• 3 Posts
  • 528 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • Yes, Android has issues but what I’m saying is that so far Linux on phones really hasn’t been able to compete. No one want’s a phone with no camera, no GPS, no apps and terrible battery. Making Linux phones is just super difficult and sadly I don’t see it happening anytime soon. Android is a good platform with lots of hardware and apps. You have Fairphone offering long tern support, f-droid offering privacy oriented apps and LineageOS offering stable OS. Getting more phoes to support it is a better bet than getting Linux to properly work on modern phones.


  • Yes, it’s all true but the issue is you can already do a lot of those things with a lot of cheap hardware that is is simply easier to support than old phones. And when it comes to phones being phones Android is really good and has a lot of apps. I think the problem with Linux phones getting more popular is that the overlap between desktop/server and mobile is very small. I mean I use my phone only for phone things and a lot of things I do on my phone I can do only on my phone (e.g. charging an electric car is basically impossible without a Android/iPhone). Having a phone that can do some things desktop/server can do but can’t do a lot of things a phone can do is pretty much pointless at this point.

    When we’ll get a proper Linux phone with full Android apps support and convergence it will be really awesome but I just don’t think there’s enough interest to get there at this point.


  • I honestly don’t really get what there is to gain by using “Desktop Linux”.

    More freedom I guess. I remember my n900 and how fun it was to just ssh into it and dig in my home directory, install apps with packet manger, edit config files with vi and so on. It really felt like having small Linux machine in my pocket. With Android everything is definitely more locked up but then again, I’m not sure what would I do if it was more open. Writing apps for Android is easier than for desktop (or just as easy), there are no more hardware keyboard phones so using terminal on them is terrible anyway and phones just work anyway so there’s no need to mess with the configuration. Personally I mostly gave up on the ‘Linux phone’ idea and if I need any new features I will simply write cross platform app that runs on Android (for example with tauri).


  • AOSP. Sad but true.

    When first pinephone came out I really believed it’s heading somewhere. It thought that it will be kind of like raspberry Pi (fun, cheap platform to play with) and that we’ll quickly see copycats and it will slowly grow the way Linux on desktop did. AFAIK nothing like this happened. You still can’t get a phone with decent Linux support which for me shows that we’re stuck with android. I think most people that would help Linux phone happen are simply satisfied with LineageOS so there’s no incentive to put as much effort into it as it requires.











  • The way the EU approaches this walled garden problem, is to try and offer ways for other competitors to tap into the user base of the bigger players instead of trying to allow all EU citizens to chat with any other EU citizen who uses META Products regardless of their host platform.

    Probably because of spam? I don’t think you can open up all the communicators to every self hosted server there is. It would be a disaster.



  • Yep, programming is fun but working as a programmer not so much. For me writing software is a creative activity. It’s fun to come up with problems and find solutions for them. In my personal projects I decide what problem I want to solve, choose the technology I think will be fun to solve it in and then come up with a solution I like.

    At work you are usually handed a problem you don’t care about (we’re decommissioning X, you don’t have to know why, just change everything to use Y), the solution is described in detail by someone else and you just have to turn it into some code using 5-10 years old stack.

    Fortunately at my current job I mostly do projects without much technical oversight (proof-of-concept type project) so I can choose how I want to do then. I dislike the company culture but I know that moving somewhere else would mean going back to boring coding agian.