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Why not go sailfish? It also has an android shell that seems to run android apps just fine.
by plq 6y ago
Why not go sailfish? It also has an android shell that seems to run android apps just fine.
- cecja 6y agoThe UX is atrocious.
- chaosharmonic 6y agoIn a word: drivers. Sailfish has a runtime for Android apps, but under the hood it's closer to other mobile Linux projects, and to that end the hardware compatibility is less like Lineage or /e/ and more like UBPorts. Android's handling of the Linux kernel, until this current version cycle, has involved several forks per device -- patches from Google (the Android Common Kernel), then patches from chipset vendors, then patches from device vendors -- with closed binary drivers inserted at various points in this process. [0] Treble has been exposing generic hardware interfaces to system images since version 8, but the drivers themselves haven't had that kind of uniformity re: how they interface with the kernel itself. There are projects that will adapt them to run GNU-based systems -- to use UBPorts as an example again, it actually does exist as a GSI -- but since the modifications needed to get them to run depend on a custom kernel, they're still device-specific. Meanwhile, Android devices are required to run Google's entire test suite using a generic build of AOSP, so while GSI compatibility isn't perfect, the minimum baseline is effectively just the ability to unlock your bootloader. [0] Generally. In some cases -- most Huawei devices, non-US Samsung models -- the device vendor is the chipset vendor. But that doesn't mean their chipset IP is any more open than, say, Qualcomm's, nor does necessarily alter that of other components like camera sensors.