17 ms·

I don't understand the desire for a Linux phone as so described in the article as a daily driver. The Android platform represents an enormous amount of work th

I don't understand the desire for a Linux phone as so described in the article as a daily driver. The Android platform represents an enormous amount of work that encompasses a more secure base kernel, an unparalleled selection of applications designed for mobile usage and written in a memory-safe language, fantastic sandboxing and user privacy features leagues ahead of any desktop operating system, and great diversity in the hardware market. While it's apparent that Android has significant downsides - de facto proprietary drivers, an environment of mostly closed-source applications, some Big G integration, and a general lack of long-term updates occasionally countering the work put into security (thanks, chip manufacturers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26593274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26593274), these are problems that can be solved. It doesn't make sense to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Closed-source applications are more a moral problem than a security one thanks to Android's sandboxing, and a vibrant ecosystem of high-quality free-and-open-source Android applications (https://f-droid.org https://f-droid.org - Amaze, Notally, QKSMS, and Tasks are some of my favorites) makes them all but optional. Google's presence in the AOSP codebase is rather limited (mostly around notifications) and taken out altogether by custom ROMs like Lineage and GrapheneOS. Proprietary drivers remain as Android's biggest problem, perhaps alongside the manufacturers that ship locked-down phones with bloatware (looking at you, Samsung). Why go the desktop-Linux-to-mobile route when you could fork Android, write drivers for the Pinephone / Librem 5, punch a hole to the base system for privileged applications, and have the best of both worlds with an order of magnitude less effort?

