not related to security as well.
This is simply not true, unfortunately. I run a Fedora system for more than ten years, and during this period updates shoved into my system tons of unwanted stuff. I still prefer the system to the alternatives, but let me tell you, there is simply no way I would install flatpak into my system, and if it wasn't for the terrible log spam it filled my log with, I probably wouldn't even know it arrived. But it would still be calling home and look for new packages that I will never want to use.
Maybe, even probably, no one have any nefarious motives behind the latest changes, but someone decided that if I want to upgrade my system now I have to start using systemd-resolve, and while I can and probably will alter it so it won't bother me, I wouldn't be installing it on my own.
Also, Firefox is the king of unwanted changes with little to no warnings, and while technically it isn't Linux, one day an innocent yum or dnf update install just killed my customized setup, flagged all my beloved addons as unsupported, and left them in disabled state.
>My computer just does what I tell it to do, and nothing changes unless I want it to.
>whenever I do have to boot into Windows to run some specific application, it's like I've invited a corporate representative from Microsoft into my home. Things are changed for me on updates
Yeah, it is really nice to have a consistent interface. But there is a flip side. Sometimes, people have to change in light of new security problems, and these sometimes need to be done quickly. The most obnoxious of these updates are interface changes (both UI and API). I think Windows does this too much and maybe for non-security related issues. The only real example I can think of is how OpenSSL uses envelope functions because ppl would abuse the primitives [Source: Alexandra Boldyreva, Christopher Patton, Thomas Shrimpton:
Hedging Public-Key Encryption in the Real World].
I literally and honestly feel like the only difference here is that vast majority of linux distributions don't have auto updates enabled and windows does. I'm literally afraid of running apt-get upgrade in Ubuntu because always, inevitably, things change and move about , which I hate with passion.
The problem isn't automatic updates, it's the philosophy behind those updates. On Ubuntu (last time I used it some 5 years ago), an update fixed bugs in software and that's it. Occasionally you'd get a new feature here and there, but rarely in the shell and existing features always stayed in their places. On Windows 10, updates ship breaking changes basically every time and there is no regard for consistency. Whether the updates are manual or automatic is an implementation detail - eventually, you'll update either way. The big difference is between a rolling release with no promise of compatibility and a versioned release with LTS.
Strange, my experience is also the exact opposite. I really wonder why that is?
I'm running about 10 windows 10 machines, various builds, auto updates enabled. Some in a domain, some in a workgroup. The last time an update bricked a system, or even broke a feature, must be over a year ago.
Now on Ubuntu, I have the same experience as some other posters. I'm reasonably confident that I can update if I do it semi regularly. But the number of times I've experienced breakage that lead to hours of bugfixing during $DAYJOB, is way too high. Now everything is in its own tightly controller docker, no more random breakage (unless docker breaks, or a key expires...).
A debian 9 apt upgrade actually managed to render my install inoperable once. But that might be semi-unfair as it had to do with graphics drivers.
Are you running windows systems on semi-recent hardware? Or is it all decades old thinkpad laptops with shitty thirdparty drivers?
This is literally the opposite to me. Running apt update/upgrade never breaks anything except a long time ago when I ran out of disk space during an update. This could have been handled better, but it isn't a usual scenario for me.
I can attest to this anxiety. There is always this question of what will happen if the update is botched and it bricks my system. This is why I consciously stay slim on the host OS (I have used Fedora in the past, and am now using Arch), and run almost all of my applications via Docker from a local container repository. The /home/username directory is backed up rigorously in the internal network so as to cover my ass if an update bricks my computer. As paranoid as I am to go through this, I am yet to need that backup because of a botched update ;-) The only times I reached out to backup were "I deleted this, but I shouldn't have..." scenarios.
The same paranoia applies to my MacBook Pro as well that was provided by work. All user generated content gets backed up regularly to aid recovery if things go north.
It's more than that isn't it? On Ubuntu I never candy crush come pre-installed, and I never have random popups on the bottom right corner of the screen for all types of reasons
Counter example. I switched from Linux to Windows because I find its desktop-experience to be superior. In my mind software and hardware is evolving at a rate that makes it impractical to support the notion that I could usefully modify it myself so it mostly comes down to trust. Do I trust Microsoft more to protect my long-term interest than some unknown group of open source maintainers? Looking at being able to access old data and run old programs I feel MS have been doing a great job. Now if they come up with a way for me to make sure that my data is in some standardized format AND protected in such a way that I could reasonably expect nobody (not even MS) to read it (but still be able to offload it elsewhere) I’d be entirely happy.
Literally the only significant amount of data I've ever lost in my life, either on a personal or professional context, were: 1. half a decade of emails dropped by Microsoft from my old Hotmail account with no reason or warning; 2. all my highlights on a 3000-page book series lost due to a iOS update breaking compatibility with the app I was using for it.
> Do I trust Microsoft more to protect my long-term interest than some unknown group of open source maintainers?
Do you? I don't. Microsoft is exclusively profit-oriented, they'll sell all your information in a heartbeat if they believe to have a legal way to do it and that it won't kill them in the next 5 years.
A group of open source maintainers (the more radical the better) will not. They will (usually) not polish the product as well, and they might be difficult to deal with if you found an issue (but you _can_ talk to them, unlike Microsoft).
I definitely trust open source people more, because they do their thing for ideological reasons and based on principles, not to maximize engagement and ad-spend and their yearly bonus.
Your concerns are the same that I had up until about 3 years ago when Microsoft and Google changed everything because at least at Google they do not care about your actual data because they can aggregate and anonymize it and a level that nobody else in the entire world can.
This is why it's way more dangerous to give data to even open source apps that are encrypted and secure because if they ever do change your privacy policy and you don't pay attention to it, they could say they start selling your data and you continue to agree to it.
That's why I like using a system which gives me control over which updates I want to receive. I'm not forced to take updates on an operating system which can also change the privacy policy on me and has done so in the past.
The Stockholm Syndrome is strong with this one. The fact they pitch their skills at anonymizing and aggregating data doesn't change the fact you can't trust Google to not utilize data exfiltration techniques in the first place. Your argument about open source license changes applies just as much, if not moreso to Google as well.
Google has actually went even further in making it transparent where they show every bit of data they have on you. You can delete it all review it all have it auto delete, they don't need any of it
> What people really want, is a phone that is on their side.
This will never happen. Personal radio communication is innocuous compared to what a modern cell phone is, yet personal radio communication is heavily restricted since decades.
Maybe we will eventually see an open source radio stack and truly open source apps. This will only happen once surveillance and kill switches have been moved to another layer.
A cell phone will never be on our side, it is far to dangerous.
There exist cellular and wireless cards for PCs too, and still a Linux PC is on our side. But if that's somehow not enough:
You could use proof-carrying code or reproducible artifacts to keep the radio stack out of the users' control while still making it obvious what it is that radio stack does.
The BIOS analog would then only accept radio code that behaves in a particular way, but it would be clear from the (open) source that the radio code is not spying on you.
I’m not sure how you’re measuring the differences between cell phones and “personal radio communication” here. Cell phones are personal devices built around 3-5 different kinds of radios.
If you’re contrasting it with the HAM/Shortwave community, there’s an obvious difference in transmission power. The Electromagnetic Spectrum is a public resource we have to share intelligently. All the core tech in a cell phone is about how to use spectrum efficiently, delivering high speeds with minimal interference. Shortwave is much less sophisticated and operates at much higher power. There are real costs to amateur radio enthusiasts blasting transmissions with incorrectly configured equipment.
Android had plenty tools in the past to allow that. Xprivacy even used to allow you to select which Contacts you want to allow for which app. So you could use WhatsApp but only allow a handful of contacts to be read.
One of the frustrations people have with Google is that they're making it increasingly closed and problematic to make modifications. Given that nowadays some banks for example are mobile only and everyone is waiting for Google to completely shut down modified boot systems(probably in response to Qualcomm TrustZone being untrustworthy), people are re evaluating whether it makes sense to invest in the Android ecosystem.
EDIT: google could have capitalized on this and made it a part of their offering.
That's because you're trying to use apps that use the services of Google. Pixel phones are still the best to use to wipe and put other operating systems on
On Android phones, if you enable "developer" in settings, the app "fake GPS settings" can do that.
Caveat: It's been almost 4 or 5 years since I used it. I used to prank colleagues on Facebook by posting from a local prison or other weird places. Have had no use for it since I deleted my fb account. So I don't know if it can still do what you want.
Also I think the apps can check for this. It's also been several years for me but I remember using an external Bluetooth GPS receiver needed this setting to allow an app to read the BT data and feed it into Android & some Apps just refused to work.
That is because of Androids stupid permissions-system where you have to give all requested permissions to an app before being able to install it.
On iOS the app installs and works and THEN it might ask you for GPS permission and you can deny that and the app keeps working, just without the feature that needs GPS.
I just installed Mi Home, a chinese app which requested every permission there is. I just denied all of them, could still use the app and am 0 afraid that the app somehow accessed my data.
> you can deny that and the app keeps working, just without the feature that needs GPS
A phone that would truly value the user would allow the user to provide a fake GPS location. Then you could use features that need GPS and not give up your privacy. But Apple doesn't allow that since it would make the phone less useful for companies who want to use phones for tracking.
A phone that truly valued the user would allow users to install multiple copies of an app, and allow the user to log in with different accounts. But Apple doesn't allow that, because they don't want people to share devices.
Yeah, your GPS example doesn’t hold up. How is denying an app location info consistent with your position that Apple wanting to enable companies to track users?
So you, I suspect, don’t want to “avoid tracking” so much as you want to avoid geo-gating of apps and content.
Content distributors rely on such features to satisfy legal obligations about what content they can show where. If the OS started adding features like “pretend I’m in location X” or “download movie regardless of app restrictions” (as an example of another feature that could be argued is pro-user) then at some point you’ll have a platform that isn’t commercially supported or viable.
Honestly, Apple is by far the most pro-user company in this field and there are countless examples of this.
But a very small minority chafe against the restrictions that are actually in most users interests (eg not allowing side loading of apps, which for most people would simply be an attack vector).
> Yeah, your GPS example doesn’t hold up. How is denying an app location info consistent with your position that Apple wanting to enable companies to track users?
Many apps require location data for access to features. If you can't provide a fake location, your only choice is to either accept tracking, or not use the service.
Lots of companies use phone apps for tracking (eg. for tracking location of agents). The company will immediately realise when you turn off GPS access. If you had a way to spoof a location (eg. tell the phone to pretend you stayed in the current location), you could go to the toilet without your employers knowledge and without leaving your phone behind.
Abusers often use phone apps to track their victims. If you are in an abusive relationship, you may be too scared to turn off Find My Friends. If the phone was actually on your side, you would be able to enter a fake location, and your abuser wouldn't have to know that you visited your parents on your way home from work.
Apple wants location data from iOS users to be hard to fake, because it is more valuable this way. Apple's most important asset is the value of their ecosystem. It's why they can charge companies 30% to access it. The user's needs are secondary.
