But for me, I see so much potential in Linux phones, but after waiting decades for the Linux desktop to pickup, I won't hold my breath.
I guess I'm with you man. I'm often baffled at how much low hanging fruit never gets fixed
But need all that software for phones, make it compatible, stable, easy to install etc. maybe it will happen if some company invests in it. Like gaming on linux and valve
Linux desktops are very much usable now, especially if you choose a competent DE like KDE, and a decent distro (ie, not Ubuntu).
Is there anything particular you find the Linux desktop still lacks majorly, preventing you from switching?
For example, we now have first class games support via Proton. First class application support via Electron and other web technologies. Linux used in schools via Chromebooks. Etc
Linux was never going to be Windows-killer but I’m constantly amazed at just how easy it is to use vanilla GNU Linux in a variety of previously closed domains and how Linux has taken over as the de facto base for many commercial systems too (phones, tablets, Chromebooks, smart TVs, set top boxes, etc.
There’s also plenty of OEMs that support and even ship Linux systems. And that would have been unthinkable to anyone who lived through the 90s and saw how MS penalised OEMs and retailers for shipping non-MS OSs.
So at what stage do people say “Linux desktop has picked up”?
To answer your question.
But the "desktop" itself refers to the GNU Linux userspace, which has plenty to criticize it for (with that said, I personally find windows to be worse on many counts). Desktop OSs are a generation behind mobile OSs, and they have a really hard time making that jump, with possibly OSX being the closest to it. They have a terribly insecure "security" model (compare the number of vulnerabilities per user for a desktop OS vs mobile - especially considering that they something like Linux desktop is barely targeted compared to the billions of android users) where your user usually runs your applications - this worked in the age of huge servers with lots of terminal users connected, where the number of processes running for=as the user were readily inspectable (due to their low number and being directly started by the user). But with applications we have tens of thousands of threads/processes running simultaneously. The processes are running by me (and thus can do everything I can), but not directly for me. The sane thing to do would be to run them in a sandbox, basically what android does (runs them as generated "system" users, and has a well-defined IPC architecture to cut holes only where necessary).
What's the difference between an AOSP Android phone and a Linux phone? For me, there is no substantial difference. The Android based phone is likely to be way more usable the various "Linux phones". The linked article states "Linux phones and their apps are all open-source and do not depend on ads or surveillance to sustain some nefarious business model, which means there is much privacy to be won." but this also applies to AOSP Android devices with open source apps.
In other words: If you seek a Linux phone, why aren't you picking GrapheneOS or LineageOS? Is there anything else that's missing?
NIH is the only rationale for the "Linux" phone thing and it's why it will be forever fringe. People working on "Linux" phones as anything more than a diversion (why not play Factorio instead?) are wasting their time.
> People working on "Linux" phones as anything more than a diversion (why not play Factorio instead?) are wasting their time.
People are free to spent their free time however they want. Some people view building things, whether it’s furniture or software, more enjoyable than playing computer games or watching TV.
More seriously, I think the reason people want to do this is threefold: 1. Android vendors almost universally seem to make it hard to run stock AOSP (and do the Windows bloatware thing that Windows vendors were known for), so a "linux phone" lets people run what they want and remove what they do not 2. AOSP, while open source, is not developed in any way like a community open source project, so their ability to change anything, especially anything Google does not want to change, is limited and means constant rebasing 3. AOSP doesn't really solve the "run a modern/non-buggy kernel" issue on existing vendor hardware (as far as I know), so if you're going to spend time on getting the kernel to work, you probably want to have a userland that is amenable for getting the kernel working, so AOSP isn't helpful there, and by the time you've done all this, you can probably just run the rest of the standard setup with a distro and tooling you are already familiar with
I think the interesting thing would be if the modern kernel work from (3) could be used by an AOSP build and get the best of both worlds, or if by the time you do all this AOSP is too resource intensive to run on the device, and so running the alternative is the only option.
