48 ms·

Is there hope for Linux on smartphones? [video]

157 points by McSinyx 4y ago

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mayoi 4y ago
Android works just fine on my smartphone.
jqpabc123 4y ago
Hardware manufacturers have no incentive to support it.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  Erm... Android is Linux.
  - JCWasmx86 4y ago
    Just the kernel is Linux, but with the "Linux" that is meant here, it has basically nothing in common, be it e.g. in the userland or "the spirit". The Linux from "Linux Smartphones" e.g. fosters an open, user-first ecosystem, as opposed to the often very closed and locked Android Smartphones. Another examples are e.g. Safetynet or the Google Play Integrity API. Those primarily don't server the users. Or apps that either complain or even stop working on rooted phones. We have admin/root on normal PCs and nobody is complaining there.
    - mulmen 4y ago
      Linux is only a kernel. What most people mean when they say “Linux” is actually “Linux distribution” which is the Linux kernel plus some userland like GNU or Android.
    - mmsnberbar66 4y ago
      > We have admin/root on normal PCs and nobody is complaining there. That's true.
    - 3836293648 4y ago
      Just the kernel is linux, but isn't basically all of the hardware support we need in the kernel? Sure, we're still out of luck with trying to run mainline kernels, but what's stopping us from running normal GNU userland on top of a working Android kernel?
      - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
        Not all the hardware support is internal for Android devices, but yes you're basically asking for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybris_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybris_(software)
    - charcircuit 4y ago
      >Those primarily don't server the users. Not having your images and messages scraped or getting tons of spam is in the interest of users. Those API allow developers to offer a better experience to users by being able to know if people are running a trusted version of the software.
  - matrix12 4y ago
    I think they conflate GNU with Linux kernel.
    - what-imright 4y ago
      Why is the title “Is there hope for linux on smartphones?”? If it said “Is there hope for GNU on smartphones?” the answer would be a resounding no, because the community is fractured and politicized to the degree the products are uncompetitive. Pinephone is an example. Then there was the Ubuntu effort. Android, being partly closed as the GPL2 allows for, is proof that Linux can be highly successful without the GNU crowd. And perhaps they should stop taking credit for software they didn’t write. They made the license. For all the complaining, the free software community hasn’t designed from the ground up and released one single production class handset alternative at a time when the culture consumes in the billions. That’s says a lot. The infighting and utopian idealistic virtue signaling is in sharp contrast to the reality of the platforms the GNU crowd has built.
      - tingletech 4y ago
        most of the user space tools originated from GNU (such as gcc), linux really just brought the kernel.
        what-imright 4y ago
        Just? It’s 28 million lines of code, the world’s largest software project
        School-Cotton 4y ago
        What counts as one software project? The combined Facebook codebase, for example, is surely larger than that.
        anthk 4y ago
        Chromium is bigger than that.
        4y ago
rvz 4y ago
> while we're picky about free software on our laptops, desktops and servers lots of us have a truck load full of proprietary software in their pocket every day. Does it have to be that way? It doesn't have to be like this, but it is also not 'early days' anymore and we have given this idea lots of time to gain any meaningful traction and it's very clear that there is almost no interest from the wider industry. Thus, as demonstrated for many years of failed alternatives, unfortunately buzzwords like 'privacy', 'non-free software' and 'Linux' have little to no use to gaining traction and selling to mass market in a comparable manner against the existing duopoly. And before you say 'Android', it is has tons of closed source userland software and subsystems and will get even worse once it moves over to Fuchsia OS. Therefore 'Android' as a free software example is disqualified. We are talking about Linux distros designed to run on phones with 'free software'.
- jrockway 4y ago
  Is this the one time people should be calling it GNU/Linux?
  - matrix12 4y ago
    Very fine point. GNU runs on many operating systems, and so to conflate GNU and Linux seems absurd.
    - cassianoleal 4y ago
      GNU runs on many kernels. GNU is part of the operating systems where it runs.
      - matrix12 4y ago
        GNU is not a boolean value. One can use portions of it without throwing away everything they use.
        cassianoleal 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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usrusrusrusr 4y ago
ddevault 4y ago
I'm typing this comment from a Poco F1 I set up with postmarketOS and Phosh earlier this week and so far it's very promising. Will write up a proper review next week. Much better than the Pinephone so far.
- nextos 4y ago
  This sounds very interesting. Can you elaborate a bit further?
  - saidinesh5 4y ago
    Not the Op, but Poco F1 has Snapdragon 845, which is like the flagship soc 3 years ago, and can boot mainline kernel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtfTJbLiYfg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtfTJbLiYfg . Iirc they even got Windows 10 booting on that phone.
- asdfqwertzxcv 4y ago
  Looking forward to your review!
- branon 4y ago
  This is interesting. Communities like postmarketOS put in a lot of effort to adapt their distribution to hardware that would otherwise be running Android. Perhaps targeting commodity hardware is a more viable strategy than contending with newer platforms like Pinephone. Sure the device is more open, but most of the software support falls on the same community of developers. Lord knows they have enough build targets to maintain already. I'm sure there will always be a place for custom hardware like Pinephone, Librem 5, but repurposing a flagship Android device is going to be a better value proposition for most people. I own a first-gen Pinephone and it seemed really promising for a while. As things got fixed and the state of affairs improved, I think everybody's expectations shifted whether they realized it or not. Phone calls and SMS work perfectly, but after that started working, now I want it to do GPS and navigation. Doing this is possible, but pushes the poor Pinephone's hardware to its limit. I think offloading progressively more tasks to a computer is perfectly natural, but ultimately (for me at least) this killed the Pinephone's viability. I wound up hitting a glass ceiling way too soon for comfort. It's one thing if software support for specific tasks is nonexistent - this is a solvable problem, the community marches forward and fixes this as a matter of course. But what do you do when you have the software support, but it just doesn't run on your Allwinner A64? Maybe things have improved yet more since the last time I tried. I'll have to check out Pure Maps again.