realusername 5y ago
Because Android is Google's own property, it's not like a standard Linux distribution by any stretch of imagination. I'm not even against proprietary apps (just against proprietary drivers of course), it's just that transforming Android to make it behave normally is just more and more work every year. Some people (including myself) would prefer to have the same system they have on their desktop on their phone, with the added bonus of having convergence. Shielding Android from the rest of the system as a "compatibility layer" just to run some apps or drivers makes tons of sens.
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  A compatibility layer for Android apps would really make it viable. I just don't want to fight my OS to be recognized and treated as its owner. In that respect I really like how I can run Windows games on Linux via Proton and Steam; an otherwise good game can ship with all kinds of crap (like having their own launchers stuck in the system tray), but when I'm done the whole Wine-sandbox collapses and I'm back in a Linux desktop that does what I want. Something like that for the host of proprietary apps you are nowadays hard-pressed to avoid (I manage now, but it is not a tenable position) would be welcome. Ideally you could do all sorts of privacy preserving stuff at the sandbox layer.
  - pydry 5y ago
    >A compatibility layer for Android apps would really make it viable. I just don't want to fight my OS to be recognized and treated as its owner. This is the real reason we need this. Without competition from free alternatives our phones will get locked down "for our benefit" harder and harder and it won't be done for our benefit. More tracking, more of our data sold, more DRM, etc.
  - ShinyRice 5y ago
    Sure, the stuff in the tray goes away, but Wine is not a sandbox. Software can still look into your filesystem and processes. You need Flatpak for proper sandboxing.
    - tnzm 5y ago
      Flatpak, of all things? https://flatkill.org/ https://flatkill.org/
      - teddyfrozevelt 5y ago
        People really still post this?
        craftinator 5y ago
smhost 5y ago
Personally, I just want it for completeness. With phone hardware getting powerful enough to run mid-to-high end games, I want to be able to carry around a phone that I can hook up peripherals to and use it just like I would use a desktop. The Android ecosystem is pretty good in its own way, but it's qualitatively different compared to the Linux ecosystem for my use case. Windows and several popular Linux distros are moving to ARM anyway, so I feel like this is the ideal time to attempt carving out a space for people like myself.
- KozmoNau7 5y ago
  Exactly, I would love a smartphone-size universal computing device, to use on the go or plug into desktop/laptop docking devices when needed. The individual parts are all there. Phones are powerful enough, we have USB-C with displayport for docking, KDE/qt has (or used to have?) an alternate small/touch GUI setup, phones can throttle their CPUs up when placed in a dock with active cooling, every individual part of the puzzle is available today in some form. Microsoft tried it and Samsung tried it, but both were too tied to their own proprietary ecosystems. I think it could work with a det of open and freely available standards.
  - patentatt 5y ago
    > Microsoft tried it and Samsung tried it, but both were too tied to their own proprietary ecosystems. I think it could work with a det of open and freely available standards. Sorry, but in what world has a new UI paradigm or physical form factor reached mass adoption via an open source project? Not knocking open source in general, it’s just that these are not the open source communities’ strengths in general. Meanwhile, single platform monolithic companies with end-to-end control and lots of financial resources tend to do much better here. Added to the fact that this was the basic thrust of the Ubuntu phone and (iirc) the Mozilla phone projects as well, and I just don’t see it. Maybe Apple will popularize the idea with an M1 (or M2, M3, etc) based iPhone (15?) that is truly powerful enough to pull it off and can run iOS and Mac OS side by side.
    - KozmoNau7 5y ago
marto1 5y ago
No GNU userland and a waterfall of IP issues !? Enough of a reason for me to be honest.
rini17 5y ago
You haven't experienced the Nokia N900, have you?
- antb123 5y ago
  Loved that phone... and its brothers If anyone could have made it happen it was Nokia.
colordrops 5y ago
Yes, Android is mature and secure, but it's not private. No one seems to talk about this much, but there are a few Android "features" that had to be designed by sociopaths. The main one for me is the complete lack of control of network traffic. Other than a VPN loopback app, which is pretty janky, there is no way to disable network traffic per app. Even with a VPN loopback, there is no way to only allow network traffic when then app is in the foreground. There is no way to set network traffic to block by default and ask the user for permission when network access is needed. These restrictions are ABSOLUTELY DEADLY for user privacy and I don't understand why everyone isn't screaming at the top of their lungs from rooftops about these problems. It's quite obvious with a 2 seconds of thought that these deficiencies were intentional to maintain Google's advertising monopoly, but I don't want a crippled OS to support Google's abhorrent business model. It's absolutely mind boggling. It almost makes me want to join the LineageOS project to close these loopholes.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  By the way, my colleague has some crappy Huawei phone, which previously killed background apps [1], but this week received an update that changed the behaviour to simply disabling them from accessing the internet. [1]: https://dontkillmyapp.com https://dontkillmyapp.com
  - colordrops 5y ago
    Hmm, maybe it's time for a huawei. I have a oneplus and had the hardest time unlocking my Tesla for a while because OnePlus's OxygenOS kept killing the Tesla app in the background. Really stupid.
  - zibzab 5y ago
    This is a simple but wonderful idea! Hope more vendors follow. Google changing permission model to allow any app internet access was the stupidest decision made by a company in this millennium
    - izacus 5y ago
shmerl 5y ago
Android deviated from the rest of the Linux ecosystem for reasons that are irrelevant today and never tried to close the rift when it could. So no, I'm not thrilled about Android. Give me a system that uses Wayland, not SurfaceFlinger.
- fit2rule 5y ago
  This. People seem to be overlooking the fact that Android is an utterly repugnant ecosystem to develop for, and we can do much, much better.
sergeykish 5y ago
Same argument applies to Windows vs Linux. Same story. Synergy opens amazing smartphone hardware to Linux — DCI-P3 color space, high refresh rates, variable refresh rates. Sandboxing, user privacy features, we need this on desktop too.
- jhasse 5y ago
  No? You can't fork Windows.
  - sergeykish 5y ago
    "Just use existing Windows kernel and drivers, there are a lot of Open Source applications" etc etc. There is nothing special about Linux distribution, same could be done on top of NT kernel. But it is not. React OS reimplements kernel and userspace, in theory userspace could be used on top of Windows. There are a lot of Windows users yet no such thing. Somehow Linux experience is much richer and safe. Xmonad and pacman.
    - jhasse 5y ago
      There is something special about Linux distributions: The Linux kernel. In lots of areas it is indeed better than NT and it's stuff that matters to userspace, too (file system performance is one example, process spawning performance another).
      - sergeykish 5y ago
        How would you explain BSD than? And I've heard Linux 5.1 (2019) io_uring is similar to Windows NT 3.5 (1994) IOCP.
jcelerier 5y ago
> The Android platform represents an enormous amount of work that encompasses a more secure base kernel, an unparalleled selection of applications designed for mobile usage and written in a memory-safe language, fantastic sandboxing and user privacy features leagues ahead of any desktop operating system, and great diversity in the hardware market. but it's so freaking slow. I own a oneplus 8 pro and compared to my old Jolla it's an exercise in frustration, nothing in the UI is smooth. > an unparalleled selection of applications 78% of which are competing chat apps (no kidding, I have to have ~8 different chat apps installed) > designed for mobile usage and written in a memory-safe language, fantastic sandboxing and user privacy features leagues ahead of any desktop operating system, I'll be honest I'd trade all that for "less lag" without even thinking twice about it
- EvilEy3 5y ago
  There's either something really wrong with your OnePlus or your eyes, if it is slow.
  - opan 5y ago
    He compared it to a Jolla phone, which I assume runs Sailfish. If you're comparing Android to Android, you are missing the point. Slowness is from the software here.
ekianjo 5y ago
> I don't understand the desire for a Linux phone as so described in the article as a daily driver. So you are fine throwing your phone every 2 years or so once the manufacturer stops releasing updates?
- EvilEy3 5y ago
  Google and Samsung offer at least 4 years of support. This number will increase in the future as they decouple stuff from core OS.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    Drivers are still tied to an old non-upstreamed Linux kernel, aren't they?
gspr 5y ago
> The Android platform represents an enormous amount of work that encompasses a more secure base kernel, an unparalleled selection of applications designed for mobile usage and written in a memory-safe language, fantastic sandboxing and user privacy features leagues ahead of any desktop operating system, and great diversity in the hardware market. It's also all Google's. At any time, for any reason, Google can arbitrarily decide that they don't want you to run software X, Y or Z. On your device. The situation is, frankly, untenable. (Yes, you can often work around Google's arbitrary decision at the cost of inconvenience on your part. That still doesn't cut it. My device, my rules! Just like with my PC.)
swiley 5y ago
Android is: Incredibly heavy and slow Very hard to hack on A pretty mediocre OS (lots of functionality is just missing or poorly implemented.) Uses a driver model that encourages closed drivers (this means it never gets updates after Qualcomm stops releasing updates to their BSP) A tool used by Google to force computing to be the way they want. Really the only nice things about Android is the sandbox (which you don't need often on Linux because all the software is community maintained anyway) and the sleep features (doze, which takes a very small amount of work to re-implement at least on OpenRC and push notifications but Firefox already has that anyway.)
kapad 5y ago
I recently tried setting up an Android phone with LineageOS without any gapps. Google's integration into the Android libraries that are used to build almost all the apps out there is so deep that a lot of apps that I use regularly wouldn't even launch on the phone. Basically, by controlling the API that apps target when they are built, Google has attacked the AOSP from 2 sides. First is from the developer side of things. App developers need to jump through many hoops to make an app that would fall back to working with Google's services running on the phone (LineageOS without Gapps and using some fake gapps implementation to keep the API from breaking). The second attack that Google has made to the AOSP is from the end user's perspective. They have made it harder and harder to use AOSP without Google's services. Since it's so hard for user's to setup and use a phone without Google's services, they almost never take that option. (I personally, reverted to the OnePlus' Oxygen OS and ditched LineageOS). The end result being that user's just don't want to leave Google's Android garden and explore the wilderness of AOSP without Google.