Yeah, I don't buy it, frankly these all seems like minority use cases. I imagine if you were to poll all i-phone owners this would all be bottom of the list in terms of wants. I think a lot of people here conflate "What I as a tech and privacy enthusiast want" and "What everyone wants" very often. The feature you suggest would be used by a very small percentage.
That's not to say I wouldn't want it either but I'm pretty privacy conscious, and a tech enthusiast. I just don't think you can say Apple is putting user's needs second, I don't imagine most users need this.
> Abusers often use phone apps to track their victims. If you are in an abusive relationship, you may be too scared to turn off Find My Friends. If the phone was actually on your side, you would be able to enter a fake location, and your abuser wouldn't have to know that you visited your parents on your way home from work.
This exact same feature you are asking for would be useful for people abducting children, who could make it look like the child was still at school while they took them away.
This is far more likely to be why Apple hasn’t implemented it.
Yeah I’m going to need examples of what features get locked by not providing location. I’m just not buying this is anything other than wanting to avoid geo restrictions on content. I mean I understand the desire for this but I also understand the desire not to pay for content, so this is a thin one when it comes to “freedom”.
Oh and as for tracking, at least for the company they can already track you by what towers you’re connected to. So there’s no technical limitation on this being provided to apps regardless of what you might spoof.
> Yeah I’m going to need examples of what features get locked by not providing location.
Strava refuses to let you track your ride if you don't allow always-on background tracking. (They changed this about a year ago. Previously "while using the app" was sufficient)
A lunch menu app that I used before Covid allowed you to show nearby restaurants based on location. But there was no way to manually enter a location (without GPS it was just a huge unsorted list).
These are two examples that come to my mind (I'm not a person who uses a lot of different apps, I'm sure there's more out there. Try rejecting location access for a few apps and see what happens)
Edit: I'm also not sure why you are so hung up on geo restrictions. I don't really care about geo restrictions, and even if, you could avoid them trivially with VPNs that are widely available. That just has nothing to do with keeping my GPS coordinates private.
Just to clarify, Android has had the ability to request permissions ad hoc in the user journey since Android 6.0.
But it is true that Android won't reject apps that refuse to work without a permission while iOS mandates that basic functionalities of an app work even when permission is denied.
And meanwhile, 6 years later an app can be submitted to the play store that ignores that and just blanket asks for permissions and refuses to run without them.
"But given its importance and that i0S 14 already has a similar feature, it's more likely to ship than not. What could make Google's implementation better than Apple's is how easy it is to access more information requires you to head to the settings to see exactly what's going"
Well then, you should make sure that you're providing a useful service with that data, or allow data collection to be turned off.
Think of it like this: if I'm actively using an app that's giving me turn-by-turn directions, then of course I'm not going to want to spoof GPS, since it would make the app useless to me. But if your app demands GPS data just for ad analytics, then yes, I would absolutely and without any remorse spoof GPS data for that app. In that latter case, I don't care that a developer might be unhappy with it, because as a user I'm unhappy that the developer is slurping up data they don't need!
Good question. I still think that its up to user to decide what data he shares with app. If its crucial for app to know that gps position is not faked, app could do some heuristic. Check if user is not moving faster than some limit, does not stop moving for extended periods of time etc. Basically anticheat engine. Only area where this whould be relevant i think is online multiplayer games. Otherwise, if user is faking gps he is messing up his own experience.
2 different permissions: Possible faked GPS data, and Not faked GPS data. An app would really need to explain why it can't accept possibly faked GPS data.
I like that idea, although to me that is kinda the status quo and I'm not sure the folks who want to be able to fake anything at will would be ok with that.
i argue it's not an issue. If the user decides to spoof to cheat in the game, there are other ways to detect it (such as speed limiting - which, as i understand, pokemon go already does).
If the app wants to force a user to not modify their phone just so they have a secure enclave for which they can implement DRM, then i can't agree to it. This includes things like spoofing, but also things like memory edits or hacking save files, or anything else client side. If the app needs secure storage that's unchangeable, they can save it on their servers.
I don't play Pokémon go, but with my understanding of the game I'm not sure how spoofing the GPS would impact other users in a negative way.
Considering that most of the world has some form of travel restrictions over the past year, and I believe that being able to interact with friends in the game requires you be be in very close proximity. Can you explain how spoofing GPS data so that people are allowed to play together even though they are not close is bad?
>I'm not sure how spoofing the GPS would impact other users in a negative way.
You could attack a pokemon gym at your convenience (from your couch, whatever time of the day). This negatively impacts other players because a legit, non-cheating spoofer will have to expend far more effort to do the same thing.
>Can you explain how spoofing GPS data so that people are allowed to play together even though they are not close is bad?
Friend interaction or just interaction in the game has to do with raiding and trading. You can already league battle (pvp) over any distance.
Niantic has made some changes along these lines - main one is the remote raid pass. One person close enough to a gym can invite friends to raid, no spoofing needed. They also upped the trade distance, how close you need to be to interact with a gym/pokestop, etc.
So the answer to your question is the game itself has made changes to address actual in-game scenarios. That leaves spoofing GPS as a way to asymmetrically cheat against gyms, or perhaps trivialize collecting pokemon (some are region locked and so on).
In games like Pokemon Go (and similar augmented reality games) players go to real world locations in order to gather resources, and battle the pokemon of another user who currently holds that position.
If you can just spoof, the whole nature of augmented reality falls apart and someone could simply spoof themselves anywhere and take those positions. It was a big problem before the android os made it harder to spoof.
There's no point/ fun in playing augmented reality games if enough people simply cheat and the real world limitations aren't a factor.
I played pokemon go seriously for a few years (both at the beginning and recently) and honestly spoofers are an issue only because imho Niantic is incompetent and doesn't care.[1]
not to say how it you are anywhere not in a medium size city you need either spoofers or endless grind to unlock significant parts of the game
[1] to be fair I left before the pandemic, so I cannot comment on how they handled that
As a user I don't really care about what you want or need. You're not supposed to get any data at all unless it's strictly necessary. You're also supposed to delete any data that you do get after you're done using it in a way that benefits me and me alone.
I'm a developer too, but no, sorry, the user comes first. They're paying the bills and your salary.
If your app needs to get info that benefits the user (as the mapping app GPS example), nobody will deny it because it makes sense.
If your app wants to get info that benefits you but not the user, it only makes sense for that data to be denied (preferably) or faked (as a backup plan). You have no right to it.
> It’s easy to feel that iOS isn’t on your side when you can’t use a non-WebKit browser and can’t use an adblocker.
Not only does Safari allow for 3rd-party adblock extensions that are pretty good, there are iOS browsers available, like iCab Mobile[0] for instance, that allow for extremely fine-grained, granular and tweakable ad-blocking, filtering, domain-blocking, and CSS and javascript rules - all of which can be user-edited and refined to fit exactly the user's own requirements.
There are always so many comments like the above in these threads: often characterized by people banging on iOS because it "can't be customized the way I want it after I paid so much for my iPhone". But these seem to be just standard consumer-mindset complaining from users that don't even have the intellectual curiosity to investigate whether there's actually anything already available that solves their imagined problem, or even try to fix it themselves - just as the article says.
You still can't use a non webkit browser though. It's Internet Explorer levels of non-competition.
I would love to be able to say to my users, when they experience an issue with Safari - "you can try a different browser". But I can't because the same issue will be present in Chrome.
But that's what you a developer want, not necessarily the users. I'm extremely happy that you can't tell me to use another browser and have to fix your code for Safari instead. I think that you have a right to decide which browser I can use, even if I'm your costumer. I knew the rules when I bought my iPhone and had to accept them, even if it means only using webkit. Being forced to switch to Chrome when using a specific website just because the developer didn't feel like making it work in Safari is very annoying on the Mac and would make me go nut on the phone.
It's not "fix my code" when Safari doesn't even support the feature or it's simply broken - or most annoyingly, it works one day and breaks with an update. (See: webrtc stuff)
You might have known the rules, but most users don't. Plenty will come to me saying they've tried both Safari and Chrome and that it won't work in either, indicating they have no knowledge of webkit.
Android also randomly breaks things now and then, but I can at least direct users to Firefox, which never seems to have any problems.
Please understand redirecting users to another browser is only ever a last resort. If I can fix the code I will, but sometimes something just stops working and I can't even reproduce it.
...and I have a teacher who is relying on my app for their classes this week and "try firefox" could save them...
There exist adblockers but as far as I’m aware they all work at a network level and not at a script level, which means that 1. They suck and 2. You can’t use a VPN and an adblocker at the same time.
Quick appreciation regarding the intellectual humility required to add this to the end of your comment. In my humble opinion, this kind of attitude and approach represents some of the best of the HN community.
It's true that Safari content blocking is rules-based, but its not on a network level, the logic is implemented in the WebKit renderer. So in addition to blocking URL patterns, it is also possible to make rules to hide specific elements by CSS selector.
It’s the other way round actually. On iOS you can install an adblock ruleset provider that Safari can use natively. On Android it’s only VPN or an adblock-enabled browser (that is usually yet another set of issues) because Chrome is adblock’s enemy. At least that’s my experience after long research while using both OS (recently, mid '20-21).
Properly configured, you can get much better adblocking capabilities on an Android phone than you can on iOS.
There's a weird situation with mobile phones where for most people who aren't going to go out of their way to make their devices private, Apple's ecosystem is the right choice; it has better defaults and better sandboxing. But once you do decide to go out of your way to make your device private, Apple's ecosystem stops being the right choice.
On a rooted Android phone I have network-level adblocking on my device that directly works with the firewall. I also run Ublock Origin in my phone browser, which blows every single Safari adblocker out of the water. I can also cut off Internet access to specific apps and games, not just to domains. I also have access to a litany of Open Source apps that wouldn't be allowed on app stores like NewPipe that improve my privacy by replacing services. And LineageOS imposes additional sandboxing on top of Android's built-in features.
But if a friend buys a phone, they're not going to do any of that. They can't get NewPipe because they're not using F-Droid. They're probably going to stick with Chrome, which has next to no adblocking or extra privacy controls. An iPhone will be more private and more secure for them in almost every way.
So it's a weird situation where which device is more private depends a lot on who you are. For most average consumers, it's likely iOS. But it's not quite so simple to say that iOS has the best privacy overall.
For network level blocking on Android there's no need to root or go down any rabbit holes. Just set your DNS to a adblocking service like nextdns. It's natively available since Android 9 and there are workarounds for older versions (usually by using an app that pretends to be a VPN).
You can do DNS based adblocking on Android as well using the built in "private DNS" support in combination with something like NextDNS. Doesnt need a VPN or special browser.
I don't know about Chrome adblocking because I'm using Firefox on all my Android devices. I installed uBlock Origin and I'm using it to block elements with CSS rules (lots of annoying sticky headers and useless navigation bars.) Sometimes I use it to block scripts. My primary adblocker is Blockada which is a local VPN and blocks all ads in all apps. This means that usually no ads make their way to Firefox and I remove their empty spaces from pages with uBlock.
The shortcoming of using Blockada is that I can't use another VPN. I don't really need it yet, but if I would that could be a big problem.