orangepurple 4y ago
Arch Linux ARM can be installed on Android with Termux I run scipy and numpy on my phone with it. A bit painful because I can only see about six lines of code at a time but I wrote a few thousand lines of ML code with vim on my cell phone in the last two months. https://github.com/SDRausty/termux-archlinux/ https://github.com/SDRausty/termux-archlinux/
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Termux is a godsend on Android, and remains The Only App Which Does Not Specifically and Precisely Suck (though EinkBro is giving it a good run for its money). Termux still has a host of limitations and weaknesses which are imposed by the Android environment itself, including being capriciously killed by the OS, lack of multiple users, blocked access to most of the filesystem, and a relatively limited (though impressively growing, I have to admit) set of utilities. At last check, this includes X11 utilities and at least some of TeX, both quite formidable.
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    Termux is awesome but the native environment is suffocating. I didn't even bother with Termux utilities after one hour of messing around. I went straight for the Arch Linux ARM proot environment and it contains ALL of the Arch Linux utilities. For example you will never get scipy to compile in normal Termux because you can't reasonably get a compatible Fortran compiler built and configured. Arch Linux ARM is the best "distro" within Termux and the installation script is seamless and supports multiple users!
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      Suffocating for lack of packages? I'll note that Termux has about 1/3 the package count of RHEL / CentOS. It's not everything, but for a mobile distro, it's quite good. That said: 1. Thanks for the Arch suggestion. I'll take a look at that. Root required? 2. Even with a full-fledged distro installed, if you're running unrooted Android you're still grossly crippled by the overarching (so to speak) Android system in terms of filesystem and process management and interference.
Havoc 4y ago
Inclined to say no - mainly because of the camera. The gap between ability to mechanically take a pic and what the flagships are doing with AI driven post processing seems not only big but growing. Short of die hard linux/FOSS fans noticably worse pics is going to be an absolute show stopper
- zekica 4y ago
  Look at what Intel is doing with MIPI IPU6 webcams. The solution already exists.
  - NavinF 4y ago
    Oof looks like it’ll take over a year before Linux supports those webcams and their chipset ISP: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Greg-KH-No-ADL-Webcam-Laptop https://www.phoronix.com/news/Greg-KH-No-ADL-Webcam-Laptop I also don’t know if these cameras are any good. I’ve yet to see a laptop webcam beat a 5 year old iPhone 8 recording at 4K 60fps let alone a modern phone.
- johndough 4y ago
  The problem is not AI - many of the best "AI" publications are open source after all. The problem is that hardware vendors do not provide access to their signal processing chip's internals. It is damn near impossible to even make a phone call these days without some obscure binary blob or magic chips that nobody knows what they do but are able to control every aspect of a phone.
  - michaelt 4y ago
    > many of the best "AI" publications are open source after all. In my experience there's also very little detailed documentation about what cutting-edge phone cameras are doing. You can get some vague descriptions (focus stacking? exposure stacking? ISO stacking? ML bokeh? Special handling of faces in multiracial groups? Shake compensation? Super-resolution?) which is all very well shooting from a tripod - yet modern phone cameras do their magic at 4k 60fps even while moving? All while running on battery?
NuSkooler 4y ago
It's mentioned already, but: Android. Discounting Android as "Not Linux" enough is a mind boggle to me. Perhaps not "GNU" enough, but certainly the spirit of Linux -- customized for the particular needs, stable, fast, works on a plethora of hardware, etc.
- not2b 4y ago
  Yes, articles like this illustrate that RMS had a point, as annoying as he can be about it. Android is obviously Linux. What's missing is all of the things GNU and BSD brought to the party.
  - cma 4y ago
    Try reading Linux man pages on things like system calls to map shared memory. On Android it won't work, and you have to call into Java code to do it. Google created a monster rather than work to get things merged into the kernel (there was some kind of possible resource leak or DoS with shared memory mapping).
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Linux kernel is an implementation detail on Android.
- humanwhosits 4y ago
  fuchsia (+starnix for legacy) might make android much less linux-y over the long term
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Vanilla Android or AOSP might kinda have “Linux Spirit” but I’m not sure what gets shipped on most consumer devices does… lots of random things locked down (including boot loader, sometimes), crapware all over the place, drivers and kernel changes that aren’t upstreamed making it difficult to install anything but carrier/manufacturer-flavored Android, etc. I think most people rooting for “smartphone Linux” are looking to be able to swap and customize OSes on their phones and tablets as easily as they do on their x86 PCs without futzing around with device specific ROMs and the like.
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makz 4y ago
Before answering that question I'd ask: why would we want that? My answer is no, it didn't work on the desktop, it won't work on the smartphone, for more or less the same reasons. As much as I like Linux and FOSS, Linux is just a bad OS for the average consumer. For hackers, makers, DYI enthusiasts, etc. Linux is wonderful, however, what's the market size for a Linux smart phone for this people? I bet it's tiny.
- Bilal_io 4y ago
  Maybe we can do it backwards this time, take the Chrome approach with Linux, build a UI launcher for mobile that is as simple as possible and once it's complex and has a healthy touch-friendly apps translate it to desktop. Look at Steam Deck and what they've done. They could use the same approach to launch a Phone OS.
- aquaduck 4y ago
  Didn't work on the desktop? I've been running Linux exclusively on my desktops for 15 years. Desktop Linux is better today than it's ever been. Why does every OS need to be suitable for average consumers? Librem and Pine64 are doing great work in the mobile Linux space on the hardware side, and projects like PostmarketOS are doing great work on the software side. These are niche products for motivated enthusiasts, as they should be. They'll never grow to billions of users, nor should they. The tech industry's "grow massive or the product is worthless" mindset is pathological, in my opinion.
