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Something I haven't yet understood -- why hasn't a ~Debian of Android-compatible phones emerged? Are we lacking a UI? Kernel? Apps? Interest? Interface with ex

by ISL 9y ago

Something I haven't yet understood -- why hasn't a ~Debian of Android-compatible phones emerged? Are we lacking a UI? Kernel? Apps? Interest? Interface with existing closed-source apps? Is stock Android too good?

cyphar 9y ago
Purism is planning on fixing that[1]. The funny thing is that we've actually reverted backwards, you could install a Debian-based distro on the Nokia N900 -- not really possible on newer phones (though you do have stuff like Ubuntu Phone). [1]: https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
- codetrotter 9y ago
  Speaking of Ubuntu Touch (aka Ubuntu Phone), it should be noted that though Canonical shut down support for it, a community of people calling themselves UBports are keeping the project alive. I recently bought a Nexus 5 for the purpose of running Ubuntu Touch. It arrived yesterday and I look forward to try Ubuntu Touch on it.
  - chupasaurus 9y ago
    And UBports will support Librem 5, which was announced a week ago.
- kqr 9y ago
  I miss my N900 so much and for so many reasons. Unfortunately all of mine had abysmal build quality and fell apart after a few months. A friend of mine kept repairing his for many years -- maybe he still uses it. But a huge part of why I liked the N900 was the physical keyboard. What is the puri.sm stance on that?
  - solarkraft 9y ago
    I'm guessing they won't include it, but if they really do their job well it'll be easy to add your own.
  - fghtr 9y ago
    Take a look at https://neo900.org https://neo900.org
ddtaylor 9y ago
Canonical made some attempts at a mobile Ubuntu (which is a Debian derivative) but they have a short-sighted vision and in general they have a history of failed attempts at similar projects, like Netbook Remix.
pabs3 9y ago
The problem is primarily hardware support with two issues: A lot of hardware support on these devices is proprietary in some way. Mostly proprietary firmware, some proprietary kernel drivers and some proprietary userland daemons or drivers. Most hardware doesn't have support in the mainline Linux kernel, u-boot, mesa etc. These are improving slowly as people do reverse engineering of proprietary components and the FLOSS enthusiast community does the work of getting hardware support mainlined. Some vendors also do mainlining work too and some employ folks to work on FLOSS drivers (Broadcom RPi VC4/VC5 for example). Some related links are gathered on this page: https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile
gcb0 9y ago
drivers. really. we are back to being limited to one OS because of drivers. this is also the reason lineageOS and other android roms can't just keep updating older phones to new releases. they need the oem to upgrade so they can extract drivers from the binaries.
- greenhouse_gas 9y ago
  They can and do. For example, you can get Marshmallow on the Samsung s2, which didn't officially didn't get even Lollipop.
  - pmontra 9y ago
    I had a S2. It died on October 2016 after 5 years of good work. It still has some good points against more modern phones but I won't recommend to buy a refurbished one now. I won't trust the hardware to last much longer.
  - gcb0 9y ago
    I bet that this isonly possible because someone got the drivers for display, touch, camera, radios, etc, ...in binary form from the last oem image and put in the new one. sometimes they will backport the last kernel from android 5.1 into a 6.0 image so the binary drivers still work
greenhouse_gas 9y ago
The real problem is that you can't get a phone [1] which can run upstream kernel. So while there's postmarketOS and Replicant (both trying to port regular Linux (for lack of a better word[2]) to phones), very few phones work properly (and most are fairly old and not sold anymore, IIRC Replicant's newest phone they support is the European S3 - guess how old that thing is). So now, for each device, you have to port desktop Linux [3] to whatever generation kernel it came with. Debian, in contrast, can assume that you're using the standard modern kernel. [1]. I mean that it should work as a phone, not just a small tablet. So if it can't make phone calls, it ain't a phone. All the more so if you want a working GPS and Camera. [2]. I would have said Gnu/Linux but postmarket is based on Alpine which is based on busybox/muslc and not gnu. [3]. Anything which issues syscalls is fair game, so, for example, if your oldest phone you want to maintain is six years old, then you have to back port every single program (and library!) to work on a random seven year old kernel. Even back porting android user space (which is mostly Java and doesn't interact directly with the kernel) is a huge pain (and sometimes is actually that hard that the maintainers just give up). Porting back Debian?
- juliangoldsmith 9y ago
  postmarketOS tries to bring a desktop-style, Alpine-based Linux distro to mobile devices. It has some level of support for relatively recent (~2015) devices, but there's still a lot of work to be done. Replicant is working on creating a fully free software distribution of Android, rather than trying to provide a desktop-style Linux. Porting programs isn't generally a huge deal. Most devices on postmarketOS currently use the old downstream kernel, and most things run fine on it. The main problem is that a lot of peripherals require closed source drivers and firmware. For instance, very few devices have support for hardware-accelerated graphics or wireless connectivity, both of which are necessary on a mobile device.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
juliangoldsmith 9y ago
We're working on it with postmarketOS [0]. A lot of the issue is that most devices have poor, if any, mainline kernel support. That means you have to rely on the downstream vendor kernel, which is almost always hopelessly out of date. (For instance, the downstream kernel for my OnePlus One is at 3.4 from 2012.) Besides just being out of date, the vendor kernels require binary drivers and Android-specific services to use a lot of peripherals. For instance, the graphics driver Freedreno is compatible with my OnePlus One's GPU. However, Freedreno isn't compatible with the version of KGSL that the downstream kernel supports. That meant that my only options, if I wanted hardware-accelerated graphics, were to use Halium or mainline my device. That's not even getting into bringing up WiFi, LTE, and actual phone capabilities, which are still a ways out as far as open source software is concerned. [0]: https://postmarketos.org/ https://postmarketos.org/