I don't know why Google doesn't allow chaining VPNs. Maybe the UX would be too difficult on a phone, maybe it's a real edge case not worth spending money on, maybe it would be used only to block ads.
If you want both: a blokada-like adblocker and a VPN, setting one up with Algo and WireGuard is quite easy. I've been using it for ages and it just works without me needing to interfere.
They kind of suck because of the reasons you mention but you can absolutely use them with a VPN and I do think they've gotten better over the past six years or so that I've used them.
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.
Except the iPhone is really not on the users side. I do tend to think the iPhone isn't going to spy on me, or at least if it is, it's going to be doing so to a much lesser extent than Android.
But it's also not going to, for example, let me install a web browser which is anything other than a Safari reskin.
There are other factors to 'being on the users side' than just privacy.
Honestly Vulkan was just a lazy example, but it's hard to give a good one when I don't use Apple products in the first place.
A better example might be places where it's hard to switch away from Apple's systems, or perhaps how they only support hardware that doesn't last very long and are notoriously hostile to attempts to repair your device.
> 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.
It is perfect, since you have zero expectation your sofa should be transformed into something else, or make any provisions or concessions in its design towards looking or performing like some personalized flavor of sofa.
Similarly, the sooner we get over the trope that any handset maker must be forced into selling a tiny general purpose computing device instead of an iPod PDA communicator, the better. It is what it is, let makers just make it the best, without unnecessary and less reliable modularity. Yes people want that, it’s a market segment, and so other makers can make things for that category.
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.
A primary requirement I've had over the past few years when purchasing a phone is whether it is supported by Lineageos. Less data is collected hopefully, without gapps installed.
Interesting how this seems to be the common belief, but AFAIK AOSP does not do this, while ironically Lineage uses Google for connectivity servers and fallback DNS.
> 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.
> The average person’s iPhone/Android is the sofa in their living room just waiting to be used.
Except, it isn't.
Because at random times the sofa company comes in and reorganises the way the cushions are positioned. And then they take away the ability to use the tilt function.
Then, because they really need to know how they use the couch, they'll start tracking when you sit and lie on the couch. So when you have your day off and its outside the scheduled expectations, when you sit on the couch they suddenly come over and put locks and chains on the couch because it clearly wasn't you who was using the couch.
Most people just accept this, because what are you going to do? Buy a couch that doesn't have tilt or cushions? You want those! You don't want a wicker chair, you want a comfy couch, so you have to deal with the couch company making life hell every so often. Because there isn't an alternative for the average person.
I field calls from my parents at least once a week about something that has "broken". The tech support is like pulling teeth, because everything is hidden from the user. They don't know what they did wrong and all that they want is for it to "work". And half the time I can't help them - because the phone doesn't belong to them and the OS or apps has decided that X feature is no longer worth supporting, and force-updated them to the latest version. Rolling back to the version that did work is difficult or impossible.
They also installed sensors in the cushions that detect and measure gasses. They will know when you eat, what you eat, what your friends eat, when you and your friends are having a good time or when you are stressed. They will share this data with 3rd parties. You probably consented to this in some agreement. Your friends probably don't know their data is shared via your consent.
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.
No, it's not particularly important to me that the OS is FOSS (it's a bonus I appreciate, but what I dislike about my work Mac is that it's hard to configure and changes between versions and bundles crapware, etc., not that it's not FOSS).
Another Unix would be ok as long as it's not hidden away under a forced UI, with some things unconfigurable, required, etc.
But ultimately I want to share dotfiles between my desktop and phone (sure I might have to accept some amount of conditional guards..) - and that pretty much means Linux and ideally Arch. But only because that's what I happen to use on non-phones.
One VM per app would need a lot of RAM. Maybe one VM for Linux/Android, and one for iOS, would be a decent compromise. We'd still 'waste' some RAM, but isolation between different Android apps could be handled by cgroups/namespaces.
He said Android or iOS. It seems like massive overkill to have a phone that can run both. Even running Android apps well is a pretty tall order, running iOS apps natively on your own open source phone seems like a pipedream. It took even Google a long time and a lot of investment to get Android apps to work reasonably well on ChromeOS.
True. The question is whether the Linux emulation can be good enough to satisfy Android. There are lots of funny quirks ...
I wish something like CloudAPI/Capsicum would take off to be more secure, while also being an open platform, instead of Linux ubiquity rendering standards irrelevant.
I have no idea. I was asking because I wanted to understand better the position of the person to whom I replied. They said they wanted Linux specifically, and not just open source.
I didn't understand why it's so important for it to be Linux, as opposed to any other operating system that's as hackable/customizable. So I wanted to know if I had missed something.
> I didn't understand why it's so important for it to be Linux, as opposed to any other operating system that's as hackable/customizable.
I should apologize for my response then. I'd thought you were alluding to iOS, and thought that it was strange to bring that up when discussing configurable OS's.
I don't think it being Linux is too important for people. If somebody made a working FreeBSD for a phone and there was official support for that device, then people wouldn't be all "Well, it's not Linux". I don't think I've seen any interest from BSD maintainers to bring any form of it to phones though.
As it is now, the PinePhone is officially supported by Manjaro and that makes it the most obvious option. Also, all attempts thus far to bring open source to mobile has been some form of Linux, so it's natural that when people think "open source phone", it's probably going to be using Linux. PinePhone itself already has 18-ish different distros, including ports of Debian and Ubuntu, so it's certainly well on its way.
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.
I have my media collection shared via NFS over my VPN. I want to use MPD locally on my phone like I could on Maemo.
Also, if I'm at a friend's place who has a Roku, Chromecast etc, I can already cast media from my NFS collection easily from my Linux laptop via VPN. I want to be able to do the same thing with my phone.
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.
> And sadly, pine is still not my daily driver. At this time, it is a toy.
It was never sold as a daily driver and this was always made abundantly clear in every Pine store page since the beginning of time. Even now they only call their latest version "beta" for a good reason.
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.
I do have 5 tablets in my home, held with magnets against the walls, which do nothing else but have a custom app running which displays a full-screen WebView.
It shows stuff like weather, clock, calendar, land-line phone calls and has buttons for light scenes.
I used to use Chrome for this, but I always had to manually maximize the page, and hosting it in a custom app has additional benefits, like loading and maximizing the page as soon as the device boots, and offering a JavaScript interface so that the page can interact with Java functionality. It's much better that just hosting the page in Chrome.
Each time Chrome gets updated, the app gets killed. And even though the app has set up an alarm which makes Android call into the app every minute to ensure it is running, for some reason this doesn't bring up the UI (probably something which I need to debug).
But I know that if this app were running on Linux directly, in some Python Qt app with a Qt WebView, it would never get killed, as it has plenty of resources available.
I've also considered integrating Mozilla's rendering engine into the app, but decided not to, I can't remember why, but there were some drawbacks in doing so.
It would be hard to imagine using such an app in an industrial setting, where the app would need to be visible all the time, displaying gauges and stuff like that. The hardware could do that, with a proper OS.
> 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.
To be honest, this is in your head, and heads vary. I for one don't experience this feeling whatsoever:
>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.
Eight weeks, really? That's a blink of an eye. I didn't even know we're on Android 37, thought it was 9 or something.
Pixel 2+ with GrapheneOS, RattlesnakeOS, or CalyxOS provide pure AOSP experience sans Google and track latest Android releases within days. Depending on your needs you can control your own image build pipelines and still get verifiable boot and automated OTA updates.
Lineage runs on phones that have far superior hardware spec wise to the Pinephone and Librem 5. And I'd wager there's more people working on Lineage than there are working on Librem's and Pine's phone OSes combined.
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.
> Android also comes with a bunch of anti features like an api to block the user from taking screenshots.
When it came out there's a malware campaign that tries to extract MFA codes from Google Authenticator by taking screenshots, there was a lot of criticism towards Google for not setting the flag that activated that API and made screenshots impossible, and it's a good solution, there's no viable scenario in which you'd want to screenshot your MFA TOTP codes. I admit that i'm sometimes annoyed with it's use in banking apps, but IMHO it's a needed feature for security.
Why do random apps get access to the screenshot feature? Why would there ever be a reason to prevent a screenshot when the user presses the hardware buttons for a screenshot?
Because it's an API for a bunch of reasons ( custom apps for better features, probably taking a video of what you're doing uses the same API), so any app can use it.
Because when my device stops me, the user, from doing something I want, thats an antifeature. In this case I want to take a screenshot, and the device prevents this.
It actually is hard. When I looked in to it the only way to fix the issue was using xposed modules which did not work on my version of android/phone and is a security risk because I now have to load some untrusted module as root so I can get the phone to stop blocking me from what I'm trying to do.
Why? If you look at the list of supported devices there are lots of older models. I'm currently using the latest LineageOS on a Galaxy S4 (8 years old) and it works perfectly.
If you want commercial support have a look at https://esolutions.shop/ (/e/ is based on LineageOS).
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.
> 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
Seems like the phenomenon of people choosing Linux, only to choose a windows manager that makes the entire thing look like a non-open OS, fits this same line of thinking. At the end of the day, most people don't care about the particulars of Linux, or its ideologies. They just want an open and customizable OS, and if there's a variant that looks like a more widely-used OS, so much as the better.
If there were more open OS's that were as far along as Linux, it would likely be less popular. The important thing is open-source phones or computers, not Linux ones.
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.
You can use a Librem 5 in this exact way. I do it - it's fast enough to run an IDE and do some programming (as long as the thing you work on compiles in reasonable time), check e-mail, IM and social media, do some light browsing etc. I have GIMP, Inkscape, Audacity and LMMS there, which together with Qt Creator are pretty much all the tools I need for my gamedev work - and now I can do that on my phone attached to a screen, keyboard and mouse. Jamulus, Mumble, mpd, even some lighter games and emulators - it all works, straight from Debian repos. It's pretty fun.
I have even ran a full Plasma Desktop on an external screen this way - and it worked surprisingly well even despite of GPU acceleration not being available there because of a bug.
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.
Yeah, figuring out the Debian process can be a pain. More often than not, Debian is just a 'middle man' for the code. So for modemmanager see https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/modemmanager and note the maintainer(s) listed on the right side of the page. Sometimes the package maintainer is also a developer of the upstream code. However, often the maintainer will just be repackaging the upstream code (also listed on the right side of the page) so for new features you would need to get the upstream to incorporate it which would result in the package maintainer automatically incorporating it when they rebase/merge the latest changes. I'm not familiar with modemmanager so the main 'trick' is figuring out who does what for that package. (i.e. is the maintainer an active developer or just more passively repackaging it?)
The issue right now is that Debian maintainers are all pretty busy trying to nail down Bullseye as they're currently in their hard freeze[1] period... lots of bugs and dependency problems to deal with to get to release.
My suggestion would be to wait until Bullseye is released and then contact the maintainer and see if you need to be dealing with them or upstream to get your changes in. If you're impatient, you might have more luck contacting upstream directly right now. Either way, the odds of getting new features in for Bullseye are likely slim to none right now.
So I may be in a weird spot then. I am trying to get mmsd (not modem manager) into Debian proper. Mmsd itself is not in Debian at all.