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    Not only I've been successfully running it on my desktops for about that long, but I also have been running it on my phones for not much shorter. It works.
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    I think you’re saying basically the same thing as the person you responded to.
    - 4y ago
neverrroot 4y ago
Guess it depends on what your standards are. You can have it everywhere from today to likely never. Want just basic stuff, no apps store, no good camera, no good runtime on battery? Today, go get one. Value security more than anything else? Available today. Want a high end smart phone with proper open source Linux/Software and apps store, great camera, fast and great battery runtime? Likely never. Linux won’t get the required investment, nor will the hardware manufacturers provide the required support (no incentives). Even the Linux Desktop experience can’t properly get there in 2022. But a proper Linux phone, say something like a PinePhone is great as a second phone.
- capableweb 4y ago
  I used to think the same thing (especially after getting a PinePhone which is nowhere near being ready for the masses) but after getting a Steam Deck, which is totally a mass-consumer ready gaming platform running (and even exposing it to the users) Linux, I think Linux Phones are just missing the right company to move forward with it. Would be much harder than building a gaming console, for sure, since hardware manufacturers of basebands/modems are really anti-OSS, but I think the time will eventually come. It'll take time though.
  - revolvingocelot 4y ago
    Valve has a business case to ready Linux for mass deployment -- recall Microsoft's public musing about locking down DirectX in Windows 10, forcing everyone into the Store? IIRC Steam Machines were a hedge/threat against that, but I'm pretty confident that the individual whimsy of GabeN et al is chiefly responsible for the gobs of money and polish being poured into a Linux uh Decktop experience. That's going to be hard to replicate for a Linux experience for anything else. At the risk of sounding like a Valve exceptionalist or Great-Man historiographer, keep in mind that GabeN has untold "personal" millions to throw at weird Protean moonshots like Steam Machines-to-Proton-to-Steam Deck. I can't see a way for any extant company with the ability to build out Linux-for-a-phone to want to build out Linux-for-a-phone without baking some poisonous antifeature into it to make people look at ads.
z3t4 4y ago
Nokia had Linux on their smartphone until Microsoft bought them and stopped everything, they even shut down the app store. The OS was called MeeGo. Part of the Nokia team however started their own company called Jolla and still produce smartphones running Linux, they call their OS Sailfish. (ignoring the fact that Android also uses the Linux kernel). The problem with alternative phone OS:es is that in the country I live you must have either an iPhone or and Android phone because the ID monopoly and Payment monopoly refuse to support other operating systems...
- sgc 4y ago
  I could get by with only using banking websites in the browser. But Why does Jolla not yet support any Pixel phones? I have wanted to try it out for years, but not to the point of trying to make things work on my own.
  - mariusor 4y ago
    Probably because Google does not have an equivalent program to the https://opendevices.ix5.org/ https://opendevices.ix5.org/ that Sony has.
    - sgc 4y ago
      I don't buy that at all. That is an awesome program that I did not know about. However, they also support Gemini PDA, which is only one of Planet computers devices. And Pixels are well-known to be the among easiest to flash devices out there, and there is no shortage of third party ROMs available for them. From what I read on the SF forums, it's a sort of google boycott despite the fact that flashing a rom gets rid of the google in a pixel. https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/any-chance-of-non-sony-phones-being-officially-supported-in-the-future/9560/35 https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/any-chance-of-non-sony-phones... Further, look at the list of devices they work on - not at all a list of phones easier to flash than a pixel. https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris There seems to be a lot of politics in their forums (and their past funding), something that does not interest me in an OS project.
elagost 4y ago
If anyone actually watched the talk Guido addresses Android at about 2 minutes in, and why it's not a actually what Linux users want.
amelius 4y ago
Perhaps if someone makes WineHQ but for iOS apps instead of Windows applications.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Waydroid?
lynndotpy 4y ago
I think it's time we take a descriptivist view of "Linux", because there is some hard-to-describe way that Android isn't "Linuxy". If a good mobile graphical BSD OS appeared from nowhere , we might consider it "Linuxy-er" than Android. The presentation does a good job of explaining what is missing for a good "Linux smartphone ".
MartijnBraam 4y ago
I think this talk does a great job of explaining why AOSP is not a solution
- charcircuit 4y ago
  I disagree. It does a bad job. From what I understood it boiled down to. 1. It is hard to upstream changes to AOSP. 2. Google also has proprietary apps and services. Android has tremendous value and those seem like petty reasons to throw it out. You are going to be remaking proprietary phone stuff entire way. Why not utilize the massive amount of work Android provides. It will also speed up the process of bringing up devices since the manufacturer likely already has Android drivers ready to go.
hrbf 4y ago
Simple answer: no. Apart from Android that is. Non-specialized Linux will never be supported by manufacturers because there's simply no economic incentive to do so.
cloudymeatballs 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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yyyk 4y ago
There isn't any hope for Linux on the smartphone, at least not Linux as actually intended in the talk. A proper solution needs to run perfectly on users' existing hardware or it won't be run at all. There are a lot of old unupdated devices which should be ripe for the picking. The only solution close to matching the OSS community's resources is the Android kernel for all of its problems. The Linux smartphone community is way too ideological (far more than even RMS was back when OSS started) to do it - they won't use Android, and their hardware would also be way behind for similar reasons. So irrelevance it is, unless some rich sugar daddy company decides to make an entrance to the smartphone market, but I don't see any plausible contenders.
dimensionc132 4y ago
A typical Linux distro ISO is about 2Gb in size and this distro has all the necessary drivers and hardware devices to run on thousands of different computers with different configurations. Android "AOSP" however has to be customized for every single cell phone model because it doesn't have the device drivers added but it does use the Linux kernel. Why can't AOSP just include all the necessary device drivers for all the mobile phone models, just like what Linux does for computers? Then we could have a universal AOSP distro for phones
