Comment by yjftsjthsd-h
1 year ago
Well... yeah, don't do that. I mean this seriously, not facetiously; when I say I want a Linux phone what I mean is I want a phone that runs Debian or whatever (on bare metal, with good quality of experience, and with a mainline kernel) and where I install software out of the official repos using apt (or whatever).
(Also plenty of people on desktop Linux do `curl | sh`, and some of us are getting most of our Android apps out of F-Droid; I'm not sure the distinction runs quite the way you're suggesting.)
You can have a pinephone, and it will work fine for like 2 hours, warming like hell, and having you wait for minutes for an app to open. That’s where the linux userspace is. Maybe we should take a look at android and simply re-use the multi-million dollars spent on actually making a working mobile OS?
While my experience with PinePhone has been significantly better (sounds like you may have had a faulty unit), we have working close-to-mainline ports for a few Qualcomm-powered phones (e.g., Xiaomi Poco F1, OnePlus 6(t), Google Pixel 3a, ...) in OSes like postmarketOS or Mobian. Turns out these work a lot better - having phones build with components for phones makes a significant difference.
I didn’t mean to “shit” on the project, I did buy it as a means to both support it and to toy around with it - and yeah, the “free hardware” (which is arguably a bit naive and marketing-y goal) definitely doesn’t help create a device fit for everyday use, but I’m afraid the userspace is just not even ready to tackle the complexity, and I don’t see it happening anytime soon.
Android has a proper security, IPC model, the whole userspace has a focus on battery-saving, apps are made in a way to be suspend-able, etc. “GNU/Linux” is living in the past where C-posix binary goes brr is considered safe and enough, and I just don’t think that’s the case.
I don't understand what any of your comment has to do with this thread, which is about security models and application sources.
That said,
> You can have a pinephone, and it will work fine for like 2 hours, warming like hell, and having you wait for minutes for an app to open. That’s where the linux userspace is.
No, that's where the pinephone hardware is. I mean, also it sounds like maybe you have a defective unit because mine doesn't do what you're describing, but this is like judging Android by the cheapest phone I can buy, which is also agonizingly slow. If you don't use a device built out of really old+cheap parts, ex. postmarketos is perfectly fine.
> but this is like judging Android by the cheapest phone I can buy, which is also agonizingly slow
Nope, even running android on the same pinephone hardware results in a smooth system - it’s almost like google has been spending dollar billions on fixing and developing stuff that won’t magically appear in a userspace stuck in unix times. The kernel did get some upstreaming, that’s why linux laptops are remotely portable.
But for a mobile device you need a used space that understand the resource-constrained environment and are good citizens. This makes a huge difference in an age where racing-to-suspend is the way to conserve battery.
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