Per my original comment, I have tried to contact the ofono (mmsd) maintainers via IRC and their mailing list no less than four times to get my patches upstreamed (every time I have been ignored), and at this point I have given up trying to contact them. One of the ofono maintainers has mentioned that mmsd hasn't been worked on in over 8 years, so I think its abandoned.
The Debian on Mobile (i.e. the Mobian and Purism devs) maintainers think the best course of action is to package upstream mmsd, then update with my changes.
So there are two entangled issues here that I would suggest disentangling:
How do you get your changes to mmsd into the upstream mmsd repository on kernel.org? There have been commits to mmsd upstream in 2019. My suggestion would be to CC more folks on your next patch submission, at minimum: the Linux netdev mailing list, the oFono list, everyone in the mmsd AUTHORS file and all the folks who are listed as a committer in any of the mmsd git commits.
How do you get mmsd into Debian? The usual procedure is to upload the package to the mentors site and file a request for sponsor bug report, XCCed to relevant people/lists, which in your case is probably the debian-mobile list, Debian oFono maintainers and any other Debian mobile related addresses (I guess Purism PureOS, Mobian etc). Of course, that doesn't guarantee that a Debian uploader will sponsor the package, but it is a good start.
Do both at the same time, if upstreaming the patches doesn't work out, you can add them to Debian while still figuring out a way to push them upstream.
The debian-on-mobile team is aware of it, but even they have been commenting that getting upstream mmsd will take time. One has suggested to change the bug for a request for sponsor. It sounds like I need to do that.
So the ITP (Intent to Package) and RFS (Request for Sponsor) are two separate things.
The ITP comes before you have started the packaging, it is a notice of intent rather than a request and functions as a way to prevent other folks from spending time on something someone else is spending time on, a place to discuss and document any issues that come up during packaging and a way to advertise the potential new package such that others can get involved and co-maintain the package if they want to. Since you didn't XCC the ITP to debian-devel as is customary (and what reportbug wnpp does), that part of the purpose of ITPs was reduced.
The RFS comes after you consider the packaging complete and ready to be in the Debian archive. It is only for people who aren't yet able to upload themselves. It should be sent once each time you want to upload. It should be directed at debian-mentors (done automatically when using reportbug) and XCCed to the relevant team mailing lists and any other potential sponsors.
and I want to say I did the XCC to the relevant sponsors? I know I included th Debian on Mobile mailing list (they are the ones to suggest how to submit debian packages).
Looks like they did get a copy, but FTR, XCC != CC. XCC is my abbreviation for X-Debbugs-CC, which means that the Debian bug tracker forwards your bug to additional folks. If you use XCC then they get the bug number but if you use CC then they don't, at least for the initial bug submission, obviously for post-submission bug mail you are CCing the bug number.
Gotcha. Unfortunately, I thought I manually added that, but either Evolution didn't understand it or my mailing service didn't like it (which is what I was afraid of and why I CC'ed as well).
I'd definitely proceed as pabs3 suggests. As a short term solution, you might want to contact a-wai and see if your work could live in the Mobian repo in the meantime as I think MMS is still a highly sought after feature.
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.
This is a classic scenario that Linux also faced. Some people might be too young to remember, but a lot of services used to rely on Internet Explorer 6- and ActiveX when there was no chance whatsoever of getting those running properly on Linux. Later we had issues with DRM for streaming sites, which have probably not been fully solved yet.
The truth is that service and app developers only care about one thing: audience size, which translates to actual money. And it takes a long time to build that audience, even more so in the mobile world where all metrics are orders of magnitude bigger than on the desktop. Until Linux phones can show they have sizeable audiences, developers will ignore them. Tens of thousands is nothing, we’ll need millions. Realistically, this is not going to change in 12 months or even 2 years.
But, something can be done in the meantime: making all popular app-development frameworks run on mobile Linux, and then putting pressure on developers to produce app builds. When portability comes essentially for free, it becomes easy to support an additional platform just for the brownie points.
WhatsApp doesn't actually require Google Play Services, as everyone running LineageOS can tell you. Even if you don’t have Play Services and the Google Play Store, you can install Whatsapp from Aurora Store (off F-Droid) and then Whatsapp runs just fine on your vanilla Android.
Currently the only option is to either help with the efforts to run and emulate Google Play Services or switch to a different bank - much like requiring in-person visitors wear a mask, they're legally allowed to require you to use certain software or certain mechanisms to access your bank account.
> help with the efforts to run and emulate Google Play Services
Modern bank apps require not just Google Play Services, they also require the phone to pass Safety Net. Play Services substitutes like MicroG aren’t capable of that.
download the apk from https://www.whatsapp.com/android/, start anbox (this takes a while), install android-tools, adb install WhatsApp.apk, done. It also works with stuff like Duo Mobile, which is the 2FA my organization uses (which is interesting because it doesn't agree with my rooted lineageOS phone).
Anbox comes by default on current versions of Manjaro
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.
> The web is already almost as closed (for apps) as phones are
What? Nobody needs permission to publish a webpage, while every week we hear about google or apple blocking or unpublishing apps with flimsy justifications.
I was thinking of closed in terms of number of options, not publisher control of apps. You're right that browsers don't tend to censor content on the web today. Tomorrow, we'll see.
Web Bluetooth
Web MIDI API
Magnetometer API
Web NFC API
Device Memory API
Network Information API
Battery Status API
Ambient Light Sensor
HDCP Policy Check extension for EME
Proximity Sensor
WebHID
Serial API
Web USB
Geolocation Sensor (background geolocation)
User Idle Detection
Note: I do understand Apple's privacy concerns with some or even most of them. But most of these are obviously necessary if you want to turn the browser into the main application platform, for better and for worse.
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.
I'm very aware of microG. They have done some amazing work. But unfortunately apps like banking apps require that you pass Google's SafetyNet. Which (understandably) is a lot more complicated to support in microG.
> 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.
>Linux works exceptionally well in the areas where large companies with many developers pay to make it work well.
The elephant in the room is that we desperately need better funding mechanisms. For instance, most distro repos don't support selling Free Software - either the package is available gratis to everyone, or it's not available to anyone. There are hacks to get around it perhaps, but no support at the OOTB click-a-button level.
The only way the Year Of The Linux Desktop will ever happen is if we actually make it a priority as a community to figure out ethical funding mechanisms.
Didn't Canonical try this with the Ubuntu Software Center and it completely failed? The top selling app in 2012 made $400 in one month. That's not bad for a side project, but you can't build a business on it.
The real elephant in the room is that a lot of people use Linux because they don't like paying for software, and like using other people's labor for free. The free software movement has completely failed at providing a business model for itself. This is why funding its projects is essentially charity when they're not valuable to a large corporation selling proprietary software.
I’d say it’s even worse than that. I’d be willing to pay for a Linux distro (and have donated in the past), but, in their pursuit of user lock-in and/or profit, Ubuntu and RedHat are increasingly hostile toward desktop users. Therefore, my money goes to smaller projects without many (any?) full time developers.
>I’d be willing to pay for a Linux distro (and have donated in the past), but, in their pursuit of user lock-in and/or profit, Ubuntu and RedHat are increasingly hostile toward desktop users.
It's almost certainly profit. They have a sizable user base but not a lot of good ways of getting money out of them. I would say it's a direct example of the major unsolved problem I was talking about. This is not to condone what they did, as I found the Ubuntu advertisements particularly egregious.
I'd be happy to push work to pay for a supported Linux distro, and I have had some success before in pushing companies to choose supported open source options.
I was in fact hoping that Ubuntu would be that distro a number of years ago until they pivoted away from easy, nice, clean, just works towards halfway bad copy of OS X.
Now another frustrating thing about this is that once many open source projects get to taste the sweet juice of cashflow it seems many will immediately abandon all the ideas that got me to desperately want to suppprt them and become just as hard to work with as their commercial counterparts.
That I think is almost entirely false. People don't use Linux because it is free (as in beer). People for whom cost is the primary concern can pirate Windows, buy cheap versions from online stores or install a legitimate version of Windows and never activate it(Microsoft makes it really easy these days). Heck already probably millions of people are using one of these options rather than installing Linux.
I have been using Linux for 10 years or so and a lot of my friends/colleagues use Linux and we use Linux because software for which we are paid to work - works best on Linux. I don't think beyond college students, professional programmers using Linux mind paying for software (I pay for several!). Most of us know - there are warts and all but I have also used Mac for 5 years and my wife uses Mac for her work and it does not look like fun wresting with brew everyday.
The problem isn't that people aren't willing to pay for software - IMO the problem is, Linux is really difficult to support, because of Linux Desktop being a continuous moving target. So, application development for Linux is hard because the base is continuously changing but no company has managed to invest enough money/resources to make the base stable. And given small Linux marketshare, resources required to make a stable base is astronomical (Like google did with Android).
So, It is a chicken and egg problem. Linux can't attract large install base without a wide variety of application software, but companies who have tried supporting Linux application development have burnt themselves in past (and why bother given small Linux install base) and hence nobody has incentive to make that solid base.
>People don't use Linux because it is free (as in beer).
Plenty of Linux users I know do.
>People for whom cost is the primary concern can pirate Windows, buy cheap versions from online stores or install a legitimate version of Windows and never activate it(Microsoft makes it really easy these days). Heck already probably millions of people are using one of these options rather than installing Linux.
Not if they're programmers and prefer Unix. My experience with Linux users is different than yours. Yes, many of them end up caring about free software. Quite a few also have the "why pay for anything" attitude and pirate all their media, even when they could afford it. Sometimes these groups overlap. I don't think there's one single reason people come to Linux.
If people are willing to pay money for Linux, how come companies trying to support it haven't been successful? Would you pay $150 for a copy of a Linux distro? $200? How many of your Linux-using friends would? Would you be willing to do that every three years, like Windows?
The attitude I encounter frequently among Linux users is not just that they wouldn't pay but that they don't think money is a solution to the problems Linux has. So far, the most critical Linux development has been subsidized by proprietary software companies who use it for their infrastructure. Nobody's interested in supporting it for money because nobody wants to pay for it. The whole reason it's popular is because you don't have to. Linux would be nothing today if Linus had charged for it. There's no chicken and egg problem here. The egg is a community which doesn't value software in material terms.
> Not if they're programmers and prefer Unix. My experience with Linux users is different than yours. Yes, many of them end up caring about free software. Quite a few also have the "why pay for anything" attitude and pirate all their media, even when they could afford it. Sometimes these groups overlap. I don't think there's one single reason people come to Linux.
If every one of those programmers paid $150 for their copy of Linux Desktop - do you think it would enough to fund a Company that could build/maintain a rock-solid-stable-base Linux Desktop? The problem is that developing/supporting an OS requires enormous engineering resources and you magically don't require less resources just because your install base is small.
Currently libinput is maintained by one man mostly and I have a suspicion that Mirosoft has a small team for input devices. Take X11 vs Wayland for example. What would this new distro target? If it targets wayland - users will complain about nvidia GPU support, if it targets X11 - users will complain about fractional scaling/tearing. These are hard engineering problems which require working with partner drivers and long term commitment. I personally think that - many companies have realized there is no money to be made in supporting desktop Linux(i.e desktop itself, not a cross-platform application running on top of it), even if every one of those users paid the one time fee.