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  The talk explains that - you could make an universal AOSP image that works on mainlined devices, so you could support the whole handful of them at this moment.
- faisalhackshah 4y ago
  Because mobile (basically ARM) is not a standardized platform like the PC. PC architecture has dozens of interoperability standards the entire PC ecosystem adheres to. Everything from boot up, to DMA controllers, to protocols for device capability discovery, and more .. You can think of each ARM board as its own bespoke platform (needing it's own device tree/bsp).
cjtrowbridge 4y ago
The vast majority of smartphones currently run linux.
benreesman 4y ago
Pardon a minor correction, what you mean by “Linux” is more properly termed “GNU/Linux”, or as I’ve taken recently to calling it, “GNU plus Linux” which reflects that Linux is merely the “kernel”… So yeah, Linux runs on more smartphones than all other kernels put together. GNU/Linux? At scale? Not a fucking chance.
timonoko 4y ago
You can strap Raspberry to your phone via USB and you have 100% Linux phone without restrictions. Communication happens via Phone's USB-tethering and Raspberry's Internet-via-USB (and bVNC). OTG-phone can also power the Raspberry. I used this setup a lot, but nowadays Termux with X11-server is good enough. Most use nowadays is photo editing with GIMP. You can gain excellent dexterity with bVNC with time.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  I'd been considering working out a way to do this over Bluetooth networking for a while - have a Pi0W on a power bank in my bag, hooked up to phone over BT for when I want to test something quick on the go (ideas often happen on buses, subways, etc). Might tinker with it this evening.
- axytol 4y ago
  Thinking of the Pi0, I assume you would need 2 usb cables and a hub: 1 cable goes to Pi's power usb port, 1 goes to the other usb port for connectivity, then both cables joined through a hub to the phone's usb port.
  - timonoko 4y ago
    May have been also that when you connected Pi to a power source it powered the phone too. I was using this system 10 years go with very cheap phone without OTG, so Pi was solution to this and other problems.
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anuraj 4y ago
Around 2002-03 - Motorola had RT Linux in EZx range of touch phones (https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_a760-392.php https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_a760-392.php). They were also working on a Linux based smartphone platform which was fairly advanced before scrapping it in 2004. Been a part of those teams. Do not think it is easy to introduce another smartphone platform right now without strong differentiation given the network effects. Something on wearables might still work.
ReganLaitila 4y ago
There is no hope for a linux smartphone due to the reality that there is no hope for the linux desktop. This is aptly demonstrated by the presenters slide of the linux kernel with a single through line into userspace, where you are shown a single interface (more or less) represented as the kernel, into a byzantine maze of components, represented by userspace. Who actually wants to target such a mess? Nobody statistically. To enter the linux market you need to compile a matrix of distros, init systems, kernal module subsystems, package managers, device daemons, display servers, window managers, desktop environments, custom configuration formats, filesystem hierarchies, custom socket protocols, custom syscall interfaces, and whatever else. Or just literally re-invent everything and go your own way (Android and similar efforts). Repeat for each and every version of a "distro", each permutation having their interpretation of the correct "linux/unix" way. When you are developing software either for a direct profit motive or for a user freedom motive, they are aligned with having stable environmental targets that continue to work within a reasonable timeframe. We all love siting conway's law: "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure". The Linux userspace communication structure is plain chaos. As an app developer: what distro am I on, and at what version, what config file am I fiddling, what custom socket protocol do I need to implement, what obscure distro dependent library do I need to link against, and what horrendous wrappers do I need to write to get my software to not only run on "linux" but the other platforms where most users are. Windows, MacOSX, IOS, and Android-flavors understand this better at least from a market perspective, because the most important aspect of computing is that software works more than less of the time. works > security. I don't have to upgrade my OS to get a new version of an app. I don't want an OS upgrade to change the version of an app. I don't have to know what static vs dynamic linking is. I don't have to dig into yet another custom config format to change simple settings. As much as I enjoy discussing the particulars of tech, and digging into details from time to time, at the end of a long day I just want my computing to work. The linux ecosystem does not provide that. Yes manufactures play games with hardware locking out FOSS efforts. Some of that can be remedied by serving the legacy hardware market or providing manufactures an actual platform to target. At the same time, outside of the kernel, I see no effort of the linux userspace providing any sense of a unified UX, consistency, discoverability, or stability. Each new half decade presents yet another set of inconsistent interfaces, confusing commands, esoteric configs, outdated tutorials, and the general sense that FOSS is not positioned to serve tech at the human scale. Until userspace can provide an interface that is stable, more or less like the kernel for a decade or more, with opportunity to shim for backwards compatibility for edge cases, we will never see linux exceed further than pets of backend infrastructure.
type0 4y ago
Is it possible that RISC V open hardware Linux phones can become a reality in a decade or so?
- snvzz 4y ago
  I honestly expect the first ones to show up next year. Probably from china. There's been an android port for a while already, and quite capable SoCs are being mass-produced.
sanroot99 4y ago
I think future is to use hypervisor as operating system , samsung actually did research on porting xen hypervisor to smartphones ,but was abandoned
phendrenad2 4y ago
Linux runs just fine on my smartphone. If it doesn't work for you, just google it.
SergeAx 4y ago
I honestly don't get the idea of having a dozen distros. I understand that this is how things on desktop for decades are, but it seems grossly irrelevant. Also, things on desktop are not very good too, to be honest. There's one Android and there are dosens of variations on top of that, not parallel to that. This is how userbase is gained.

