8 ms·

The year of Linux On Desktop^WMobile [video]

55 points by pabs3 3y ago

sgt 3y ago
It's a cool project indeed but just don't get your hopes up. It remains a tinkerer's toy, like Linux on the desktop perpetually always being behind, then Linux on the mobile might be worse by an order of magnitude.
minimalist 3y ago
Watching this, as I've been daily-driving GNU/Linux phones for two years now (first PP then PPP). One change I've noticed: when waiting for things in public, I don't reach for the phone, as I need to preserve battery for the essential functions--as a means of contact :) Edit: The video is an /okay/ overview of the current state of some things for a Linux-familiar audience. A more compelling thing would be to step through the distros on this multiboot image [0] and show what works and what doesn't work. I think it's really understated how much choice one gets when using a Linux phone. That said, Gnome and KDE are pretty darn functional for the basic stuff these days. Definitely more than a modern feature phone [1], which is plenty for many people. [0]: https://xnux.eu/p-boot-demo/ https://xnux.eu/p-boot-demo/ [1]: https://www.kaiostech.com/ https://www.kaiostech.com/
- XorNot 3y ago
  I am curious what fundamentally makes power management so difficult these days. I know some of the effort is just inadequate driver support - the various modes can't be turned on properly because they're locked behind proprietary blobs which need to be reverse engineered. But is their something else? What's the pathology that leads to issues in software?
  - izacus 3y ago
    There's no pathology, it's just really really hard. Any single component not sleeping properly and keeping the CPU, buses or radios active immediately ruins the battery life for everyone. Power saving is all about racing towards that sweet idle state where every chip is clocked down and nothing radiates. Which means that good power saving requires full vetting of every process on the system and making sure they all cooperate or, at least, are forced to sleep. Android needed years to get into that state and developers/hackers are still sour about the restrictions it puts on them to keep battery life in check.
    - minimalist 3y ago
      > Android needed years to get into that state and developers/hackers are still sour about the restrictions it puts on them to keep battery life in check. True. In my experience, many desktop applications do not care about minimizing idle cycles or network activity. So you end up with your radios always active, or some persistent CPU activity. For example, if one were to use Element Desktop, Signal Desktop and Discord simultaneously on PPP (all electron apps), we're looking at ~20% CPU utilization, idle! Mobile Linux will get there eventually!
      - jwells89 3y ago
        I always wondered what exactly it is that Electron apps are doing to use that much CPU when they're sitting in the background doing nothing, often not even being on screen. For something like chat I guess it could be polling (surely sockets are more popular now?), but it's not uncommon to see this behavior even in completely offline Electron apps. It seems like they're never truly idle.
  - seltzered_ 3y ago
    I don't know, but I hope the efforts to drive application-level power management somehow lead to power management improvements when using gnome on a laptop as well. For reference, macOS introduced some APIs intended to improve power management around 2016 when the fanless usb-c MacBook Air came out.
    - jwells89 3y ago
      On the software side of things, for something like decade now macOS has also surfaced which programs are egregiously power hungry to the user. The most visible way is in the battery menubar item, and in the most extreme cases it'll even show a notification. Similarly Safari tells users when sites are being too voracious. I think this sort of thing is probably more effective than many believe at helping curb lackadaisical attitudes towards resource consumption among devs, with how it turns users into squeaky wheels.
      - seltzered_ 3y ago
        Yeah, that's been helpful too. I think Gnome has been taking starting steps - around Gnome 43/44 IIRC it started listing 'background apps' in the upper right pop menu.
  - MartijnBraam 3y ago
    The power management model in phones is just radically different than desktops. Android can get a lot of battery life by suspending applications and tightly controlling application resource usage.
- linmob 3y ago
  There should be videos demoing the p-boot-demo image on YouTube, I included some in my Weekly Updates [0] on the topic. At this point, it makes no sense to try the image - it's simply to old, and projects have progressed too much. Regarding the battery life: This is a thing on the PinePhone, even more on the PinePhone Pro and (to a lesser degree) the Librem 5. These days I carry a Librem 5 (PureOS) and a OnePlus 6 (postmarketOS), the battery angst does not really apply to the One Plus 6, it easily lasts a day unless something goes terribly wrong. The main reason to do so is that I like to listen to way more podcasts than current (and likely also future) Librem 5 battery life allows. [0]: https://linmob.net/categories/weekly-update/ https://linmob.net/categories/weekly-update/,
charcircuit 3y ago