>If every one of those programmers paid $150 for their copy of Linux Desktop - do you think it would enough to fund a Company that could build/maintain a rock-solid-stable-base Linux Desktop?
It wouldn't be a bad place to start.
>The problem is that developing/supporting an OS requires enormous engineering resources and you magically don't require less resources just because your install base is small.
Well, you have to narrow the hardware you support. That's the main thing that makes Linux on the desktop suck. Only Microsoft has succeeded in writing a highly compatible operating system, as you mention with a lot of resources. But there isn't the will for this, because people want Linux to run on everything. In this area, System76 are probably doing the best. But their hardware is not very good.
>I personally think that - many companies have realized there is no money to be made in supporting desktop Linux(i.e desktop itself, not a cross-platform application running on top of it), even if every one of those users paid the one time fee.
The point is that the fee is off the table because nobody would pay it. That's all I'm saying. Your argument is a non-sequitur. You say these engineering problems require hard work, and that there's not enough money in it even if everyone paid the fee. In that case, one would need to raise the fee until it can pay for the development that needs to be done.
But the market would not bear it. It already will not bear a standard operating system price.
> The free software movement has completely failed at providing a business model for itself.
Wouldn't you say the Freemium model is a successful business model for many? Or there are free software but we can do extra for you like Automatic/Wordfence etc. Ad driven 'free' software is quite common place. Also 'goodwill' supported.
Not saying its not challenging for many free software services but there are business models around 'free'.
I didn't go into the details but ads/data are a funding mechanism. It's a funding method where you pay with intangibles, and is successful because ads/data are implicitly available on literally every platform out there and is so convenient it requires literally zero clicks on the user's behalf to activate.
I didn't mention it because it's uhhhh, antithetical to Free Software. Let me explain that:
Free Software says "put ultimate power in the users' hands, so that they can call the shots" - this is why they commonly use the GPL (sorry if obvious). Ads/tracking puts the devs at the mercy of the third parties who are paying their bills, despite said third parties not giving a shit about the quality of the software. It's why ads are so often unoptimized.
A more minor reason is that it's situational. Anything offline basically can't do either. Anything like libpng just doesn't really make sense.
But fundamentally, the crux is that devs have to do what they're paid to do. There are exceptions, but those are only exceptions and not the rule.
i thought the business model was to sell professional support for companies, and it has worked very well so far. the problem is that you can't apply that business model in this case.
> the problem is that you can't apply that business model in this case
Random thought: I wonder if the problem is personal version of "selling support" is home PC repair companies, ubuntu is trying to be MS but they should be GeekSquad or geeks4u.
ubuntu's big problem is that they try to be everything to everyone.
There's room for a phone linux, a user/corporate client linux, an enterprise linux or two. It's pretty tough for a company, even the well funded ones to do all three. MS missed phone, google missed enterprise, redhat doesn't really do phone or client (fedora I guess but it's not really a paid product). Then, you got scrappy ubuntu that's gonna reinvent phones and debian and do server support, and they are kinda just bad at all of it . . ..
I've found Ubuntu Desktop to be by far the least problematic desktop Linux distro. I was a big Fedora fan for a while but the hit in stability just wasn't worth it for me, and I liked the positivity of the Ubuntu hobbyist community, containing many people who are not primarily software engineers.
It's not bad, and it's what I'd put my grandma on. It really falls down on the job as an enterprise client, shipping old buggy software like bad insecure versions of openconnect VPN and such.
If you want to set up a browsing/email machine for something it's a great choice.
This is actually where I think ubuntu should focus, the server offering is kinda meh. The upstart and unity shit was a waste of time. Instead, they should focus all that energy on being a client OS. One that can run on grandmas old machine and one that can run in the enterprise.
I know Elementary does something similar. Every time I hear about it, they make it sound like it's successful, but I've never actually seen any numbers.
The purpose of freedom respecting software is that you can take it, make it your own, and contribute back. No expectation that it is suitable for your use in its current state. But it is suitable for the use of its maintainers.
Put in the elbow grease, sponsor someone else to put in the elbow grease, or settle for non-free software where your itches seem to come pre-scratched. Personally I encourage you to scratch your own itch and contribute back.
So freedom respecting software is for people who can program or pay someone else to program for them. That's why there will never be widespread use of it?
I think the other part is that people see it as an opportunity to “make it big” so to speak. If you develop some small part of the UI or functionality for someone else’s OS you get a pat on the back and a commit message with your name on it. If you develop the distribution that becomes popular, you get to name it. You get to go to conferences and tell everyone how you started it. You give keynote speeches. You can start a company to make money off the distro. It opens a lot of doors.
So with that in mind, with only 18 distros, why wouldn’t I throw a 19th into the ring vs toiling away at fixing just my own annoyances?
Heh the first mistake they make is thinking they can make a distro by themselves. Made that mistake before before joining postmarketOS. At least I didn't make my own distro public.
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.
Yeah that seemed to be the main problem, each time Openmoko released a platform, they had already announced that it was deprecated because they were working on the next one.
I think my disappointment stemmed from this - I was expecting a (perhaps rudimentary, perhaps unpolished) platform that would make a base to start developing things on, but that wasn't there.
I'll keep an eye on pinephone, hopefully they've done their historical research in this area :)
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.
Unfortunately a big part of having a truly working phone is the long tail of one-off apps. City-specific rideshares and bus apps, easy airline boarding, some new chat app that your friends started using.
I was a Lumia Windows Phone user, and I loved the OS, and I'm not at all some avid app user on the phone (I don't like mobile games, I don't install random apps that are just a packaged web site). Still, every time I got out of a well-worn bubble, the phone felt second-class. I couldn't order a cab, couldn't scan that coupon, I couldn't install that dating app, etc etc. I used that phone for 3 or 4 years until the battery gave out or whatever, but moving to iOS and Android felt so empowering.
I can only imagine the experience on Linux, without any corporate pushing to get your app on their phone, would be much worse.
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 remember feeling like cross compilers for handheld devices were silly in 2006 when I had a Zarus. The only reason not to develop on your Pinephone is because it's in your pocket and you can't be bothered to pull it out and hook a keyboard up.
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.
Sure, but you must have taken special care to ensure that the gobject introspection tools are run using qemu. Or maybe this does not use GIR at all because it is plain C (which I would not recommend for new apps, and neither does GNOME AIUI).
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 really don't mean to rail on you, but this confirms the parent comment's suspcisions quite precisely - having "seen the movie" about a book whose major point is the eradication of books in favor of more easily digestible media like movies; and having read the other book you mentioned almost 40 years ago, whose themes are completely irrelevant to Russian trolls or face detection...
>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.
I have a pinephone but it's not too useable yet. It's a chicken and egg problem. Once it's actually starting to be useable and a lot of basics are in place, e.g. stable base OS, apps will follow.
Another issue for apps might just be the lack of resources to get started. Kudos to you for all the work you're doing on Megapixel.
Let's keep iterating and true FOSS fashion share what we've learned so we all can benefit. And we can simply ignore all the "reviews" that complain about the lack of apps, compare to Android/iOS for polish.
Also for people complaining about performance, the code will be optimized, graphic acceleration will be used, and finally more powerful device will become available.
Of course a $200 Linux phone with immature software does not compare to $1000 subsidized spying devices
Basically as was said below, just write applications for desktop. Some caveats I've found though, is to minimize the horizontal of your app (to even just a couple hundred pixels wide), and verify that treating your mouse as touch input works (such as scrolling) and testing like that.
When pretending your app is running on a pinephone works properly-ish, I'd call it good. Any functional client or service is a boon to mobile Linux; and even if it's imperfect, so is everything else for now :)
I am surprised no one in here has mentioned Sailfish OS. It is Linux based. I really enjoy mine. I own it like I own my couch. I highly recommend it for those that are interested like myself.
Sure, I do not have the latest phone model, I have it on my Sony XA2 and Cosmo communicator. It has issues with some playstore things, but I also do not care. I can do 90% of what I want on them and the rest I save for my computer. I like the separation.
I think the whole Linux-on-the-phone experience would (have) profit(ed) a lot from focussing on real (e.g. mainline) Linux tablets.
It is easier to use the programs which are already available on the desktop due to the fact that GNOME (and probably KDE) already support touch screens. The usage of a tablet only slightly shifts from using a desktop. So it is a more gradual change.
So by rolling out tablets first, development time could be spent on smoothing out hardware acceleration, supporting cameras, responsive UI, optimizing touch, etc.
And then we could tackle phones.
For me as a PinePhone owner, the biggest problem is not apps but overall speed. The OS feels very sluggish. And although I know that it is really old hardware, doing basic things should be much faster. This holds me back from really using it. The other big problem is battery consumption. Any distro I tried drains the battery so fast that I always have to shut off the phone when I am not using it. Even if I don't do anything. On a fresh Manjaro+KDE, I can see the battery drop by 10% after picking it up and using the browser for a few minutes.
And wrt to linux tablets: The PineTab[0] is sadly having really bad resolution (one thing that is excellent on the PinePhone btw.) and it is too heavy. It is a far less attractive package compared to the PinePhone which has "pretty ok" specs througout. So I am really excited for things like the cutiepie[1] or the jingos tablet[2] (if it is not a scam). Although the latter will come with a custom linux kernel which kinda makes the advantage of a (mainline) linux tablet worthless since one still depends on some people maintaining some old linux fork.
Thank you for your work btw. It is much appreciated! And I plan on building apps myself in the future. But since I want to use Rust with GTK it is a bit hard to get everything fit together as a GTK-newbie (including glade).
I want a linux phone. But you know what I want first?
I want a Visual Studio level IDE that I can develop Linux GUI application in. GTK is an amazing piece of software, and there are some beyond amazing GTK based applications that I found and started using.
As someone who has not done linux GUI development before, the biggest issue is getting started. Android has first class development support, and so does iOS. Linux has Glade for GTK and QtCreator for QT apps.
Vala is an amazing first step, and the code makes design & development super easy. But there is still a disconnect between design and development that hinders adoption. If there was a nice "all in one" application where development can be done like. You could see the hype, and then disappointment, when https://github.com/akiraux/Akira was announced and it looked like such an IDE. But alas.
The Rust GTK Bindings also look really good, but I think the biggest hurdle that needs to be overcome is making Glade either more user friendly and making it tie into an IDE like Builder, or have an IDE like IntelliJ support it.
I was thinking along the same lines. Some time ago GNOME seriously considered Mono to be a good platform to develop Linux apps.
There is now an active project Avalonia, that provides WPF-like GPU accelerated framework, that is cross-platform, and can potentially work well on PinePhone with .NET Core.
And although Flutter has historically been for ios and android, I actually prefer writing Flutter apps while running them on my Ubuntu box. It feels lighter and faster running them natively in Linux than running them in an emulator.
Gnome Builder is basically the reference GTK IDE, such a shame that the developers are so stereotypically gnome and are just not supporting any usecase outside of flatpak at all
I personally don't. Unless the phone distribution is something like Red Hat enterprise Linux and it won't break, bend, or do anything fishy.
