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The only "real" solution is to get an actual Linux phone, such as the PinePhone[1] or Librem 5[2]. 1 - https://www.pine64.org/pinephone https://www.pine64.org/

The only "real" solution is to get an actual Linux phone, such as the PinePhone[1] or Librem 5[2]. 1 - https://www.pine64.org/pinephone https://www.pine64.org/pinephone 2 - https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5

zozbot234 6y ago
Linux phones are nice since they provide things like mainline kernel support which is important for the long term, but many cheap Android devices can be modded to run custom firmware. (The PostmarketOS is working on providing "baseline" Linux installs for those devices.)
- kagenouta 6y ago
  Also worth noting that one of Google's long-term goals is to make Android bootable on mainline. They've been slowly upstreaming the patches they built into Android's base kernel, and their Treble roadmap involves further isolating the hardware drivers, to enable running a generic kernel across devices.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    Yes and AIUI, libhybris is working on supporting those userspace hardware drivers on a non-AOSP install. The postmarketOS folks would rather do without using downstream code/drivers/firmware at all and keep everything upstream based, but some devices will need this and it might also be useful for quick bring up on new devices.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  I am a big fan of PostmarketOS, but that being said, you still need to patch the Mesa libraries to get hardware acceleration working on an old Nexus 7. They want to do a lot more work, but it's difficult with all these garbage/trash ARM devices out there. If Google gave a shit about e-waste, they'd mandate UEFI+ARM like Microsoft did with their phones (except without the locked bootloader). Trying to get drivers to load an work on every ARM variant is a nightmare compared to x86.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    > but that being said, you still need to patch the Mesa libraries to get hardware acceleration working on an old Nexus 7. Why are these patches needed? If the issue is that graphics has to rely on a proprietary binary, then that's sad but not something that Mesa can do much about. If no non-free code is required, it should be possible to push these patches upstream and make the support official.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > they'd mandate UEFI+ARM like Microsoft did with their phones (except without the locked bootloader) I approve, but is that sufficient? UEFI gives you a better booting situation, but I thought you still needed device tree or something to handle device enumeration? Or does UEFI do that? EDIT: In an attempt to answer my own question, I dug up https://elinux.org/Device_Tree_What_It_Is#UEFI https://elinux.org/Device_Tree_What_It_Is#UEFI which implies that UEFI can replace device tree and give you an actual uniform platform. If I'm getting that right, then that does look like the best possible solution.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    I am still surprised Google gets almost no flack for this. Chromebooks are particularly bad offenders. They're basically disposable laptops with an incredibly short lifecycle, where even browser security updates end when Google decides a laptop has left support. It's ironic Chrome is supported many years longer on any given Windows PC than any given Chromebook. Google loves claiming to be environmentally friendly, but disposable computing is practically their default mode now.
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      Not sure what's "bad" about Chromebooks, seeing as you can unlock them and install standard firmware. Then your only obstacle to using them as you would any other laptop is OEM hardware that's sometimes not supported by the mainline kernel, and a mildly non-standard keyboard. Android is a lot worse than that, many devices are not even OEM unlockable in the first place.
Sebb767 6y ago
But you pay 750$ for a 3GB quad core phone; I've got these specs on a 300€ OnePlus One five (six?) years ago. Sure, replaceable battery and open hardware are a _very_ good thing, but the value/$ of these phones are horrendous. That's not to defend OnePlus or any other manufacturer, but when I can get a high end Samsung or Xiaomi device with 4 times the specs at every corner for the same price or less and simply install Lineage on it. I definitely support the effort and I love that they finally got the design modern, but those prices are hard to swallow, even for someone pretty privacy-focused.
- na85 6y ago
  >value/$ of these phones are horrendous Sounds like you value the open/libre aspect at $0. Not everyone feels the same way: Those phones are for people who value the replaceable battery and libre stack at $x where x > 0.
  - adamc 6y ago
    Seems more like $X >> 0.
  - Sebb767 6y ago
    Sure, there's a market for these phones and I absolutely do not speak for everyone :) Still, I can get a Samsung Galaxy A20e for 150€ right now, which has about the same specs (actually slightly better) and spend two hours to get Lineage on it. My point is, I do value my privacy a lot, even to the point of running my phone without GApps (which drops a lot of features), and I think these projects are absolutely awesome, but with their current offering those phones are simply not a general solution to someone with a budget.
    - AsyncAwait 6y ago
      Your cheap Samsung phones are not running open firmware with mainline Linux, nor have hardware kill switches. A PinePhone/Librem 5 will also always be capable of running emacs/golang etc. which is not easily doable on Android if termux isn't possible anymore.
sub7 6y ago
Unfortunately these tiny side projects are not the answer. They'll never get traction because they're not better devices. The answer is to either hack Android/iOS so you can patch out all the bundled bs or to regulate them and force them to offer a "clean" OS version.
- coronadisaster 6y ago
  "luckily", that is not the truth
- mondoshawan 6y ago
  I think this is the third time I've seen this kind of comment on HN about this. Seems like an uptick, but these aren't side projects.
- ta17711771 6y ago
  This is why, after years of pining over Librem phone and similar, and learning a lot about security along the way, I've settled on GrapheneOS.
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  Unfortunately, by doing so you'll always rely on proprietary hardware blobs and hostile vendors who will make it harder to patch whatever you want to patch with each release in the name of "security" and will never offer anything close to an actual GNU/Linux experience on a phone. I also don't see how a process that requires rooting, patching etc, is any more prone to mainstream adoption than an actual Linux phone. The thing is, if one wants to move a cause somewhere, it may require some inconveniencing at the start for the long-term vision to pan out. Working with GCC was surely a bit painful at the start of the 90s, but it was worth it for the goal of having a free software stack on the desktop and now it's time to do the same for the phone.
dirtydroog 6y ago
Nokia had the N900 tooo
ndesaulniers 6y ago
Android is not actual Linux?
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Given that you guys don't list Linux APIs as something that one can count on as stable NDKs APIs, require us to manually write JNI wrappers to access 90% of OS features, no not really. It could be running BSD or Windows and we would hardly notice.
  - ndesaulniers 6y ago
    Was waiting for the first "No True Scotsman" definition of what precisely Linux is. Guess we better get rid of the hardware abstraction layer for your majesty, too, then?
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Depends how much the Chocolate Factory Oompa-Loompas are willing to actually offer a C and C++ development environment comparable to other GNU/Linux variants. Better ask Willy Wonka if it is ok to do so, and by Android 20 we might eventually get it, if it takes as much as sorting out header files, build tools, native dependencies, gcc and clang support and finally listening to game developers as presented at GDC 2020.
      - ndesaulniers 6y ago
        > game developers as presented at GDC 2020. Link? Otherwise it's hard to take full time HN armchair commenters seriously.
maelito 6y ago
If only they had a desktop mode like Samsung Dex.