It already was the year of the Linux on mobile because of Android. Android already supports the mainline kernel. The author also gives unfair cons to Android, incorrectly claims the location API requires a separate API such as Play Services, and claimed that depending on Google is bad because new major versions of Android are developed in private before they are released to the public and that they may make an attestation API for Android (they already have).
- stonogo 3y ago
  This kind of pedantry always appears when people are trying to have a discussion about non-android linux distributions on mobile devices. You know full well what they're talking about when they say "linux" here and it's not "android."
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Okay, but Android literally is a Linux distro, or family of distros perhaps. I'm happy to agree that we really need better terminology, but the answer is better terminology, not less precise terminology. - "Linux" is bad because Android is Linux. - "GNU/Linux" doesn't quite work because 1. ChromeOS is GNU/Linux and 2. Alpine isn't. - "mainline Linux" is a thing we want, but still separate - I'd take Droidian with a hacked-up vendor kernel over a Pixel running an official Android image on mainline Linux any day. The best I've been able to come up with is something like "user-controlled Linux" or "community OS" or even just "not Android", but I'd really prefer a better term.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Android officially does not support Linux APIs for userspace. https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis Applications deployed via Play Store might crash and burn by ignoring this fact, which is a reason why termux nowadays must be sideloaded.
    - Adverblessly 3y ago
      > - "Linux" is bad because Android is Linux. If you are being precise, Android is not Linux (and neither is Debian for that matter). It is an operating system that uses the Linux kernel. > The best I've been able to come up with is something like "user-controlled Linux" or "community OS" or even just "not Android", but I'd really prefer a better term. Here is my proposal, we continue to call operating systems like those "Linux" and call operating systems like Android and ChromeOS "Operating systems that use the Linux kernel". No reason to give the common and useful definition an awkward name like "Community OS" just to allow the abberant cases to continue to reside within the "Linux" definition.
aussieguy1234 3y ago
I switched to Linux 20+ years ago as a teenager, when I got frustrated with Windows 98 BSOD (blue screen of death). Have not looked back since.
- fsflover 3y ago
  On mobile?
nologic01 3y ago
Imho the android vs "true linux" debate must resolve soon or act as a millstone against our hopes for a free mobile device. The desired end state of the world is one where is a well developed and mass-usable "third option" besides the duopoly. There should be a well identifiable app store where vital apps that one cannot not use (public sector, banking, medical etc) can be available, ideally as open source. There are clearly major obstacles on the hardware side due to the cartel nature of mass mobile production and distribution but having a diffuse vision on the software side doesn't help. The experience with linux desktop suggests that remaining niche and techie oriented is not fatal. The FOSS model has long term resilience. But the stakes are those days so high that a FOSS mobile in any shape or form that can break into the mass market would literally change the world.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >The desired end state of the world is one where is a well developed and mass-usable "third option" besides the duopoly. There should be a well identifiable app store where vital apps that one cannot not use (public sector, banking, medical etc) can be available, ideally as open source. It's much easier to regulate the heavily entrenched duopoly at this point, like how EU is trying to do, than somehow get a third player on the market, and convince people and devs to jump on board off Android and iOS. That's just not gonna happen. Even Microsoft was forced to throw in the towel and exit the mobile market and Windows Lumia phones were actually great, so there just is no space on the market for a third player that comes in so late in the game, to gain any sizable market share, that would convince users and devs to switch and allow for a sustainable business.
  - nologic01 3y ago
    If something has to be regulated as public utility it might as well be a public utility. That this cornered "market" will never produce competition is clear enough. But there has never been a device so intimately coupled with the lives of so many people. Past approaches dont apply to new challenges. The question is how can the foss community use its limited resources to facilitate a "third way". There is some precedent in this respect from the fediverse/mastodon experience. The easy availability of a near substitute removes the TINA excuse from various stakeholders and policy makers. Its neither a concrete path nor a certainty. My comment was simply that people should not create further obstacles by pursuing self-indulgent agendas
snvzz 3y ago
As it's often the case, Linux is ill-suited for the task at hand. Genode does now run on PinePhone[0], with a much more suitable system architecture. 0. https://genodians.org/nfeske/2023-02-01-mobile-sculpt https://genodians.org/nfeske/2023-02-01-mobile-sculpt
- fsflover 3y ago
  I don't understand what is not suitable in Linux for you. I am very happy with my Librem 5 running desktop Linux apps, including Firefox with all plugins. It can even work as desktop if you connect a keyboard and screen.