I'm a Linux desktop guy, but use an iPhone (I don't sign in with appleID). Privacy and libre arguments aside Linux on the phone sounds great at first until you need to make a call and it suddenly drops. Just my 2 cents
>sounds great at first until you need to make a call and it suddenly drops.
Agreed, I had an N900 running maemo long ago. It was a novel idea to have a Linux device in my pocket, and being able to just drop in to a terminal or do some X11 forwarding over ssh was kinda neat.
But when you start missing phone calls because the screen becomes unresponsive, or the camera is failing to save a picture due to some driver bug, it's a little hard to convince yourself it's worth it.
A couple of years after the N900 launched and WhatsApp had taken over the (European) world, suddenly the lack of support elevated from minor annoyances to full blown disappointment and having awkward conversations about why I couldn't join the group chat. The much cheaper Nexus 4 would replace it with a much better experience all round.
Though I still have a soft spot for that slide out keyboard.
Hah but it seems nobody actually wants a Linux phone with RHEL stability, they want the newest thing and absolutely can't wait a single day for an update, even if it's completely untested and will break core functionality.
I just use the stock applications. Mail, calendar / contacts through webdav / carddav, phone / text, and the browser. I've found I don't need anything more on a phone.
I don't necessarily want a Linux phone, I want a trustworthy portable communication terminal. As of today the smartphone is de facto the standard in portable communication terminals, and Linux is the standard in open, therefore trustworthy (PEBKAC issues aside), operating systems for general use.
It is then normal for many people to want a Linux phone, but give us a BSD, or whatever, based phone, and we're in business.
The gist is that most of us simply find unthinkable to use a piece of hardware that we don't 100% trust, for personal communications, writing or receiving mail, keeping personal data and documents, banking etc. therefore we need an open platform because allowing public scrutiny of the code base - device drivers and user apps included - is the only working method to prevent both software and firmware from doing nasty things behind the user. So far, a Linux phone is the closest we can get to that dream device.
I want a Linux phone. I want to buy something which I can just own and do what I want with it without some overlord deciding that I have violated some terms and conditions. All I need is for some basic apps like email, Maps(OSM is fine),Spotify, Twitter, WhatsApp/Telegram and my banking app to work. It covers 90% of my use cases of my phone.
In any case we all have more than one phone in our house. An extra Linux phone will give me and my family options. The junk stuff and games etc can go on my Android.
Spotify is a big ask because google would have to port widevine (the web DRM.) I've been switching to sound cloud because of this. I'm guessing you're from Europe and that's why your bank needs an "app" instead of just having a website. Here in the US think or swim (the fancy Canadian robinhood style UI for stock trading) works fine in icecat if you turn off librejs.
I think everything else is there. Also Linux games are generally better than Android ones IME. (although I haven't run any besides nethack on my pinephone.)
> Spotify is a big ask because google would have to port widevine (the web DRM.)
Spotify shouldn't be a problem [0][1] using librespot [2]. As for banking, I can't speak for all of Europe, but web apps are generally optimized for desktop use, apps have some convinient features, like scanning the QR code of a bill and pay it with one tap, instead of having to type in everything manually when it's on paper, or copy paste it from a PDF.
Additionally some banks require an app for 2FA for the web interface on PC too.
I am actually from India. The bank mobile websites are good enough. But the apps have some good user flow for P2P payments etc. But yeah, I can live with a good mobile website.
Please explain to me how android is not linux, because android is open source.
I'm guessing it's the exact same problem that happened with microsoft: drivers are restricted and not open source, which prevents users to really have control over the mainstream devices they bought. It's the same loophole all over again: we don't own the thing we bought.
So in the end, the problem comes with hardware vendors, but most consumers really don't understand and don't care.
So why not just make an open phone, but with the same android OS everybody knows? Without the google play store? Why make a new OS, with worse hardware support?
I guess what people mean by a Linux phone is a GNU/Linux phone.
The term isn't that accurate because the userspace might not be glibc and GNU coreutils etc. But I guess that's what people mean: a phone running X11 or Wayland, and the entire stack that comes with it, as opposed to the Android userspace (which does not use X11, and has a pretty different userspace structure).
For the higher layers, Linux is an implementation detail of Android. If you write an app for Android, you write it against Android APIs and get little-to-no access to the Linux part, the graphics stack is quite different, ...
When it comes to mobile devices, UX is more important than ever. Any time I see a "Linux phone" I just see a complete disaster of Linux quality UI and usability.
What I want is a 100% iOS or Android phone, with a USB port that I can plug into a keyboard/mouse/monitor dongle on my desk, and get a desktop Linux environment that shares my same media.
No clever apps that work in both. No clever Linux UI nonsense. A Phone that's 100% android or iOS in my hand, and 100% Linux or MacOS when plugged in to my workstation.
I shouldn't have any clue that it's a Linux phone when I'm walking around with it.
A Linux phone will absolutely need something compatible with Apple CarPlay and/or Android auto. I assume most people are like me and prefer to use their phone's navigation apps rather than their car's built in navigation (which is always outdated and inferior).
I recently bought a PinePhone and honestly the experience of tinkering with it reminds me of what it was like to tinker with Linux back in the early 2000's. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. You get the same feeling of freedom and realization of just how locked down the incumbent ecosystems are. But, at the same time, there is little that is guaranteed to work out of the box and a willingness to tinker is required (Anyone remember trying to print from Linux to a networked Windows printer back in the day? It was possible, sometimes, but never straightforward.)
I have no doubt that as ARM proliferates, the Linux phone experience will continue to improve, but it is going to take time (and as the article points out, it is going to take development effort from the community). Realistically, though, Linux phones will never reach Android/iOS levels of smoothness until you get a couple companies that want to disrupt the Android/iOS duopoly with a new Linux-based offering....
Until then, Linux phones are a no-go for mainstream users. That being said, mainstream users who just want a working phone that is not a massive data funnel back to FANG already have a really good option with https://e.foundation/
I want a Linux phone because Android even when fully degoogled and secured like in GrapheneOS is still beholdened to Google's grip on their proprietary Play Services framework and 'SafetyNet'.
Basically tons of apps are crippled and non-functional unless you let Google's code run as a system app. Sure it can be tricked, spoofed, and mocked for the time being but doing so basically destroys the security model of Android in the process. There's also a lot of badwill between the 'secure' Android ROM groups which isn't great when the selling point is security and reliability.
A proper Linux phone with a Secure Boot/Verified Boot implementation would be great. Linux phone's ATM seem to be more concerned with userland stuff like camera apps.
In a way, a Linux computer in the form factor of a phone with a modem is probably best but it's the complicated nature of the ARM ecosystem getting in the way. e.g how many forms of a secure boot system for ARM exist between Android, Apple M1, Samsung Knox, et al.
Regarding the camera... I don't quite see why a camera system using MPV + standard webcam capture tool can't be used... I guess it's not user friendly but it would be simple. It's not like Linux+Camera is anything new.
This is quite misinformed. GrapheneOS is not "degoogled", it's build from the same open-source code as Googles Android, but that's it. AOSP does not have any Google service installed. I'm using GrapheneOS as my daily driver and I've got about 45 apps installed. All but 1 has not worked without Googles play services and I can easily manage without that app.
Also, those pure Linux phones will take a decade to match the security of current Android and iOS phones. Have fun waiting for that verified boot and proper app sandboxing. insert the image of a skeleton in an armchair.
Yea, I do. I spend time and money trying these things.
And I dont want apps or anything! Phone, SMS and Browser would be fine. (Maybe address book?)
Like, Xfce with those three apps on my com-set would be "done" and shippable to the eager market. Get the the core-com-set features working and let a marketplace/app-store mature around it. Don't try to 1=1 to iOS for mass market. It's not Lean.
No. This is also the reason why, at times, I loathe to use Linux. I would prefer to use something like FreeBSD, which has a different culture and attitude. It's a more stable and polished experience that doesn't aim to cater to every nerd's obsessions. This is what I want in a phone, which is why I use an iPhone, despite all the tradeoffs.
All too often, a Linux gadget shows up to an established market place, with its academically superior ideology (which I love and support) and then wonder why it always feels like a has-been, a Johnny-come-lately to the party.
I don't know about others, but what I would want in alternative phone is something that is different in a different way. For example, a simple and open hackable phone that enables creativity. If Linux is part of that story, fine. But I'd be open to other options.
Basically it's the Raspberry Pi. And the arruino thing. Sure proving that I could do some sort of actual development on a pi might be fun for a while, but what makes the Pi fun is that it's simple and straightforward and approachable enough that it encourages creativity. People make cool and fun things with Pi's. I would want a phone platform that would enable that same type of exploratory creativity in the phone hardware space. Linux kind does that for the Pi.
If I get a Linux phone, I don't want to get a smartphone that tries and fails to be an Android phone.
I am perfectly fine if the phone only has a terminal interface, where I can type "call 212 555 5555" to make a phone call. Especially if I could then hack the audio input/output with some other terminal tool that would allow me to record, or change my voice.
This is the thing I don't understand. People say they want this, but...
You can already do that with PinePhone, right now. All that's needed for this use case is already there. (since 8 months ago, really)
The drivers are all there if you really want this, and it's a few weekends project to write a bunch of scripts that will make PinePhone do exactly what you want just by using common Linux tools.
You can use fbkeyboard and write a bunch of shell scripts. Calling is no more than a few AT commands that you can wrap in a shell functions or whatever. If you really want to be fancy, you can write something that will allow you to queue AT commands and call your scripts on unsolicited indications from the modem. You don't even need a modem manager or any other complicated SW like that, if you don't like complexity.
Mobile data can be entirely handled by the kernel too, with just some generic configuration commands to set it up. No complicated usersapce needed, no daemons needed, not even pppd, like with older GPRS modems.
Audio is solved at this point, and I documented all the controls and have a suggested setup for the very flexible calling setup where you can monitor, playback, record, modem audio, your mic/earphone, in whatever combination you want. There's even a tool that can do the setup based on some config flags, no need to mess with individual controls or ALSA tools. No audio daemon is necessary for basic use cases.
All you need is just start and implement your ideas. No kernel hacking needed, or any complicated stuff like that. It's just there for the taking.
People who actually did something like this can probably be counted on one hand. There's sxmo, and there are 1 or 2 people I remember writing to me personally, that seemed to have some similar low-tech but extremely flexible and hackable custom setup.
And yet, for me, you kind of answered another question with "a few weekends" and "a few AT commands". Because at first blush that isn't as approachable as I'd like. And what you described was doing things that I already do rudimentarily with phones for years. Does it have gpio that I can do weird things with? And what about graphics programming? Because handhelds have screens, and I'm 1000% sure I don't want to have to navigate the X stack with C as I have over the years, or GTK, and frankly, I don't really want to have to setup compiler tool chains or any of that. I realize in typing this up, that while the Linux on a pi is cool, it's actually that I can hack Python live in it right away that makes it so accessible. I think what I want in an open/creative phone is a live AND graphical programming environment like Squeak/Smalltalk or something of similar ilk.