The number of CPU cycles my current android phone burns through just to boot and get ready to accept my "first useful input" is probably in the same order of magnitude as or higher than my old N900 would use for the entire day (600MHz single core vs. 8 cores at several GHz). Yet somehow the N900 could easily run quite a lot of things in parallel and would still react quickly to inputs, while I decided to get rid of my previous (still several times more powerful) phone because it would regularly hang for 10 more seconds without any good reason (also there were no more OS updates).
Also with the N900, I had control over every aspect of the system, I could easily script things in python without installing a huge app for it, which the OS would decide to randomly kill to save battery, etc.. Closest thing you can do on Android is root your phone and now every second app complains what a horrible person you are for wanting a bit more control over your own hardware.
That being said, I too eventually buckled to the fact that all the software you need to make a smartphone useful/entertaining is pretty much only available for Android and iOS. And the most realistic way to get "Android-compatibility" to a Linux phone is to just ship an entire Android build with it, due to how interwoven things are on Android.
Some more things to add: On the N900 updates were quick, easy and painless to a degree that no current phone OS matches: You just to "apt update && apt upgrade", reboot will only happen when really necessary, otherwise any small component (which are just .deb packages as in Debian or Ubuntu) will just be upgraded and restarted in place, without a big download, interruption and reboot. And most importantly, without waiting for a slow vendor to collect and package up all the tiny updates into a big 1GB package that can then be delivered weeks late...
Also, Backups. The only backup solution for a non-rooted phone nowadays is "use our cloud, trust us", and even then backups are always incomplete, because an increasing number of apps set the "no-backup" flags and do (or not do) their own thing, selling you yet one more cloud subscription just to get your own data into "safety". And even with a rooted LineageOS, backups are still a huge pain and incomplete. On the N900, you could just run any old normal Linux backup software, and be done. Imagine, your phone just sending its stuff to your company tape library, no hassle!
And (didn't try this, but should have worked): remote management. SSH into your users' phones to do stuff. Run ansible/puppet/..., manage them like any old Linux box. No tedious mobile device crap management that doesn't really do most of the useful shit, only works on half the hardware and in the end is just yet another cloud lock in by some vendor.
One is actually working without draining the battery in an hour and has an actually working security model.
Sorry for the tongue in cheek reply, but I am in complete agreement with you.
?
If you use a famous and popular vendor like Samsung, if you're really really lucky your 0-day will take 9 months to be fixed.
The latter is:
- not being developed by Google which chooses what's better for them,
- provides convenient development tools,
- runs any desktop Linux software, can serve as a desktop when connected to a keyboard/screen,
- native terminal, including ssh, sshfs, X forwarding etc,
- allows to choose the OS you run.
More: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
Currently I use Sailfish from Jolla on a Sony phone. For a linux phone, it serves my needs. I would be open to change.
Daily Driving a Linux Phone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750756 - 2 days ago (3 points, 2 comments)
VoLTE works fine (phosh with gnome-calls)
feel free to ask questions you may have
Do you use Waydroid and Android apps? Apps like Whatsapp and Signal are things I use.
Not that android with 2 SIM cards works good, but it seems no phones with 2 sims are supported by linux at the moment.
The geniuses at google can't comprehend the concept of "call numbers from country X with number from country X, do the same for country Y" so I must manually select by myself every single time and I get charged some obscene amount of money if I click wrong.
I got one from the Fosdem and it is truly amazing! Contrary to previous things I tried, like the pinephone, this one is really totally usable for everyday with everything that you could need (phone, SMS, 4g/5g, ...). Especially, for one time it has a very good camera, on par with some Xiaomi phones, that is really ok when you like to take pictures.
Basically, it is a kind of a debian, but there is something very amazing, waydroid, that allows to run Android apps like if it was native apps but with full control other their rights, like being in a sandbox.
The only issue that is not really solvable is that a lot of apps are requiring the Google integrity verification shit, so your are forced to connect with your Google account to the play store or Google services to be able to use them. Like these shitty OpenAI and Mistral apps...