55 points by pabs3 3y ago

sgt 3y ago

It's a cool project indeed but just don't get your hopes up. It remains a tinkerer's toy, like Linux on the desktop perpetually always being behind, then Linux on the mobile might be worse by an order of magnitude.

minimalist 3y ago

Watching this, as I've been daily-driving GNU/Linux phones for two years now (first PP then PPP). One change I've noticed: when waiting for things in public, I don't reach for the phone, as I need to preserve battery for the essential functions--as a means of contact :) Edit: The video is an /okay/ overview of the current state of some things for a Linux-familiar audience. A more compelling thing would be to step through the distros on this multiboot image [0] and show what works and what doesn't work. I think it's really understated how much choice one gets when using a Linux phone. That said, Gnome and KDE are pretty darn functional for the basic stuff these days. Definitely more than a modern feature phone [1], which is plenty for many people. [0]: https://xnux.eu/p-boot-demo/ https://xnux.eu/p-boot-demo/ [1]: https://www.kaiostech.com/ https://www.kaiostech.com/

XorNot 3y ago
I am curious what fundamentally makes power management so difficult these days. I know some of the effort is just inadequate driver support - the various modes can't be turned on properly because they're locked behind proprietary blobs which need to be reverse engineered. But is their something else? What's the pathology that leads to issues in software?
- izacus 3y ago
  There's no pathology, it's just really really hard. Any single component not sleeping properly and keeping the CPU, buses or radios active immediately ruins the battery life for everyone. Power saving is all about racing towards that sweet idle state where every chip is clocked down and nothing radiates. Which means that good power saving requires full vetting of every process on the system and making sure they all cooperate or, at least, are forced to sleep. Android needed years to get into that state and developers/hackers are still sour about the restrictions it puts on them to keep battery life in check.
  - minimalist 3y ago
    > Android needed years to get into that state and developers/hackers are still sour about the restrictions it puts on them to keep battery life in check. True. In my experience, many desktop applications do not care about minimizing idle cycles or network activity. So you end up with your radios always active, or some persistent CPU activity. For example, if one were to use Element Desktop, Signal Desktop and Discord simultaneously on PPP (all electron apps), we're looking at ~20% CPU utilization, idle! Mobile Linux will get there eventually!
    - jwells89 3y ago
      I always wondered what exactly it is that Electron apps are doing to use that much CPU when they're sitting in the background doing nothing, often not even being on screen. For something like chat I guess it could be polling (surely sockets are more popular now?), but it's not uncommon to see this behavior even in completely offline Electron apps. It seems like they're never truly idle.
- seltzered_ 3y ago
  I don't know, but I hope the efforts to drive application-level power management somehow lead to power management improvements when using gnome on a laptop as well. For reference, macOS introduced some APIs intended to improve power management around 2016 when the fanless usb-c MacBook Air came out.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    On the software side of things, for something like decade now macOS has also surfaced which programs are egregiously power hungry to the user. The most visible way is in the battery menubar item, and in the most extreme cases it'll even show a notification. Similarly Safari tells users when sites are being too voracious. I think this sort of thing is probably more effective than many believe at helping curb lackadaisical attitudes towards resource consumption among devs, with how it turns users into squeaky wheels.
    - seltzered_ 3y ago
      Yeah, that's been helpful too. I think Gnome has been taking starting steps - around Gnome 43/44 IIRC it started listing 'background apps' in the upper right pop menu.
- MartijnBraam 3y ago
  The power management model in phones is just radically different than desktops. Android can get a lot of battery life by suspending applications and tightly controlling application resource usage.
linmob 3y ago
There should be videos demoing the p-boot-demo image on YouTube, I included some in my Weekly Updates [0] on the topic. At this point, it makes no sense to try the image - it's simply to old, and projects have progressed too much. Regarding the battery life: This is a thing on the PinePhone, even more on the PinePhone Pro and (to a lesser degree) the Librem 5. These days I carry a Librem 5 (PureOS) and a OnePlus 6 (postmarketOS), the battery angst does not really apply to the One Plus 6, it easily lasts a day unless something goes terribly wrong. The main reason to do so is that I like to listen to way more podcasts than current (and likely also future) Librem 5 battery life allows. [0]: https://linmob.net/categories/weekly-update/ https://linmob.net/categories/weekly-update/,

charcircuit 3y ago

It already was the year of the Linux on mobile because of Android. Android already supports the mainline kernel. The author also gives unfair cons to Android, incorrectly claims the location API requires a separate API such as Play Services, and claimed that depending on Google is bad because new major versions of Android are developed in private before they are released to the public and that they may make an attestation API for Android (they already have).