realusername 5y ago

Because Android is Google's own property, it's not like a standard Linux distribution by any stretch of imagination. I'm not even against proprietary apps (just against proprietary drivers of course), it's just that transforming Android to make it behave normally is just more and more work every year. Some people (including myself) would prefer to have the same system they have on their desktop on their phone, with the added bonus of having convergence. Shielding Android from the rest of the system as a "compatibility layer" just to run some apps or drivers makes tons of sens.

Freak_NL 5y ago
A compatibility layer for Android apps would really make it viable. I just don't want to fight my OS to be recognized and treated as its owner. In that respect I really like how I can run Windows games on Linux via Proton and Steam; an otherwise good game can ship with all kinds of crap (like having their own launchers stuck in the system tray), but when I'm done the whole Wine-sandbox collapses and I'm back in a Linux desktop that does what I want. Something like that for the host of proprietary apps you are nowadays hard-pressed to avoid (I manage now, but it is not a tenable position) would be welcome. Ideally you could do all sorts of privacy preserving stuff at the sandbox layer.
- pydry 5y ago
  >A compatibility layer for Android apps would really make it viable. I just don't want to fight my OS to be recognized and treated as its owner. This is the real reason we need this. Without competition from free alternatives our phones will get locked down "for our benefit" harder and harder and it won't be done for our benefit. More tracking, more of our data sold, more DRM, etc.
- ShinyRice 5y ago
  Sure, the stuff in the tray goes away, but Wine is not a sandbox. Software can still look into your filesystem and processes. You need Flatpak for proper sandboxing.
  - tnzm 5y ago
    Flatpak, of all things? https://flatkill.org/ https://flatkill.org/
    - teddyfrozevelt 5y ago
      People really still post this?
      - craftinator 5y ago