Slight adjustment to your verbiage: you are forced to interact with Google, but I don't recall having to give a phone number for emulators. Then again, one didn't need a microsofr account to use windows until recently, so I might be wrong.
Tablets and things like x86 android exist so I don't know that Google can enforce phone numbers anyhow, if you want a separate login for each device...
In addition with integrity verification, I can easily think that they are using it for "push notifications" that will also travel through Google.
So, it is not only that you will have to "interact" with Google, but the fact that you will be forced to let Google track you: which phone you use, which ip, which app with which account, used when, where, ...".
That defects a little bit the purpose to have a "free" phone if you still have to give your data to Google.
So the problem is the "push" not the "pull".
Many apps do require passing the integrity check, though, but microG is getting better on that front (and IIRC you don’t need a Google account for that).
Science has gone too far!
Seriously, thanks for pointing this one out. I haven't heard of it before.
So furiphone (fxl1) and hopefully nothing related to "iphone".
But, compared to the pinephone and co, this is the first one that could be used as a daily driver, without another read android backup phone. And it works well out of the box, without firmware flashing or any console/dev operation.
Hang on, did you just cite 2-factor auth as something that requires a proprietary app? And password managers?
After that I tried Firefox OS but it was switfly replaced by Android, thank the gods for Android.
Meanwhile here I am on my Linux machine, constantly anxious that sooner or later one of my bazillion npm and pip dependencies will get compromised, and secretly praying that one day proper sandboxing and an Android-security model will be common on the Linux desktop, so that I can erect security boundaries between my applications and repositories.
I find this quote[0] by the developer of SpectrumOS[1] rather telling:
<qyliss> I have embarked on the ultimate yak shave
<qyliss> it started with "I wish I could securely store passwords on my computer"
<qyliss> And now I am at the "I have funding to build my own operating system" level
Also the very same npm backdoors have already hit android apps. What can sandboxing do if you backdoor a dependency of your banking app?
And let's not forget the several noclick attacks that can root your iphone with a message :)
Years ago, I met someone (through another friend) who worked in CS, and was super into digital privacy. He was the first person I knew to run a Linux phone, for privacy reasons. He tried to pay for as much as possible by cash, and maintained his accounts manually on paper. The only way to contact him was by text message (intermittently, unreliably) or via a specific client using the Matrix protocol. My friend and I both installed the client to be able to contact him and maintain a friendship.
After a few months, we both lost contact with him simultaneously: something was updated in the client, and it was impossible to re-establish contact with him without a F2F interaction (="privacy"). Sadly, he was also uncontactable by text message. For both of us, the friendship simply ceased to exist.
My reflection is that such things --as with many things in life-- are on a spectrum. At some point on the spectrum, as you head towards the extreme end, your position on that spectrum (be it voluntary or --as with disease-- involuntary) start to impair your ability to live (what might be considered) a normal functional life. I'd also hazard that moving towards that extreme end of the spectrum beings increasing small gains, coupled with increasingly large downsides.
I'm not suggesting that running a pure Linux phone is extreme, but it's definitely in the middle zone where there are definite downsides.
Animats•2h ago
Is it still possible to initialize an Android phone without a Google account?
codethief•1h ago
Nux•1h ago
Check devices supported by 3rd party distros like LineageOS which out of the box have no Google services. Ironically Pixel phones are very well supported. Xiaomi, OnePlus, too. There are quite a few:
https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/
amaccuish•1h ago
Without that ability, anyone can plug in to your phone and write whatever they want to the internal flash and your phone will be none the wiser.
lucb1e•39m ago
...it's sure nice this exists and is available to anyone but it's not seriously a risk if you're not of interest to people who are willing to physically show up and bug your hardware in a way that requires quite a bit of preparation
amelius•51m ago
Or maybe it is because mobile computing is just stuck, and it won't move even in decades ...
lawn•1h ago