157 points by McSinyx 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mayoi 4y ago

Android works just fine on my smartphone.

jqpabc123 4y ago

Hardware manufacturers have no incentive to support it.

rbanffy 4y ago
Erm... Android is Linux.
- JCWasmx86 4y ago
  Just the kernel is Linux, but with the "Linux" that is meant here, it has basically nothing in common, be it e.g. in the userland or "the spirit". The Linux from "Linux Smartphones" e.g. fosters an open, user-first ecosystem, as opposed to the often very closed and locked Android Smartphones. Another examples are e.g. Safetynet or the Google Play Integrity API. Those primarily don't server the users. Or apps that either complain or even stop working on rooted phones. We have admin/root on normal PCs and nobody is complaining there.
  - mulmen 4y ago
    Linux is only a kernel. What most people mean when they say “Linux” is actually “Linux distribution” which is the Linux kernel plus some userland like GNU or Android.
  - mmsnberbar66 4y ago
    > We have admin/root on normal PCs and nobody is complaining there. That's true.
  - 3836293648 4y ago
    Just the kernel is linux, but isn't basically all of the hardware support we need in the kernel? Sure, we're still out of luck with trying to run mainline kernels, but what's stopping us from running normal GNU userland on top of a working Android kernel?
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      Not all the hardware support is internal for Android devices, but yes you're basically asking for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybris_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybris_(software)
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    >Those primarily don't server the users. Not having your images and messages scraped or getting tons of spam is in the interest of users. Those API allow developers to offer a better experience to users by being able to know if people are running a trusted version of the software.
- matrix12 4y ago
  I think they conflate GNU with Linux kernel.
  - what-imright 4y ago
    Why is the title “Is there hope for linux on smartphones?”? If it said “Is there hope for GNU on smartphones?” the answer would be a resounding no, because the community is fractured and politicized to the degree the products are uncompetitive. Pinephone is an example. Then there was the Ubuntu effort. Android, being partly closed as the GPL2 allows for, is proof that Linux can be highly successful without the GNU crowd. And perhaps they should stop taking credit for software they didn’t write. They made the license. For all the complaining, the free software community hasn’t designed from the ground up and released one single production class handset alternative at a time when the culture consumes in the billions. That’s says a lot. The infighting and utopian idealistic virtue signaling is in sharp contrast to the reality of the platforms the GNU crowd has built.
    - tingletech 4y ago
      most of the user space tools originated from GNU (such as gcc), linux really just brought the kernel.
      - what-imright 4y ago
        Just? It’s 28 million lines of code, the world’s largest software project
        School-Cotton 4y ago
        What counts as one software project? The combined Facebook codebase, for example, is surely larger than that.
        anthk 4y ago
        Chromium is bigger than that.
      - 4y ago

rvz 4y ago

> while we're picky about free software on our laptops, desktops and servers lots of us have a truck load full of proprietary software in their pocket every day. Does it have to be that way? It doesn't have to be like this, but it is also not 'early days' anymore and we have given this idea lots of time to gain any meaningful traction and it's very clear that there is almost no interest from the wider industry. Thus, as demonstrated for many years of failed alternatives, unfortunately buzzwords like 'privacy', 'non-free software' and 'Linux' have little to no use to gaining traction and selling to mass market in a comparable manner against the existing duopoly. And before you say 'Android', it is has tons of closed source userland software and subsystems and will get even worse once it moves over to Fuchsia OS. Therefore 'Android' as a free software example is disqualified. We are talking about Linux distros designed to run on phones with 'free software'.

jrockway 4y ago
Is this the one time people should be calling it GNU/Linux?
- matrix12 4y ago
  Very fine point. GNU runs on many operating systems, and so to conflate GNU and Linux seems absurd.
  - cassianoleal 4y ago
    GNU runs on many kernels. GNU is part of the operating systems where it runs.
    - matrix12 4y ago
      GNU is not a boolean value. One can use portions of it without throwing away everything they use.
      - cassianoleal 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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usrusrusrusr 4y ago

ddevault 4y ago

I'm typing this comment from a Poco F1 I set up with postmarketOS and Phosh earlier this week and so far it's very promising. Will write up a proper review next week. Much better than the Pinephone so far.

nextos 4y ago
This sounds very interesting. Can you elaborate a bit further?
- saidinesh5 4y ago
  Not the Op, but Poco F1 has Snapdragon 845, which is like the flagship soc 3 years ago, and can boot mainline kernel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtfTJbLiYfg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtfTJbLiYfg . Iirc they even got Windows 10 booting on that phone.
asdfqwertzxcv 4y ago
Looking forward to your review!
branon 4y ago
This is interesting. Communities like postmarketOS put in a lot of effort to adapt their distribution to hardware that would otherwise be running Android. Perhaps targeting commodity hardware is a more viable strategy than contending with newer platforms like Pinephone. Sure the device is more open, but most of the software support falls on the same community of developers. Lord knows they have enough build targets to maintain already. I'm sure there will always be a place for custom hardware like Pinephone, Librem 5, but repurposing a flagship Android device is going to be a better value proposition for most people. I own a first-gen Pinephone and it seemed really promising for a while. As things got fixed and the state of affairs improved, I think everybody's expectations shifted whether they realized it or not. Phone calls and SMS work perfectly, but after that started working, now I want it to do GPS and navigation. Doing this is possible, but pushes the poor Pinephone's hardware to its limit. I think offloading progressively more tasks to a computer is perfectly natural, but ultimately (for me at least) this killed the Pinephone's viability. I wound up hitting a glass ceiling way too soon for comfort. It's one thing if software support for specific tasks is nonexistent - this is a solvable problem, the community marches forward and fixes this as a matter of course. But what do you do when you have the software support, but it just doesn't run on your Allwinner A64? Maybe things have improved yet more since the last time I tried. I'll have to check out Pure Maps again.

