4 ms·

Why is "phone interface" buried down at the end of the page under "future goals"? I mean, if a project wanted to put a "10 year life-cycle" on an IoT blender b

Why is "phone interface" buried down at the end of the page under "future goals"? I mean, if a project wanted to put a "10 year life-cycle" on an IoT blender by porting Gnu/Linux to it, you'd think the first order of business would be writing a Gnu/Linux program to, you know, blend things. Getting 10+ years of running performant Weston demos would be a very distant 2nd to that.

ollieparanoid 9y ago
> Why is "phone interface" buried down at the end of the page under "future goals"? Well, right now there is no phone interface available yet, and that is why it is a future goal (which does not necessarily mean, that it is in distant future). > I mean, if a project wanted to put a "10 year life-cycle" on an IoT blender by porting Gnu/Linux to it, you'd think the first order of business would be writing a Gnu/Linux program to, you know, blend things. Getting 10+ years of running performant Weston demos would be a very distant 2nd to that. I'm not selling you a blender here. I wanted to create a solid base to run GNU/Linux natively on smartphones, and now there is this pmbootstrap component, which works quite well and seems worthy of a release. This enables other people to jump in and contribute, if they want to, and accelerate development even more, because multiple persons can work in parallel on the project. This is much more important to me, than silently working a few months or however long it would take me in my free time to package Plasma Mobile and make a release after that, just to hear that another crucial component is missing from the OS.
- jancsika 9y ago
  > This is much more important to me, than silently working a few months or however long it would take me in my free time to package Plasma Mobile and make a release after that, just to hear that another crucial component is missing from the OS. So, imagine sharing a video that shows the fruits of your labor in order to drum up some interest in your project. Strauss' "Thus Spake Zarathustra" is playing in the background. The video shows you booting the phone into Gnu/Linux. As the music builds, you touch the screen of the phone to make it start to do a task. As you enter data into the phone to complete this task, the music builds toward a climax. Finally, at the climax of the music the task on the phone is complete, and the phone reacts in the most dramatic way a phone possibly can. What do you imagine the phone doing in such a video?
  - mappu 9y ago
    > The video shows you booting the phone into Gnu/Linux. ... What do you imagine the phone doing in such a video? Making some kind of trivial kernel patch in vim, compiling, reconfiguring the bootloader, and then successfully rebooting into the new kernel
  - Drdrdrq 9y ago
    Read his comment again, you are missing the point. He is not offering you a phone, he is offering lower level components and showing you how it can be used to build a phone. Feel free to jump in and help him! Congrats to OP, hope this takes off in a major way! We could use a free (as in freedom) OS for phones!
    - djsumdog 9y ago
      Yea I thought this was more of a "turn your old phone into a Beagle Board/Pi/Tiny portable computer" type project. I'm really for this idea. It'd be nice to just run regular Linux on old phone hardware.
  - mintplant 9y ago
    Are you deliberately trying to discourage this person to the point where they give up and quit? The negativity throughout this thread is making me want to just leave HN.
    - sydd 9y ago
      While I dont agree with the tone of the post above, I agree with the content. While its a noble thing to try to build a new phone OS, I dont see the slightest chance that it will take off. Look at others who tried and failed: - Ubuntu trying basically the same with an estabilished brand, mobile experts, a huge community,.. - Mozilla. Here same as Ubuntu - Microsoft. Yeah, they were closed source, but had almost endless $$$ to throw at their project. Heck they even bought one of the biggest mobile brands (Nokia) and failed. - Other smaller ones like Tizen, Sailfish OS,... So me being negative is just being realistic.
jampa 9y ago
That's is what I think is one of the huge problems with GNU/Linux and OSS projects, design being an afterthought rather than one of the core features. I mean there is a ton of linux distributions that run better on my PC, but I still rather Hackintosh it due to the linux distros interface design and I bet others do the same. I know this is a new project, but in order to ever hit the mainstream, it needs to have a interface at least as good stock android/TouchWiz. Otherwise people will be driven away, I ask people about Ubuntu and they won't ever say "the design is bad". But they said they switched back to Windows because "they couldn't get a hang of it", because the interface made them feel confused.
- ollieparanoid 9y ago
  I agree with the "interface at least as good as stock Android" part. I wouldn't even mind if someone re-created the Android UI with native GNU/Linux libraries instead of the ones from Android. As long as the user choose the interface, this would surely make it easier for people to switch from Android to postmarketOS and users who'd like to use something different could freely do so.
  - ucaetano 9y ago
    Will never happen (well, with 99.9% confidence). It would require replicating all of Google's Android APIs and keeping them constantly up-to-date with Google's, forever. Extremely well-funded Amazon and Samsung tried, both gave up.
    - ollieparanoid 9y ago
      Wait, I did not say that it needs to be compatible with anything. Just recreating the top bar, that you can drag down to connect to your Wi-Fi etc. and the three buttons at the bottom working in a similar way would make it very easy to migrate without any compatibility requirements. But as ocdtrekkie has noted: > At the point where the phone OS can't make calls yet, worrying about style is a bit premature.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
ucaetano 9y ago
Phone interface? Isn't a terminal good enough for you? :)
- catdog 9y ago
  Someone needs to build an ultra portable (more or less) full size keyboard, then it would be enough. ;)
mac01021 9y ago
I know we're still calling them "phones", but I make and answer voice calls with mine far less frequently than I do with my desktop computer. It really is just a pocket-sized computing device and I use it almost exclusively for its web browser and internet connection. So this didn't strike me as even a little bit odd. I might be weird, though.