by ISL 9y ago

cyphar 9y ago

Purism is planning on fixing that[1]. The funny thing is that we've actually reverted backwards, you could install a Debian-based distro on the Nokia N900 -- not really possible on newer phones (though you do have stuff like Ubuntu Phone). [1]: https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

codetrotter 9y ago
Speaking of Ubuntu Touch (aka Ubuntu Phone), it should be noted that though Canonical shut down support for it, a community of people calling themselves UBports are keeping the project alive. I recently bought a Nexus 5 for the purpose of running Ubuntu Touch. It arrived yesterday and I look forward to try Ubuntu Touch on it.
- chupasaurus 9y ago
  And UBports will support Librem 5, which was announced a week ago.
kqr 9y ago
I miss my N900 so much and for so many reasons. Unfortunately all of mine had abysmal build quality and fell apart after a few months. A friend of mine kept repairing his for many years -- maybe he still uses it. But a huge part of why I liked the N900 was the physical keyboard. What is the puri.sm stance on that?
- solarkraft 9y ago
  I'm guessing they won't include it, but if they really do their job well it'll be easy to add your own.
- fghtr 9y ago
  Take a look at https://neo900.org https://neo900.org

ddtaylor 9y ago

Canonical made some attempts at a mobile Ubuntu (which is a Debian derivative) but they have a short-sighted vision and in general they have a history of failed attempts at similar projects, like Netbook Remix.

pabs3 9y ago

The problem is primarily hardware support with two issues: A lot of hardware support on these devices is proprietary in some way. Mostly proprietary firmware, some proprietary kernel drivers and some proprietary userland daemons or drivers. Most hardware doesn't have support in the mainline Linux kernel, u-boot, mesa etc. These are improving slowly as people do reverse engineering of proprietary components and the FLOSS enthusiast community does the work of getting hardware support mainlined. Some vendors also do mainlining work too and some employ folks to work on FLOSS drivers (Broadcom RPi VC4/VC5 for example). Some related links are gathered on this page: https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile

gcb0 9y ago

drivers. really. we are back to being limited to one OS because of drivers. this is also the reason lineageOS and other android roms can't just keep updating older phones to new releases. they need the oem to upgrade so they can extract drivers from the binaries.

greenhouse_gas 9y ago
They can and do. For example, you can get Marshmallow on the Samsung s2, which didn't officially didn't get even Lollipop.
- pmontra 9y ago
  I had a S2. It died on October 2016 after 5 years of good work. It still has some good points against more modern phones but I won't recommend to buy a refurbished one now. I won't trust the hardware to last much longer.
- gcb0 9y ago
  I bet that this isonly possible because someone got the drivers for display, touch, camera, radios, etc, ...in binary form from the last oem image and put in the new one. sometimes they will backport the last kernel from android 5.1 into a 6.0 image so the binary drivers still work

greenhouse_gas 9y ago

The real problem is that you can't get a phone [1] which can run upstream kernel. So while there's postmarketOS and Replicant (both trying to port regular Linux (for lack of a better word[2]) to phones), very few phones work properly (and most are fairly old and not sold anymore, IIRC Replicant's newest phone they support is the European S3 - guess how old that thing is). So now, for each device, you have to port desktop Linux [3] to whatever generation kernel it came with. Debian, in contrast, can assume that you're using the standard modern kernel. [1]. I mean that it should work as a phone, not just a small tablet. So if it can't make phone calls, it ain't a phone. All the more so if you want a working GPS and Camera. [2]. I would have said Gnu/Linux but postmarket is based on Alpine which is based on busybox/muslc and not gnu. [3]. Anything which issues syscalls is fair game, so, for example, if your oldest phone you want to maintain is six years old, then you have to back port every single program (and library!) to work on a random seven year old kernel. Even back porting android user space (which is mostly Java and doesn't interact directly with the kernel) is a huge pain (and sometimes is actually that hard that the maintainers just give up). Porting back Debian?

juliangoldsmith 9y ago
postmarketOS tries to bring a desktop-style, Alpine-based Linux distro to mobile devices. It has some level of support for relatively recent (~2015) devices, but there's still a lot of work to be done. Replicant is working on creating a fully free software distribution of Android, rather than trying to provide a desktop-style Linux. Porting programs isn't generally a huge deal. Most devices on postmarketOS currently use the old downstream kernel, and most things run fine on it. The main problem is that a lot of peripherals require closed source drivers and firmware. For instance, very few devices have support for hardware-accelerated graphics or wireless connectivity, both of which are necessary on a mobile device.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

juliangoldsmith 9y ago

We're working on it with postmarketOS [0]. A lot of the issue is that most devices have poor, if any, mainline kernel support. That means you have to rely on the downstream vendor kernel, which is almost always hopelessly out of date. (For instance, the downstream kernel for my OnePlus One is at 3.4 from 2012.) Besides just being out of date, the vendor kernels require binary drivers and Android-specific services to use a lot of peripherals. For instance, the graphics driver Freedreno is compatible with my OnePlus One's GPU. However, Freedreno isn't compatible with the version of KGSL that the downstream kernel supports. That meant that my only options, if I wanted hardware-accelerated graphics, were to use Halium or mainline my device. That's not even getting into bringing up WiFi, LTE, and actual phone capabilities, which are still a ways out as far as open source software is concerned. [0]: https://postmarketos.org/ https://postmarketos.org/