orangepurple 4y ago

Arch Linux ARM can be installed on Android with Termux I run scipy and numpy on my phone with it. A bit painful because I can only see about six lines of code at a time but I wrote a few thousand lines of ML code with vim on my cell phone in the last two months. https://github.com/SDRausty/termux-archlinux/ https://github.com/SDRausty/termux-archlinux/

dredmorbius 4y ago
Termux is a godsend on Android, and remains The Only App Which Does Not Specifically and Precisely Suck (though EinkBro is giving it a good run for its money). Termux still has a host of limitations and weaknesses which are imposed by the Android environment itself, including being capriciously killed by the OS, lack of multiple users, blocked access to most of the filesystem, and a relatively limited (though impressively growing, I have to admit) set of utilities. At last check, this includes X11 utilities and at least some of TeX, both quite formidable.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  Termux is awesome but the native environment is suffocating. I didn't even bother with Termux utilities after one hour of messing around. I went straight for the Arch Linux ARM proot environment and it contains ALL of the Arch Linux utilities. For example you will never get scipy to compile in normal Termux because you can't reasonably get a compatible Fortran compiler built and configured. Arch Linux ARM is the best "distro" within Termux and the installation script is seamless and supports multiple users!
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Suffocating for lack of packages? I'll note that Termux has about 1/3 the package count of RHEL / CentOS. It's not everything, but for a mobile distro, it's quite good. That said: 1. Thanks for the Arch suggestion. I'll take a look at that. Root required? 2. Even with a full-fledged distro installed, if you're running unrooted Android you're still grossly crippled by the overarching (so to speak) Android system in terms of filesystem and process management and interference.

Havoc 4y ago

Inclined to say no - mainly because of the camera. The gap between ability to mechanically take a pic and what the flagships are doing with AI driven post processing seems not only big but growing. Short of die hard linux/FOSS fans noticably worse pics is going to be an absolute show stopper

zekica 4y ago
Look at what Intel is doing with MIPI IPU6 webcams. The solution already exists.
- NavinF 4y ago
  Oof looks like it’ll take over a year before Linux supports those webcams and their chipset ISP: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Greg-KH-No-ADL-Webcam-Laptop https://www.phoronix.com/news/Greg-KH-No-ADL-Webcam-Laptop I also don’t know if these cameras are any good. I’ve yet to see a laptop webcam beat a 5 year old iPhone 8 recording at 4K 60fps let alone a modern phone.
johndough 4y ago
The problem is not AI - many of the best "AI" publications are open source after all. The problem is that hardware vendors do not provide access to their signal processing chip's internals. It is damn near impossible to even make a phone call these days without some obscure binary blob or magic chips that nobody knows what they do but are able to control every aspect of a phone.
- michaelt 4y ago
  > many of the best "AI" publications are open source after all. In my experience there's also very little detailed documentation about what cutting-edge phone cameras are doing. You can get some vague descriptions (focus stacking? exposure stacking? ISO stacking? ML bokeh? Special handling of faces in multiracial groups? Shake compensation? Super-resolution?) which is all very well shooting from a tripod - yet modern phone cameras do their magic at 4k 60fps even while moving? All while running on battery?

NuSkooler 4y ago

It's mentioned already, but: Android. Discounting Android as "Not Linux" enough is a mind boggle to me. Perhaps not "GNU" enough, but certainly the spirit of Linux -- customized for the particular needs, stable, fast, works on a plethora of hardware, etc.

not2b 4y ago
Yes, articles like this illustrate that RMS had a point, as annoying as he can be about it. Android is obviously Linux. What's missing is all of the things GNU and BSD brought to the party.
- cma 4y ago
  Try reading Linux man pages on things like system calls to map shared memory. On Android it won't work, and you have to call into Java code to do it. Google created a monster rather than work to get things merged into the kernel (there was some kind of possible resource leak or DoS with shared memory mapping).
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Linux kernel is an implementation detail on Android.
humanwhosits 4y ago
fuchsia (+starnix for legacy) might make android much less linux-y over the long term
kitsunesoba 4y ago
Vanilla Android or AOSP might kinda have “Linux Spirit” but I’m not sure what gets shipped on most consumer devices does… lots of random things locked down (including boot loader, sometimes), crapware all over the place, drivers and kernel changes that aren’t upstreamed making it difficult to install anything but carrier/manufacturer-flavored Android, etc. I think most people rooting for “smartphone Linux” are looking to be able to swap and customize OSes on their phones and tablets as easily as they do on their x86 PCs without futzing around with device specific ROMs and the like.

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makz 4y ago

Before answering that question I'd ask: why would we want that? My answer is no, it didn't work on the desktop, it won't work on the smartphone, for more or less the same reasons. As much as I like Linux and FOSS, Linux is just a bad OS for the average consumer. For hackers, makers, DYI enthusiasts, etc. Linux is wonderful, however, what's the market size for a Linux smart phone for this people? I bet it's tiny.