smhost 5y ago

Personally, I just want it for completeness. With phone hardware getting powerful enough to run mid-to-high end games, I want to be able to carry around a phone that I can hook up peripherals to and use it just like I would use a desktop. The Android ecosystem is pretty good in its own way, but it's qualitatively different compared to the Linux ecosystem for my use case. Windows and several popular Linux distros are moving to ARM anyway, so I feel like this is the ideal time to attempt carving out a space for people like myself.

KozmoNau7 5y ago
Exactly, I would love a smartphone-size universal computing device, to use on the go or plug into desktop/laptop docking devices when needed. The individual parts are all there. Phones are powerful enough, we have USB-C with displayport for docking, KDE/qt has (or used to have?) an alternate small/touch GUI setup, phones can throttle their CPUs up when placed in a dock with active cooling, every individual part of the puzzle is available today in some form. Microsoft tried it and Samsung tried it, but both were too tied to their own proprietary ecosystems. I think it could work with a det of open and freely available standards.
- patentatt 5y ago
  > Microsoft tried it and Samsung tried it, but both were too tied to their own proprietary ecosystems. I think it could work with a det of open and freely available standards. Sorry, but in what world has a new UI paradigm or physical form factor reached mass adoption via an open source project? Not knocking open source in general, it’s just that these are not the open source communities’ strengths in general. Meanwhile, single platform monolithic companies with end-to-end control and lots of financial resources tend to do much better here. Added to the fact that this was the basic thrust of the Ubuntu phone and (iirc) the Mozilla phone projects as well, and I just don’t see it. Maybe Apple will popularize the idea with an M1 (or M2, M3, etc) based iPhone (15?) that is truly powerful enough to pull it off and can run iOS and Mac OS side by side.
  - KozmoNau7 5y ago

marto1 5y ago

No GNU userland and a waterfall of IP issues !? Enough of a reason for me to be honest.

rini17 5y ago

You haven't experienced the Nokia N900, have you?

antb123 5y ago
Loved that phone... and its brothers If anyone could have made it happen it was Nokia.

colordrops 5y ago

Yes, Android is mature and secure, but it's not private. No one seems to talk about this much, but there are a few Android "features" that had to be designed by sociopaths. The main one for me is the complete lack of control of network traffic. Other than a VPN loopback app, which is pretty janky, there is no way to disable network traffic per app. Even with a VPN loopback, there is no way to only allow network traffic when then app is in the foreground. There is no way to set network traffic to block by default and ask the user for permission when network access is needed. These restrictions are ABSOLUTELY DEADLY for user privacy and I don't understand why everyone isn't screaming at the top of their lungs from rooftops about these problems. It's quite obvious with a 2 seconds of thought that these deficiencies were intentional to maintain Google's advertising monopoly, but I don't want a crippled OS to support Google's abhorrent business model. It's absolutely mind boggling. It almost makes me want to join the LineageOS project to close these loopholes.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
By the way, my colleague has some crappy Huawei phone, which previously killed background apps [1], but this week received an update that changed the behaviour to simply disabling them from accessing the internet. [1]: https://dontkillmyapp.com https://dontkillmyapp.com
- colordrops 5y ago
  Hmm, maybe it's time for a huawei. I have a oneplus and had the hardest time unlocking my Tesla for a while because OnePlus's OxygenOS kept killing the Tesla app in the background. Really stupid.
- zibzab 5y ago
  This is a simple but wonderful idea! Hope more vendors follow. Google changing permission model to allow any app internet access was the stupidest decision made by a company in this millennium
  - izacus 5y ago

shmerl 5y ago

Android deviated from the rest of the Linux ecosystem for reasons that are irrelevant today and never tried to close the rift when it could. So no, I'm not thrilled about Android. Give me a system that uses Wayland, not SurfaceFlinger.

fit2rule 5y ago
This. People seem to be overlooking the fact that Android is an utterly repugnant ecosystem to develop for, and we can do much, much better.

sergeykish 5y ago

Same argument applies to Windows vs Linux. Same story. Synergy opens amazing smartphone hardware to Linux — DCI-P3 color space, high refresh rates, variable refresh rates. Sandboxing, user privacy features, we need this on desktop too.