zozbot234 6y ago

Linux phones are nice since they provide things like mainline kernel support which is important for the long term, but many cheap Android devices can be modded to run custom firmware. (The PostmarketOS is working on providing "baseline" Linux installs for those devices.)

kagenouta 6y ago
Also worth noting that one of Google's long-term goals is to make Android bootable on mainline. They've been slowly upstreaming the patches they built into Android's base kernel, and their Treble roadmap involves further isolating the hardware drivers, to enable running a generic kernel across devices.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Yes and AIUI, libhybris is working on supporting those userspace hardware drivers on a non-AOSP install. The postmarketOS folks would rather do without using downstream code/drivers/firmware at all and keep everything upstream based, but some devices will need this and it might also be useful for quick bring up on new devices.
djsumdog 6y ago
I am a big fan of PostmarketOS, but that being said, you still need to patch the Mesa libraries to get hardware acceleration working on an old Nexus 7. They want to do a lot more work, but it's difficult with all these garbage/trash ARM devices out there. If Google gave a shit about e-waste, they'd mandate UEFI+ARM like Microsoft did with their phones (except without the locked bootloader). Trying to get drivers to load an work on every ARM variant is a nightmare compared to x86.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  > but that being said, you still need to patch the Mesa libraries to get hardware acceleration working on an old Nexus 7. Why are these patches needed? If the issue is that graphics has to rely on a proprietary binary, then that's sad but not something that Mesa can do much about. If no non-free code is required, it should be possible to push these patches upstream and make the support official.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > they'd mandate UEFI+ARM like Microsoft did with their phones (except without the locked bootloader) I approve, but is that sufficient? UEFI gives you a better booting situation, but I thought you still needed device tree or something to handle device enumeration? Or does UEFI do that? EDIT: In an attempt to answer my own question, I dug up https://elinux.org/Device_Tree_What_It_Is#UEFI https://elinux.org/Device_Tree_What_It_Is#UEFI which implies that UEFI can replace device tree and give you an actual uniform platform. If I'm getting that right, then that does look like the best possible solution.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  I am still surprised Google gets almost no flack for this. Chromebooks are particularly bad offenders. They're basically disposable laptops with an incredibly short lifecycle, where even browser security updates end when Google decides a laptop has left support. It's ironic Chrome is supported many years longer on any given Windows PC than any given Chromebook. Google loves claiming to be environmentally friendly, but disposable computing is practically their default mode now.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    Not sure what's "bad" about Chromebooks, seeing as you can unlock them and install standard firmware. Then your only obstacle to using them as you would any other laptop is OEM hardware that's sometimes not supported by the mainline kernel, and a mildly non-standard keyboard. Android is a lot worse than that, many devices are not even OEM unlockable in the first place.