You can write everything in python if you like. Pinephone is just a Pi with a screen and USB attached modem and some other things that are accessible in more than one way. Don't like AT, use modemmanager. Don't like gtk, make some python canvas lib write to a framebuffer. You can probably make the whole phone UI just with `dialog` and shell scripts. If anything, there are too many options. ;)
I don't want a Linux phone, I want a handheld Linux computer
Put phone calls in it if you want, but I'm probably never going to use it. The sim would be for mobile data access
Of course I can already SSH using my iPhone, the big thing I'm missing is a physical keyboard. Something like a Blackberry or that Nokia one with the slide out keyboard would be fantastic
I have a linux phone, and I love it.
I love being able to provision it like a server.
I love that I can write applications in just about whatever language I want.
True, there is a lot of room for improvement - but I'm a programmer, it's a great excuse to try out some new things and learn about cellular networks.
I want convergence. I want my smartphone to be my daily driver machine when I connect it to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse.
My Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ kind of delivers this with Samsung Dex, but it feels sluggish and clunky and there are some minor but very annoying bugs and glitches.
I'm hoping that Linux phones will deliver on that.
Sure, but not necessarily. LineageOS is fine. What I really want is more good Android apps without Google (or any other) dependencies, without ads/tracking or in-app purchases (classic single-time pay is Ok).
I wouldn't mind dialing numbers from command line though.
I would love a Linux phone, to develop my own interfaces away from iOS and Android. I think the challenge is really the native stack for the development for me. For example, just last week I was trying to mess with the Framebuffer on the remarkable tablet, but I know way too less. For new developers (e.g young 20s) we grew on JavaScript, Python and heavily abstracted UI frameworks. I think sometimes the problems are too abstract and ambiguous in this area and make it a little daunting for newcomers since it seems so low-level. As young and new developer, I have time to hack around, but it doesn’t seem like one of those getting started tutorials I can do by myself.
Is funny because Android is linux, and it's the most popular phone OS by a large margin.
I don't think we have the right definitions here, are we talking about GNU/Linux phones? Other distributions/Linux? Or about anything that is Open Source?
Android is technically Linux, sure. But it doesn't share the Linux ecosystem. GNU/Linux would be a way to distinguish, but it would exclude distros such as postmarketOS, which are part of the Linux ecosystem.
I need a little fewer apps, but yes. It's not really a question about what operating system I want, there's currently only two supported by at least two or three of the apps I need. An I only trust one of the companies behind those two operating systems.
Personally I don't really care if there's a browser, email, any messaging beyond SMS, maps are nice to have, but not required. I can even do without banking, but I do have a few special apps for work and interacting with the government.
Depending on where you live, we reached a point where you can choose to not have a SmartPhone, but good luck interacting with society, every new thing is "App first". I a few weeks we'll have Covid-19 passports, on our phones. Don't have a smartphone? I would count on the government having planned for that scenario.
Every country is different, especially USA vs EU vs other parts of the world.
I could do without banking on my phone but most bank sites in my EU country are sending a message to their banking app on the phone to do 2FA when we login. This started between fall 2019 and early 2020. One of the banks I use is still supporting a hardware token (one of those displaying random digits), the other ones are all app based. 2FA works by entering a PIN in the app or using the fingerprint reader. I wouldn't be able to do any banking without an Android or iOS device.
This summer I wanted to hack with LineageOS or something like that. XDA developers said there was a good build for a new Samsung Android tablet so I bought it. I guess I should have read more as Samsung does not use the standard Android bootloader to flash but something called Odin, which is not available (although some people say they have a Windows tool that works). I could query some other non-Samsung Android devices I had with the Android flash tool, but there were no good builds for them or I was unable to build, or I didn't want to risk flashing that specific device.
I might try again this year. I'll look to see what non-Samsung tablets are selling near around here, then look online to see what might have a decent LineageOS or similar build, and then get it. If I flash and brick some cheap, new Android tablet it's not that big of a deal. It's one of the reasons I got into Android programming in the first place, that it is free/open and I can hack around on it like I can my Linux laptop. I thought by 2020 it would be easier to flash a tablet and install LineageOS but I guess it takes a little more effort. I did miss some things though like that Samsung does not use standard Android flash.
If I really needed it I would have done it already, but I was doing it on the weekend for fun, so when I ran into trouble and other things came up, I shelved it for a little while.
> 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?
Browsing and editing files on PinePhone is substantially more cumbersome than doing so on a PC, unless you have SSH (takes time to setup, requires a separate computer, has issues finding the IP address, maybe laggy) or an external keyboard (tiny screen, USB dongle, can't easily charge at the same time).
Linux PCs are always be behind in supporting new hardware. Hardware components are always developed with the market in mind. If the market is commercial, Linux support is not a primary concern.
Linux PCs give you lots of options and customizability. Customization is nice but if you don't care this is a lost benefit. Customization also means the Linux community is fragmented based on preference. This means efforts are not unified.
OSS effort is mostly expended on improving data center computing. When it came to a desktop PC, running Linux only makes sense if you're a developer. Linux phones are the same. Improvements will double down on developer needs.
Upgrades are dangerous. Linux PC upgrades can have major issues and render your desktop unusable until you fix things. Linux phones will likely suffer from the same problem. Customization strikes again to make supporting upgrades a nightmare.
Finally, Linux's file orientation is the most granular level of control that is antithetic to an "app" model. The app model is convenient, fast and easy to manage. The file model results in more effort for the user to properly manage their device.
A Linux phone is something I don't want! Linux phones will take considerable time to get to present phone quality levels.
Hard to say. I don't phone much, especially these days during the pandemic, without travel, I don't need mobile devices for anything really.
Smartphones are barely useful for anything to me these days. I thought about it and I basically want desktop experience but in a small form factor of a smartphone, because that's what I'm used to using most of the time.
Small portable computer that I can actually program and compile stuff on. Device where I am able to script and modify any aspect of it in case of need, without needing to install appstore apps for every little stupid thing I know how to shell script in 5 lines by combining existing tools. Something small enough that it would be more portable than a notebook, but just as generically programmable, and can host any of the usual scripting languages, databases, servers and tools I may want to run on the go, and already know all too well.
Something on the way between a dumb phone and a general computer. And the phone part would ever be interesting to me only if I could hook it, script it, and control it via some personal rules in a detailed manner. Otherwise just using a dumb phone has way better ergonomics than any smartphone ever had for me.
"Still people want to create more distributions instead of actually implementing missing features in the existing distributions"
If people would document their stuff and would bother to give the slightest hint what should be done next for a newcommer to their project, people wouldn't have to restart everything from scratch.
"I want a truly libre, open phone! ... MY truly open libre phone that i own and brand and get rich on!"
With a linux phone, there is a solid chance that I won't be forced to replace my phone in order to continue security updates. I very much look forward to pulling my software from a DFSG-approved repository.
As long as there is enough interest to keep the manufacturing line open, the rest of the ecosystem will continue to grow.
No -- I want a phone that is not subject to Google's data vampirism that competes with Apple for the dollars of the actual humans who use them. If that phone runs Linux and is free, great! If not, less good, but still acceptable.
I wish Microsoft hadn't bungled Windows Phone quite so thoroughly.
I just want a phone that works well. Android would probably be considered very polished compared to many Linux distros, and even there there is a ton of weird UX and bugs that you wouldn't expect for something so mainstream (as a fellow Android user). :)
I think people wants something other than iOS/Android user interface paradigm, or at least I do.
I don't care if Kernel reports version as Darwin 20.3.0 or Linux 2.6.26 or Linux 10.0.23456.0, I want some ... I don't know, something other than "it".
Of course i do. Phone hardware has evolved tremendously and my old android can run games that mere decade ago required full desktop computer plugged to a wall socket. It's no longer a phone, but a handheld computer with a modem that can make calls.
Current popular OSes are garbage - they lock the computer, turning it into an ad platform useful only for selfies and social media. You don't even own the device - you merely rent and are at the complete mercy of the vendor.
It's just about about linux. I'd take anything that gives me control over the device and turns into a real computer that i can plug to a monitor or two and use it as a desktop. Hardware is here, software isn't.
I have an Asus laptop I bought 6 or so years ago that I loaded Mint Linux onto when I found I hated Windows 8. That thing is still working perfectly. Every other device seems to slow down with every single update until it's almost unusable. The tablets have all slowly degraded. The phones are worthless junk that barely even runs now. My Windows 7 laptop isn't worth the space it takes up, even after a system restore.
Yes, I want a Linux phone please! Especially one I can get parts and batteries for. Something with a removable battery even. Although I must admit, Motorola does a pretty good job with their unlocked Android phones.
I have one. I look forward to the day when it matches the specs of a flagship eg. 12-16GB of RAM without the $2K price tag. I want to be able to do VMs inside it and other things... I have a Pinephone now, I think it would be possible to run QEMU in it to do a VM but the current hardware specs are not great for this... like ARM VS Code had 3-5 second lag per click.
Also as a side note, I bought an LG Stylo 6 from Boost and I wanted to smash the phone out of the box due to the bloatware. I know "install ADB bro, uninstall the bloat" but like the voice mail message literally forces you to choose an ad to use it like wtf is that.
I don't care if it's Linux, Windows, iPhone or Android. I want a phone that melts into my computer as a first class citizen/appendage.
Just today, as an example, I had to send someone a link from my desktop. I had to send it to their email. The next best option would have been to use Messenger on Facebook. Why can't I simply have the phone appear as a window on the my desktop (almost like a virtual machine) and have access to its full functionality, including, copy, paste, transfer, file system, etc.
It's 2021.
Microsoft might want to think about bringing back Windows Phone and doing it right this time. Call me. I'll design it for you.
I backed the Librem 5 and I have a Pinephone on order.
Yet I can comfortably say that I don't care one bit about "Linux phones".
I want a handheld Linux computer, and it just so happens that these attempts to make "phones" are the closest approximation.
But if there was a mobile Linux distro that did not waste development time on features like calling, SMS or camera, and hardware that used the space wasted by camera, receiver etc for additional battery capacity, I would most certainly buy that.
I'm happy to use an Android or iOS device as a smartphone. I want a pocketable computer to do things those devices cannot (or rather: refuse to) let me do.
> Still people want to create more distributions (mostly from scratch trying to emulate an android/ios experience more) instead of actually implementing missing features in the existing distributions or fixing issues in the upstream applications those use.
Even before doing that, I think the most important thing for Linux phones is getting HW-Accel to work. Any Android/iOS phone nowadays renders basically anything on the GPU and it makes the experience of using a computing device so much better.
Obviously this is very hard, as free hardware drivers (especially for high-end SOCs) are rarely available.
If I understand right, the argument is that to really want a Linux phone means to want to write your own code for your phone?
Does that mean that Linux in general is only for people who want to write their own code? I kind of thought some people thought Linux could be for anyone, not just for coders. Despite it not really taking off as a consumer desktop, I remember when people thought it could/should and it would be good if it did. Are those days gone? Now people think linux is just for coders, and if you don't want to write your own code you shouldn't use linux?