Bilal_io 4y ago
Maybe we can do it backwards this time, take the Chrome approach with Linux, build a UI launcher for mobile that is as simple as possible and once it's complex and has a healthy touch-friendly apps translate it to desktop. Look at Steam Deck and what they've done. They could use the same approach to launch a Phone OS.
aquaduck 4y ago
Didn't work on the desktop? I've been running Linux exclusively on my desktops for 15 years. Desktop Linux is better today than it's ever been. Why does every OS need to be suitable for average consumers? Librem and Pine64 are doing great work in the mobile Linux space on the hardware side, and projects like PostmarketOS are doing great work on the software side. These are niche products for motivated enthusiasts, as they should be. They'll never grow to billions of users, nor should they. The tech industry's "grow massive or the product is worthless" mindset is pathological, in my opinion.
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  Not only I've been successfully running it on my desktops for about that long, but I also have been running it on my phones for not much shorter. It works.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  I think you’re saying basically the same thing as the person you responded to.
  - 4y ago

neverrroot 4y ago

Guess it depends on what your standards are. You can have it everywhere from today to likely never. Want just basic stuff, no apps store, no good camera, no good runtime on battery? Today, go get one. Value security more than anything else? Available today. Want a high end smart phone with proper open source Linux/Software and apps store, great camera, fast and great battery runtime? Likely never. Linux won’t get the required investment, nor will the hardware manufacturers provide the required support (no incentives). Even the Linux Desktop experience can’t properly get there in 2022. But a proper Linux phone, say something like a PinePhone is great as a second phone.

capableweb 4y ago
I used to think the same thing (especially after getting a PinePhone which is nowhere near being ready for the masses) but after getting a Steam Deck, which is totally a mass-consumer ready gaming platform running (and even exposing it to the users) Linux, I think Linux Phones are just missing the right company to move forward with it. Would be much harder than building a gaming console, for sure, since hardware manufacturers of basebands/modems are really anti-OSS, but I think the time will eventually come. It'll take time though.
- revolvingocelot 4y ago
  Valve has a business case to ready Linux for mass deployment -- recall Microsoft's public musing about locking down DirectX in Windows 10, forcing everyone into the Store? IIRC Steam Machines were a hedge/threat against that, but I'm pretty confident that the individual whimsy of GabeN et al is chiefly responsible for the gobs of money and polish being poured into a Linux uh Decktop experience. That's going to be hard to replicate for a Linux experience for anything else. At the risk of sounding like a Valve exceptionalist or Great-Man historiographer, keep in mind that GabeN has untold "personal" millions to throw at weird Protean moonshots like Steam Machines-to-Proton-to-Steam Deck. I can't see a way for any extant company with the ability to build out Linux-for-a-phone to want to build out Linux-for-a-phone without baking some poisonous antifeature into it to make people look at ads.

z3t4 4y ago

Nokia had Linux on their smartphone until Microsoft bought them and stopped everything, they even shut down the app store. The OS was called MeeGo. Part of the Nokia team however started their own company called Jolla and still produce smartphones running Linux, they call their OS Sailfish. (ignoring the fact that Android also uses the Linux kernel). The problem with alternative phone OS:es is that in the country I live you must have either an iPhone or and Android phone because the ID monopoly and Payment monopoly refuse to support other operating systems...

sgc 4y ago
I could get by with only using banking websites in the browser. But Why does Jolla not yet support any Pixel phones? I have wanted to try it out for years, but not to the point of trying to make things work on my own.
- mariusor 4y ago
  Probably because Google does not have an equivalent program to the https://opendevices.ix5.org/ https://opendevices.ix5.org/ that Sony has.
  - sgc 4y ago
    I don't buy that at all. That is an awesome program that I did not know about. However, they also support Gemini PDA, which is only one of Planet computers devices. And Pixels are well-known to be the among easiest to flash devices out there, and there is no shortage of third party ROMs available for them. From what I read on the SF forums, it's a sort of google boycott despite the fact that flashing a rom gets rid of the google in a pixel. https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/any-chance-of-non-sony-phones-being-officially-supported-in-the-future/9560/35 https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/any-chance-of-non-sony-phones... Further, look at the list of devices they work on - not at all a list of phones easier to flash than a pixel. https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris There seems to be a lot of politics in their forums (and their past funding), something that does not interest me in an OS project.

elagost 4y ago

If anyone actually watched the talk Guido addresses Android at about 2 minutes in, and why it's not a actually what Linux users want.

amelius 4y ago

Perhaps if someone makes WineHQ but for iOS apps instead of Windows applications.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
Waydroid?

lynndotpy 4y ago

I think it's time we take a descriptivist view of "Linux", because there is some hard-to-describe way that Android isn't "Linuxy". If a good mobile graphical BSD OS appeared from nowhere , we might consider it "Linuxy-er" than Android. The presentation does a good job of explaining what is missing for a good "Linux smartphone ".

MartijnBraam 4y ago

I think this talk does a great job of explaining why AOSP is not a solution

charcircuit 4y ago
I disagree. It does a bad job. From what I understood it boiled down to. 1. It is hard to upstream changes to AOSP. 2. Google also has proprietary apps and services. Android has tremendous value and those seem like petty reasons to throw it out. You are going to be remaking proprietary phone stuff entire way. Why not utilize the massive amount of work Android provides. It will also speed up the process of bringing up devices since the manufacturer likely already has Android drivers ready to go.

hrbf 4y ago

Simple answer: no. Apart from Android that is. Non-specialized Linux will never be supported by manufacturers because there's simply no economic incentive to do so.

cloudymeatballs 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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yyyk 4y ago

There isn't any hope for Linux on the smartphone, at least not Linux as actually intended in the talk. A proper solution needs to run perfectly on users' existing hardware or it won't be run at all. There are a lot of old unupdated devices which should be ripe for the picking. The only solution close to matching the OSS community's resources is the Android kernel for all of its problems. The Linux smartphone community is way too ideological (far more than even RMS was back when OSS started) to do it - they won't use Android, and their hardware would also be way behind for similar reasons. So irrelevance it is, unless some rich sugar daddy company decides to make an entrance to the smartphone market, but I don't see any plausible contenders.