Sebb767 6y ago

But you pay 750$ for a 3GB quad core phone; I've got these specs on a 300€ OnePlus One five (six?) years ago. Sure, replaceable battery and open hardware are a _very_ good thing, but the value/$ of these phones are horrendous. That's not to defend OnePlus or any other manufacturer, but when I can get a high end Samsung or Xiaomi device with 4 times the specs at every corner for the same price or less and simply install Lineage on it. I definitely support the effort and I love that they finally got the design modern, but those prices are hard to swallow, even for someone pretty privacy-focused.

na85 6y ago
>value/$ of these phones are horrendous Sounds like you value the open/libre aspect at $0. Not everyone feels the same way: Those phones are for people who value the replaceable battery and libre stack at $x where x > 0.
- adamc 6y ago
  Seems more like $X >> 0.
- Sebb767 6y ago
  Sure, there's a market for these phones and I absolutely do not speak for everyone :) Still, I can get a Samsung Galaxy A20e for 150€ right now, which has about the same specs (actually slightly better) and spend two hours to get Lineage on it. My point is, I do value my privacy a lot, even to the point of running my phone without GApps (which drops a lot of features), and I think these projects are absolutely awesome, but with their current offering those phones are simply not a general solution to someone with a budget.
  - AsyncAwait 6y ago
    Your cheap Samsung phones are not running open firmware with mainline Linux, nor have hardware kill switches. A PinePhone/Librem 5 will also always be capable of running emacs/golang etc. which is not easily doable on Android if termux isn't possible anymore.

sub7 6y ago

Unfortunately these tiny side projects are not the answer. They'll never get traction because they're not better devices. The answer is to either hack Android/iOS so you can patch out all the bundled bs or to regulate them and force them to offer a "clean" OS version.

coronadisaster 6y ago
"luckily", that is not the truth
mondoshawan 6y ago
I think this is the third time I've seen this kind of comment on HN about this. Seems like an uptick, but these aren't side projects.
ta17711771 6y ago
This is why, after years of pining over Librem phone and similar, and learning a lot about security along the way, I've settled on GrapheneOS.
AsyncAwait 6y ago
Unfortunately, by doing so you'll always rely on proprietary hardware blobs and hostile vendors who will make it harder to patch whatever you want to patch with each release in the name of "security" and will never offer anything close to an actual GNU/Linux experience on a phone. I also don't see how a process that requires rooting, patching etc, is any more prone to mainstream adoption than an actual Linux phone. The thing is, if one wants to move a cause somewhere, it may require some inconveniencing at the start for the long-term vision to pan out. Working with GCC was surely a bit painful at the start of the 90s, but it was worth it for the goal of having a free software stack on the desktop and now it's time to do the same for the phone.

dirtydroog 6y ago

Nokia had the N900 tooo

ndesaulniers 6y ago

Android is not actual Linux?

pjmlp 6y ago
Given that you guys don't list Linux APIs as something that one can count on as stable NDKs APIs, require us to manually write JNI wrappers to access 90% of OS features, no not really. It could be running BSD or Windows and we would hardly notice.
- ndesaulniers 6y ago
  Was waiting for the first "No True Scotsman" definition of what precisely Linux is. Guess we better get rid of the hardware abstraction layer for your majesty, too, then?
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Depends how much the Chocolate Factory Oompa-Loompas are willing to actually offer a C and C++ development environment comparable to other GNU/Linux variants. Better ask Willy Wonka if it is ok to do so, and by Android 20 we might eventually get it, if it takes as much as sorting out header files, build tools, native dependencies, gcc and clang support and finally listening to game developers as presented at GDC 2020.
    - ndesaulniers 6y ago
      > game developers as presented at GDC 2020. Link? Otherwise it's hard to take full time HN armchair commenters seriously.

maelito 6y ago

If only they had a desktop mode like Samsung Dex.