I was using userland which is doing emulation from what i know, my phone for god knows what for some reason doesn't work through termux but now I kinda want to patch an app with termux or something and publishing it to f-droid :p
The other side of the coin is with everybody trying to cram AI features into an existing touch UI, touch targets are shrinking and buttons and hard to differentiate gestures are getting overloaded. It used to be that I could tell people that touch UI was great because a toddler could readily master it. Try telling a toddler about edge gestures. Those days are gone now.
iOS 26 went overboard in this direction, especially on iPad. They took what used to be a great touch screen experience and made it only usable with mouse and keyboard. The traffic light buttons are horrible touch targets, as is the menu on top of the screen.
Even on iPhone the long press menus have been crammed so full and their font size reduced that they are much worse touch targets.
This OS that used to work great on a 3.5" screen is now difficult to use on a big 6.5" screen. We've gone totally backwards.
Yes, they obviously do; these very paradigms become important the moment one connects relevant HIDs to a capable-enough smartphone. That also includes high-precision operation in an untethered state, e. g. by way of a suitable stylus. Etc.
But also: why does this matter? Android is a dead ecosystem. Smart phones are a dead ecosystem. Google literally just announced that no one is allowed to develop for it and actually have random people run their applications without paying a protection fee and doxing yourself for future leaks and/or government crackdowns. Just like Apple. On your "own" smartphones you won't even be allowed to run your own software.
The only reason anyone would ever keep developing software for such platforms is if someone is paying them. And that leads to crappy software. The smartphone platforms will be entirely commercial and lose all the "scratch my own itch" software. Becoming merely a fancy bank/video/navigation/shopping terminal you have no control over.
Eh? I'm pretty sure I qualified my statements and you're just agreeing with the qualification I made. Yes, people will continue to use them. Yes, corporations will continue to develop for them. But they're not general purpose computers anymore. And if you're a human person geek I doubt you're going to want to use them for computing. But it'll take a bit for everyone to wake up to the new situation. Just like it took a bit for everyone to wake up to the social media problems. https://xkcd.com/743/
Smartphones are going to become our legal digital identity. While I'm not greatly happy about that, I do see it's inevitability - as no good alternatives have emerged. At least there are two platforms and not just one.
This is not a “done deal“ by any means and it’s a mistake to speak of it this way. I for one will reject such a mandate even if it makes life incredibly inconvenient. (I also know others who are switching away from big tech smartphones and who do not intend to return.)
We can’t hand off something as essential as ID to these megacorps, as it will only further increase their leverage over governments (i.e. the people). While I’m not happy with many government actions lately, at least they are nominally accountable!
The only backup that I can envision is to memorize a long passphrase.
There's been a good alternative the whole time. It's called not requiring a "digital identity."
Anonymity and pseudo-Anonymity on the web has worked, and would continue to work. We don't need device attestation that you are running a specific OS, from a specific vendor, with specific apps (or not) to interact with the digital world. People have been interacting with digital services from a computer web browser without that tech since the 90s.
If a digital identity is a must (and I don't think it is), it should at minimum not be tied to a proprietary, locked down OS on proprietary hardware that you don't own or control. I'd rather my "legal digital identity" be a public/private key pair that I control, not tied to any specific device.
None of that. Just your ID.
...yes it does, when have you last tried daily driving an llvmpipe-rendered desktop?
Google and Apple think they can do it because they know they are a duopoly.When they keep doing things like these, I hope we will see someone else coming forward to better serve their customers.
> The only reason anyone would ever keep developing software for such platforms is if someone is paying them Have you ever heard the name of f-droid?At least in android , this is not true. We can't let the bad examples be the only examples.
That seems to be the road we are heading down, but I think some of it may be intentional. It's a way to shut up the masses without relinquishing control of the OS back to the user.
Google's way of going "Here, we'll just "let" you run Linux" but it's also getting people used to the idea that Linux is just an "app" you run, the underlying OS still remains locked down as ever. The dangerous parts of Google's change isn't just not being able to run your own software, it's device attestation and the power that gives them (and Governments) to control what your computer can and cannot do.
If Microsoft ever implements similar changes to Windows I'll view WSL the same way.
It's just an illusion of freedom to placate us nerds.
On lower end phones, it is already common to have the OS that the firmware runs be a realtime hypervisor that multiplexes Android with a higher priority realtime OS to help drive the radio.
> device attestation and the power that gives them (and Governments) to control what your computer can and cannot do.
Device attastation is probably the least scary form of this. You still get to run whatever software you want; all you lose out on is the ability to interact with external services that demand attestation. This is a much more pro-consumer way of implementing DRM than actually locking down computers, which looked to be the way the industry was heading for years.
That's the problem "lose out on the ability to function on modern society unless you use an approved device or an approved OS." Not looking forward to a world where I have to have two phones, one "approved government and bank services phone" and one that's a device I actually own and control.
> This is a much more pro-consumer way of implementing DRM than actually locking down computers
No such thing as pro-consumer DRM, it's an oxymoron.
And Google IS locking down computers, requiring identity verification and Google to sign any app to run on Android, which conveniently they could pull at any time.
What happens when online services stop even doing business via their website and forces the use of a mobile app? Suddenly now all Linux (and Mac and Windows) computers are locked out of interacting with most of the commercial web and you are forced to have a tracking device to simply exist.
Maybe it's a "lesser evil" but it's still evil, and not something we should just settle on and accept.
Where do you find such a device today? Pixel with GrapheneOS? Any decent mobile Linux hardware I don’t know about?
If you are concerned about privacy, why are you using a firmware-backdoored chinese phone?
It is good enough that I am not in a hurry to try to go back to use some more open linux-based phone again, but definitely held back by not being allowed to be better integrated in the OS.
Regarding your second point though, GPU acceleration in Termux/proot Linux is already well supported on most mainstream phones with Snapdragon GPUs (I belive Malis are also supported to some extent). You can actually play games like Skyrim at decent FPS if you've got a modern phone, and even modern games like Cyberpunk 2077 (although you'd need to be on the newest flagship for it to be playable).
Check out the mobox project if you're interested: https://github.com/jaycore/mobox-patched
As for Wayland v X11. Wayland has gotten pretty nice over the last year or so. It's much more straight forward to work with vs the old fiddly xorg.conf files.
I don't think they wanted Xorg, I think they were asking for SurfaceFlinger rendering directly to hardware with no intermediate layer.
Isn’t that exactly what Android is? A GUI on a Linux kernel?
But there’s really not much in this space. It seems that nobody is running Android on VM… or those that do aren’t sharing how they do so.
On GNU/Linux mobile, Waydroid allows to run Android apps.
On desktop, Qubes OS runs everything in VMs for security, and they have related guides:
https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/waydroid-template/23356
https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/android-vm-options-and-blissos-...
https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/android-x86-qube-installation-g...
And of course to run a VM (if you wanted to make a competing app for example) you need a special system permission which you can't get without your device losing "integrity" status.
kirito1337•4mo ago