dimensionc132 4y ago

A typical Linux distro ISO is about 2Gb in size and this distro has all the necessary drivers and hardware devices to run on thousands of different computers with different configurations. Android "AOSP" however has to be customized for every single cell phone model because it doesn't have the device drivers added but it does use the Linux kernel. Why can't AOSP just include all the necessary device drivers for all the mobile phone models, just like what Linux does for computers? Then we could have a universal AOSP distro for phones

seba_dos1 4y ago
The talk explains that - you could make an universal AOSP image that works on mainlined devices, so you could support the whole handful of them at this moment.
faisalhackshah 4y ago
Because mobile (basically ARM) is not a standardized platform like the PC. PC architecture has dozens of interoperability standards the entire PC ecosystem adheres to. Everything from boot up, to DMA controllers, to protocols for device capability discovery, and more .. You can think of each ARM board as its own bespoke platform (needing it's own device tree/bsp).

cjtrowbridge 4y ago

The vast majority of smartphones currently run linux.

benreesman 4y ago

Pardon a minor correction, what you mean by “Linux” is more properly termed “GNU/Linux”, or as I’ve taken recently to calling it, “GNU plus Linux” which reflects that Linux is merely the “kernel”… So yeah, Linux runs on more smartphones than all other kernels put together. GNU/Linux? At scale? Not a fucking chance.

timonoko 4y ago

You can strap Raspberry to your phone via USB and you have 100% Linux phone without restrictions. Communication happens via Phone's USB-tethering and Raspberry's Internet-via-USB (and bVNC). OTG-phone can also power the Raspberry. I used this setup a lot, but nowadays Termux with X11-server is good enough. Most use nowadays is photo editing with GIMP. You can gain excellent dexterity with bVNC with time.

nibbleshifter 4y ago
I'd been considering working out a way to do this over Bluetooth networking for a while - have a Pi0W on a power bank in my bag, hooked up to phone over BT for when I want to test something quick on the go (ideas often happen on buses, subways, etc). Might tinker with it this evening.
axytol 4y ago
Thinking of the Pi0, I assume you would need 2 usb cables and a hub: 1 cable goes to Pi's power usb port, 1 goes to the other usb port for connectivity, then both cables joined through a hub to the phone's usb port.
- timonoko 4y ago
  May have been also that when you connected Pi to a power source it powered the phone too. I was using this system 10 years go with very cheap phone without OTG, so Pi was solution to this and other problems.

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anuraj 4y ago

Around 2002-03 - Motorola had RT Linux in EZx range of touch phones (https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_a760-392.php https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_a760-392.php). They were also working on a Linux based smartphone platform which was fairly advanced before scrapping it in 2004. Been a part of those teams. Do not think it is easy to introduce another smartphone platform right now without strong differentiation given the network effects. Something on wearables might still work.

ReganLaitila 4y ago

There is no hope for a linux smartphone due to the reality that there is no hope for the linux desktop. This is aptly demonstrated by the presenters slide of the linux kernel with a single through line into userspace, where you are shown a single interface (more or less) represented as the kernel, into a byzantine maze of components, represented by userspace. Who actually wants to target such a mess? Nobody statistically. To enter the linux market you need to compile a matrix of distros, init systems, kernal module subsystems, package managers, device daemons, display servers, window managers, desktop environments, custom configuration formats, filesystem hierarchies, custom socket protocols, custom syscall interfaces, and whatever else. Or just literally re-invent everything and go your own way (Android and similar efforts). Repeat for each and every version of a "distro", each permutation having their interpretation of the correct "linux/unix" way. When you are developing software either for a direct profit motive or for a user freedom motive, they are aligned with having stable environmental targets that continue to work within a reasonable timeframe. We all love siting conway's law: "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure". The Linux userspace communication structure is plain chaos. As an app developer: what distro am I on, and at what version, what config file am I fiddling, what custom socket protocol do I need to implement, what obscure distro dependent library do I need to link against, and what horrendous wrappers do I need to write to get my software to not only run on "linux" but the other platforms where most users are. Windows, MacOSX, IOS, and Android-flavors understand this better at least from a market perspective, because the most important aspect of computing is that software works more than less of the time. works > security. I don't have to upgrade my OS to get a new version of an app. I don't want an OS upgrade to change the version of an app. I don't have to know what static vs dynamic linking is. I don't have to dig into yet another custom config format to change simple settings. As much as I enjoy discussing the particulars of tech, and digging into details from time to time, at the end of a long day I just want my computing to work. The linux ecosystem does not provide that. Yes manufactures play games with hardware locking out FOSS efforts. Some of that can be remedied by serving the legacy hardware market or providing manufactures an actual platform to target. At the same time, outside of the kernel, I see no effort of the linux userspace providing any sense of a unified UX, consistency, discoverability, or stability. Each new half decade presents yet another set of inconsistent interfaces, confusing commands, esoteric configs, outdated tutorials, and the general sense that FOSS is not positioned to serve tech at the human scale. Until userspace can provide an interface that is stable, more or less like the kernel for a decade or more, with opportunity to shim for backwards compatibility for edge cases, we will never see linux exceed further than pets of backend infrastructure.

type0 4y ago

Is it possible that RISC V open hardware Linux phones can become a reality in a decade or so?

snvzz 4y ago
I honestly expect the first ones to show up next year. Probably from china. There's been an android port for a while already, and quite capable SoCs are being mass-produced.

sanroot99 4y ago

I think future is to use hypervisor as operating system , samsung actually did research on porting xen hypervisor to smartphones ,but was abandoned

phendrenad2 4y ago

Linux runs just fine on my smartphone. If it doesn't work for you, just google it.

SergeAx 4y ago

I honestly don't get the idea of having a dozen distros. I understand that this is how things on desktop for decades are, but it seems grossly irrelevant. Also, things on desktop are not very good too, to be honest. There's one Android and there are dosens of variations on top of that, not parallel to that. This is how userbase is gained.