stonogo 3y ago
This kind of pedantry always appears when people are trying to have a discussion about non-android linux distributions on mobile devices. You know full well what they're talking about when they say "linux" here and it's not "android."
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Okay, but Android literally is a Linux distro, or family of distros perhaps. I'm happy to agree that we really need better terminology, but the answer is better terminology, not less precise terminology. - "Linux" is bad because Android is Linux. - "GNU/Linux" doesn't quite work because 1. ChromeOS is GNU/Linux and 2. Alpine isn't. - "mainline Linux" is a thing we want, but still separate - I'd take Droidian with a hacked-up vendor kernel over a Pixel running an official Android image on mainline Linux any day. The best I've been able to come up with is something like "user-controlled Linux" or "community OS" or even just "not Android", but I'd really prefer a better term.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Android officially does not support Linux APIs for userspace. https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis Applications deployed via Play Store might crash and burn by ignoring this fact, which is a reason why termux nowadays must be sideloaded.
  - Adverblessly 3y ago
    > - "Linux" is bad because Android is Linux. If you are being precise, Android is not Linux (and neither is Debian for that matter). It is an operating system that uses the Linux kernel. > The best I've been able to come up with is something like "user-controlled Linux" or "community OS" or even just "not Android", but I'd really prefer a better term. Here is my proposal, we continue to call operating systems like those "Linux" and call operating systems like Android and ChromeOS "Operating systems that use the Linux kernel". No reason to give the common and useful definition an awkward name like "Community OS" just to allow the abberant cases to continue to reside within the "Linux" definition.

aussieguy1234 3y ago

I switched to Linux 20+ years ago as a teenager, when I got frustrated with Windows 98 BSOD (blue screen of death). Have not looked back since.

fsflover 3y ago
On mobile?

nologic01 3y ago

Imho the android vs "true linux" debate must resolve soon or act as a millstone against our hopes for a free mobile device. The desired end state of the world is one where is a well developed and mass-usable "third option" besides the duopoly. There should be a well identifiable app store where vital apps that one cannot not use (public sector, banking, medical etc) can be available, ideally as open source. There are clearly major obstacles on the hardware side due to the cartel nature of mass mobile production and distribution but having a diffuse vision on the software side doesn't help. The experience with linux desktop suggests that remaining niche and techie oriented is not fatal. The FOSS model has long term resilience. But the stakes are those days so high that a FOSS mobile in any shape or form that can break into the mass market would literally change the world.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>The desired end state of the world is one where is a well developed and mass-usable "third option" besides the duopoly. There should be a well identifiable app store where vital apps that one cannot not use (public sector, banking, medical etc) can be available, ideally as open source. It's much easier to regulate the heavily entrenched duopoly at this point, like how EU is trying to do, than somehow get a third player on the market, and convince people and devs to jump on board off Android and iOS. That's just not gonna happen. Even Microsoft was forced to throw in the towel and exit the mobile market and Windows Lumia phones were actually great, so there just is no space on the market for a third player that comes in so late in the game, to gain any sizable market share, that would convince users and devs to switch and allow for a sustainable business.
- nologic01 3y ago
  If something has to be regulated as public utility it might as well be a public utility. That this cornered "market" will never produce competition is clear enough. But there has never been a device so intimately coupled with the lives of so many people. Past approaches dont apply to new challenges. The question is how can the foss community use its limited resources to facilitate a "third way". There is some precedent in this respect from the fediverse/mastodon experience. The easy availability of a near substitute removes the TINA excuse from various stakeholders and policy makers. Its neither a concrete path nor a certainty. My comment was simply that people should not create further obstacles by pursuing self-indulgent agendas

snvzz 3y ago

As it's often the case, Linux is ill-suited for the task at hand. Genode does now run on PinePhone[0], with a much more suitable system architecture. 0. https://genodians.org/nfeske/2023-02-01-mobile-sculpt https://genodians.org/nfeske/2023-02-01-mobile-sculpt

fsflover 3y ago
I don't understand what is not suitable in Linux for you. I am very happy with my Librem 5 running desktop Linux apps, including Firefox with all plugins. It can even work as desktop if you connect a keyboard and screen.