You can absolutely use linux without writing your own code. You might find the experience frustrating if you don't enjoy, or don't have time for, tinkering with your computer a lot though.
There are rough edges, there are dozens of distros, dynamic linking is popular even when it makes no sense which causes lots of programs to not work until you track down the right dependencies etc.
On the other hand Linux can be allright for people who don't do anything interesting, who just use firefox all day, that works fine in linux.
I bought a PinePhone Manjaro edition. Thing is solid, decent hardware though not earth shattering in anyway.
The one killer app for me is phonecalls and text alerts, though. I can live without anything else, but those need to work. The main issue I have with the pinephone and the reason I still use my Android is because when the PinePhone turns its screen off, it also puts the 4G hardware to sleep.
I've tried it over and over, but the hardware just won't wake the phone up and make it ring. I'd love to ditch the Google shit, but unfortunately I really can't do that right now.
I want a phone that behaves like windows/linux desktop where I can freely download any application from any website and run it. And where the development can be as simple as hooking said phone to bigger screen, keyboard, mouse, launching some IDE and where I can code / design gui (delphi like) / compile (native please) / debug. Modern phone hardware has enough power for these tasks being done in place.
It should also have some low power built in core dedicated strictly to phone tasks that would have a priority over everything else.
I have also been craving the same and have found myself utilizing a VM on my phone to access the OS of my liking (Manjaro KDE) and being able to do things that I definitely could not do on my phone when I was away from my desktop. I do think at the end of the day, all we yearn for is having the THE desktop experience on our phone.
Yes, my next phone will be a Linux phone. I'm just done with Android and iOS. They're terrible operating systems run by massive companies with entirely way too much control, money and power.
I got a PinePhone and the experience was pretty poor compared to everything else, I never ended up using it as a phone.
But it's still cool, and I'm happy I bought it, and I think that later in the future an OSS phone is going to be amazing.
However my unusual use case was that I want my phone to also be my 'computer', e.g. I arrive at work, plug my phone into the USB-C of the monitor that already has a keyboard, mouse and ethernet attached, and I get to work.
I already use linux day to day at work with an ASUS PN50 4500U and it's awesome.
I think the author is conflating Linux "culture", for the a lack of a better term, with the Linux "tech-stack". A lot of people like the extensibility of a "Linux phone" (here, meaning the tech), but do not give 2 shits about the culture-slash-zealotry, as exemplified by a distrust/dislike of technologies just because the are from megacorps like Google: what's wrong with writing Flutter UI on the Pinephone? Is it because Flutter was originally authored by Google?
I don't even care about the cost. I would pay a premium for the non-closed garden phone if it had apps and support. I would happily pay $1,500 for a Pinephone or similar with capability to run the small subset of apps I use -- phone, sms/signal, brave, maps/nav, and maybe a handful of others.
In any given geographic region, the concept of an operating system or a platform, in and of itself, is of little importance as a clear majority of the smartphone users are not computer- or tech-savvy. They wouldn't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. It doesn't have to ring a bell with them.
As a lay passenger, I wouldn't want to or have to know what planes are made of or how a flight management system works. That's not my business. Think of it from a user's perspective.
As the author said, there certainly should be an adversarial Librem vs PinePhone split. We need choice and diversity in the ecosystem, different approaches. There doesn't need to be convergence on interface or anything else. Ideally there will just be hardware standardized enough that users can choose between a wide variety of distros that themselves converge on different solutions, allowing users to choose both hardware and software independently of each other.
How? the existing handset manufacturers just need to make their phones functional enough for linux and/or provide the various blobs in a straightforward manner. And a suitable stretch goal? few or no blobs.
Alternative approach: release the blobs for old phones so we[2] can at least actually write our own updates.
There. No weird hardware needed. Just existing handsets. Just start there.
[1] next week is also good.
[2] or someone who is more clever, has more time available, or otherwise more motivated.
- I want it to be fast (as fast as last year's flagships), because
- I want to use it as my only computer. Mobile when it's in my hand, desktop when it's connected to my monitor or mobile lapdock
- I want the mobile experience to be good enough (phone, message, very good browser, and support for apps that run on Ubuntu) for daily use, but not on par with e.g. Android
That's already quite a planning. Thanks for your efforts on the camera app.
I shouldn't have to care. I absolutely love my P2. I would like little more than permanent support for Android on my P2.
Why? I just want working hardware to be able to continue to work. It's still a great phone for me. If a "Linux phone" means the OS vendor doesn't isolate me from updates just because they have new hardware out, then yes, I want a Linux phone.
I want a phone that doesn't track the living hell out of me, and has an OS which I can modify and reinstall myself, and most importantly, doesn't immediately stop receiving security updates after 1 year. It doesn't have to be Linux, but that seems like the best candidate. I'm very happy to be proven wrong here.
To be totally honest, I don't even really want a phone at all. It's just corporate and governmental bureaucracy that demands me to have one. I'd rather just use email, internet and VOIP to communicate with people from laptops/desktops, and give my ears an eyes a break when I'm on the go.
^ This is exactly what I started doing three years ago and love it. No more tiny rectangle screens stealing my attention; no more endless scrolling, notifications, tiny keyboards, or app stores; no more feeding the data monsters or being forced to upgrade when things fall out of support. Tons more time to think more deeply about things. Still very well connected via email, www, and VoIP, and I do have a work phone, but it's only used for work-related calls and SMS.
AOSP ports (like lineage) provide a better experience. Yes, compatibility is an issue, but with raw Linux we end up reimplementing everything anyway. So why not start from a solid base that works and fork if one feels it's useful, rather then having to create a Camera app all over again?
I am a C# dev. As much as I love working on Linux, how can I contribute to Linux itself. Gnome default userland killed the last C# based apps years ago when I remember right. All meaningful work (stuff which goes upstream) is in C++ ... a language where I have no joy writing code in.
I want a phone with a map, slack for work, unfortunately), signal and a browser. I want it to not feed Google. That's it. Don't even care if it dials or texts. It just had to fit in my pocket. Linux is just a bonus because it already runs on everything else use daily.
Not really. I remember when smart phones came out and I was excited at the possibilities, I've installed termux and everything, but it turns out touch screens are just garbage at typing on, and my phone is better served as a brainless newpipe device.
I want a phone decoupled from google and apple, I don’t care if it runs Linux or vax/vms, as long as it does work, and also does work with my car and other devices. Just get me out of this data driven hell, I will pay
Do I want a Linux phone? Yes, as a mobile app dev, I found our current situation a bit "boring": you either pick Android, or iOS (or on certain situations.... both).
Yes. I've been meaning to get one since I first heard about ubuntu phone (that turns into desktop). Unfortunately, living in Brazil I never get the chance to get one, with the exception of importation.
I don't own a linux phone yet but from the last reviews I would buy one immediately if it had last generation hardware + hardware acceleration. (don't even need a camera or other gizmos).
The PinePhone only achieved about 1% the LTE speed of an iPhone on the same cell network. This means that no matter how much I fiddle with the device, it's just not going to be practical.
I do. Mostly I just use my phone for browsing. So, I want my phone to only have firefox browser wit uBo installed. No need for other apps (messages, phone, contact, any 3rd party app)
> People even want to use Flutter to make UIs, was the phone lacking in google technologies for your liking?
If a company makes a tool that can repurposed for a system not by them, then why shame people for using that tool?
> But even weirder, there's tons of people asking for Android roms for the PinePhone. What's the point? Do you believe in the church of papa Alphabeticus, the pope of the internet?
People want to use apps that the environment current lacks. Again, there's no reason to shame them for it, FFS.
> It's the community that against "the other side". It's the developers that are actually working together to make something.
And yet, this is made after scorning users for not truly wanting to use a Linux phone on the basis of them possibly incorporating software that were from Google. How can the author hypocritically call for a Kumbaya within the Linux community, when they are already indulging in gatekeeping and confrontational behavior of their own?
And at what point is this arbitrary purism satiated? Is a completely ad-less Google-originated technology like Go to be rejected? Should Protobufs be considered harmful because of where they come from? When did Google become the '90s Microsoft of '20s Linux, anyway?
> People are still complaining to other people that they have chosen wrong. This is Linux, you can do what you want with your device.
And yet the author has the audacity to question people wanting to try different things with their mobile distros, even things they don't want, such as 'Having an "one true way" to use the UI and tons of preinstalled apps.' Just rampant naked hypocrisy. Do they really want a Linux phone?
I have a Linux phone because I'm really just tired of fighting against OS vendors to do basic shit like file management or text editing or scheduling background processes or running chat clients or compiling apps (god forbid compiling the OS or running a self hosting dev environment on the device) or pretty much anything other drooling while scrolling through <insert favorite drug>.
I honestly don't mind when something is legitimately broken, especially when I have the tools to work around it. For the first few months the dialing app didn't work, fine, I just wrote some shell scripts to poke AT commands into the modem myself. The thing that makes Linux phones much nicer is the much weaker distinction between users and developers. If something is broken then you can just go fix it (or rip it out or hack around it.) I strongly dislike palm OS style UIs so I switched my phosh session file out for flux box. Many people won't like that and I don't have to care.
If you don't have privacy or overall security concerns, Linux phones are dissapointing. They are very stuck in the early 2010's. The author's description of his app MegaPixels and the community is living proof.
I used to dream of Linux phones and achieving the DIY freedom of desktop Linux. But just like desktop Linux stuck recreating XP era apps, what are we recreating, Ice Cream Sandwich era apps?
I'd love to see the benefits of shell modularity implemented so users can drag together scripts with their fingers.
Also, why is GTK and QT being used for these projects? It's already a drag that we are stuck using local GUI subsystems on desktops. They should be using layout engine platforms like Electron or React Native. That would increase portability, attract existing projects, and promote cross compatibility
> They should be using layout engine platforms like Electron or React Native. That would increase portability, attract existing projects, and promote cross compatibility
GTK and Qt run slowly enough on the PinePhone's anemic processor and GPU, and Electron or React Native would perform even worse.
I want a phone that is just a computer. I don't want a phone that tells me where I am allowed to install software from, or where I am allowed to get it from. I just want a computer that is small and has a phone in it.
I don't care if it is linux, I don't care if it is open source!
Nope. LTE-capable watches will replace cell phones. Phones are the thing of the past, I don't think it's worth the time anymore.
Of things relevant, watches is the present and AR is the future. Both are a challenge from FLOSS point of view: watches and AR involve very latest hardware/tech which is very proprietary AND those devices are not very interesting from the "general-purpose computer" point of view. They have very narrow purpose/function, and they become obsolete very quickly (due to newer tech being objectively better and better). Very useful devices in everyday life, but not interesting to play with.
Unlike a laptop, or a desktop or a breadboard/rpi, which are general-purpose devices and are actually interesting to play with and learn from.
Would I like a truly open/libre Linux on my, say Apple Watch or Apple Glasses? Sure, but realistically it ain't gonna happen within the tiny time span of high-tech relevance. And it'd be a travesty if bright minds would spend their valuable time on that hopeless endeavor. There are so many more interesting and more valuable things to do: improve man pages, or cure cancer...