jhasse 5y ago
No? You can't fork Windows.
- sergeykish 5y ago
  "Just use existing Windows kernel and drivers, there are a lot of Open Source applications" etc etc. There is nothing special about Linux distribution, same could be done on top of NT kernel. But it is not. React OS reimplements kernel and userspace, in theory userspace could be used on top of Windows. There are a lot of Windows users yet no such thing. Somehow Linux experience is much richer and safe. Xmonad and pacman.
  - jhasse 5y ago
    There is something special about Linux distributions: The Linux kernel. In lots of areas it is indeed better than NT and it's stuff that matters to userspace, too (file system performance is one example, process spawning performance another).
    - sergeykish 5y ago
      How would you explain BSD than? And I've heard Linux 5.1 (2019) io_uring is similar to Windows NT 3.5 (1994) IOCP.

jcelerier 5y ago

> The Android platform represents an enormous amount of work that encompasses a more secure base kernel, an unparalleled selection of applications designed for mobile usage and written in a memory-safe language, fantastic sandboxing and user privacy features leagues ahead of any desktop operating system, and great diversity in the hardware market. but it's so freaking slow. I own a oneplus 8 pro and compared to my old Jolla it's an exercise in frustration, nothing in the UI is smooth. > an unparalleled selection of applications 78% of which are competing chat apps (no kidding, I have to have ~8 different chat apps installed) > designed for mobile usage and written in a memory-safe language, fantastic sandboxing and user privacy features leagues ahead of any desktop operating system, I'll be honest I'd trade all that for "less lag" without even thinking twice about it

EvilEy3 5y ago
There's either something really wrong with your OnePlus or your eyes, if it is slow.
- opan 5y ago
  He compared it to a Jolla phone, which I assume runs Sailfish. If you're comparing Android to Android, you are missing the point. Slowness is from the software here.

ekianjo 5y ago

> I don't understand the desire for a Linux phone as so described in the article as a daily driver. So you are fine throwing your phone every 2 years or so once the manufacturer stops releasing updates?

EvilEy3 5y ago
Google and Samsung offer at least 4 years of support. This number will increase in the future as they decouple stuff from core OS.
- fsflover 5y ago
  Drivers are still tied to an old non-upstreamed Linux kernel, aren't they?

gspr 5y ago

> The Android platform represents an enormous amount of work that encompasses a more secure base kernel, an unparalleled selection of applications designed for mobile usage and written in a memory-safe language, fantastic sandboxing and user privacy features leagues ahead of any desktop operating system, and great diversity in the hardware market. It's also all Google's. At any time, for any reason, Google can arbitrarily decide that they don't want you to run software X, Y or Z. On your device. The situation is, frankly, untenable. (Yes, you can often work around Google's arbitrary decision at the cost of inconvenience on your part. That still doesn't cut it. My device, my rules! Just like with my PC.)

swiley 5y ago

Android is: Incredibly heavy and slow Very hard to hack on A pretty mediocre OS (lots of functionality is just missing or poorly implemented.) Uses a driver model that encourages closed drivers (this means it never gets updates after Qualcomm stops releasing updates to their BSP) A tool used by Google to force computing to be the way they want. Really the only nice things about Android is the sandbox (which you don't need often on Linux because all the software is community maintained anyway) and the sleep features (doze, which takes a very small amount of work to re-implement at least on OpenRC and push notifications but Firefox already has that anyway.)

kapad 5y ago

I recently tried setting up an Android phone with LineageOS without any gapps. Google's integration into the Android libraries that are used to build almost all the apps out there is so deep that a lot of apps that I use regularly wouldn't even launch on the phone. Basically, by controlling the API that apps target when they are built, Google has attacked the AOSP from 2 sides. First is from the developer side of things. App developers need to jump through many hoops to make an app that would fall back to working with Google's services running on the phone (LineageOS without Gapps and using some fake gapps implementation to keep the API from breaking). The second attack that Google has made to the AOSP is from the end user's perspective. They have made it harder and harder to use AOSP without Google's services. Since it's so hard for user's to setup and use a phone without Google's services, they almost never take that option. (I personally, reverted to the OnePlus' Oxygen OS and ditched LineageOS). The end result being that user's just don't want to leave Google's Android garden and explore the wilderness of AOSP without Google.