ollieparanoid 9y ago

> Why is "phone interface" buried down at the end of the page under "future goals"? Well, right now there is no phone interface available yet, and that is why it is a future goal (which does not necessarily mean, that it is in distant future). > I mean, if a project wanted to put a "10 year life-cycle" on an IoT blender by porting Gnu/Linux to it, you'd think the first order of business would be writing a Gnu/Linux program to, you know, blend things. Getting 10+ years of running performant Weston demos would be a very distant 2nd to that. I'm not selling you a blender here. I wanted to create a solid base to run GNU/Linux natively on smartphones, and now there is this pmbootstrap component, which works quite well and seems worthy of a release. This enables other people to jump in and contribute, if they want to, and accelerate development even more, because multiple persons can work in parallel on the project. This is much more important to me, than silently working a few months or however long it would take me in my free time to package Plasma Mobile and make a release after that, just to hear that another crucial component is missing from the OS.

jancsika 9y ago
> This is much more important to me, than silently working a few months or however long it would take me in my free time to package Plasma Mobile and make a release after that, just to hear that another crucial component is missing from the OS. So, imagine sharing a video that shows the fruits of your labor in order to drum up some interest in your project. Strauss' "Thus Spake Zarathustra" is playing in the background. The video shows you booting the phone into Gnu/Linux. As the music builds, you touch the screen of the phone to make it start to do a task. As you enter data into the phone to complete this task, the music builds toward a climax. Finally, at the climax of the music the task on the phone is complete, and the phone reacts in the most dramatic way a phone possibly can. What do you imagine the phone doing in such a video?
- mappu 9y ago
  > The video shows you booting the phone into Gnu/Linux. ... What do you imagine the phone doing in such a video? Making some kind of trivial kernel patch in vim, compiling, reconfiguring the bootloader, and then successfully rebooting into the new kernel
- Drdrdrq 9y ago
  Read his comment again, you are missing the point. He is not offering you a phone, he is offering lower level components and showing you how it can be used to build a phone. Feel free to jump in and help him! Congrats to OP, hope this takes off in a major way! We could use a free (as in freedom) OS for phones!
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    Yea I thought this was more of a "turn your old phone into a Beagle Board/Pi/Tiny portable computer" type project. I'm really for this idea. It'd be nice to just run regular Linux on old phone hardware.
- mintplant 9y ago
  Are you deliberately trying to discourage this person to the point where they give up and quit? The negativity throughout this thread is making me want to just leave HN.
  - sydd 9y ago
    While I dont agree with the tone of the post above, I agree with the content. While its a noble thing to try to build a new phone OS, I dont see the slightest chance that it will take off. Look at others who tried and failed: - Ubuntu trying basically the same with an estabilished brand, mobile experts, a huge community,.. - Mozilla. Here same as Ubuntu - Microsoft. Yeah, they were closed source, but had almost endless $$$ to throw at their project. Heck they even bought one of the biggest mobile brands (Nokia) and failed. - Other smaller ones like Tizen, Sailfish OS,... So me being negative is just being realistic.

jampa 9y ago

That's is what I think is one of the huge problems with GNU/Linux and OSS projects, design being an afterthought rather than one of the core features. I mean there is a ton of linux distributions that run better on my PC, but I still rather Hackintosh it due to the linux distros interface design and I bet others do the same. I know this is a new project, but in order to ever hit the mainstream, it needs to have a interface at least as good stock android/TouchWiz. Otherwise people will be driven away, I ask people about Ubuntu and they won't ever say "the design is bad". But they said they switched back to Windows because "they couldn't get a hang of it", because the interface made them feel confused.

ollieparanoid 9y ago
I agree with the "interface at least as good as stock Android" part. I wouldn't even mind if someone re-created the Android UI with native GNU/Linux libraries instead of the ones from Android. As long as the user choose the interface, this would surely make it easier for people to switch from Android to postmarketOS and users who'd like to use something different could freely do so.
- ucaetano 9y ago
  Will never happen (well, with 99.9% confidence). It would require replicating all of Google's Android APIs and keeping them constantly up-to-date with Google's, forever. Extremely well-funded Amazon and Samsung tried, both gave up.
  - ollieparanoid 9y ago
    Wait, I did not say that it needs to be compatible with anything. Just recreating the top bar, that you can drag down to connect to your Wi-Fi etc. and the three buttons at the bottom working in a similar way would make it very easy to migrate without any compatibility requirements. But as ocdtrekkie has noted: > At the point where the phone OS can't make calls yet, worrying about style is a bit premature.
- djsumdog 9y ago

ucaetano 9y ago

Phone interface? Isn't a terminal good enough for you? :)

catdog 9y ago
Someone needs to build an ultra portable (more or less) full size keyboard, then it would be enough. ;)

mac01021 9y ago

I know we're still calling them "phones", but I make and answer voice calls with mine far less frequently than I do with my desktop computer. It really is just a pocket-sized computing device and I use it almost exclusively for its web browser and internet connection. So this didn't strike me as even a little bit odd. I might be weird, though.