8 ms·
We need a third alternative, based on freedom with your device. No root access, remote control by apple and google, all wrong.
by exabrial 10mo ago
We need a third alternative, based on freedom with your device. No root access, remote control by apple and google, all wrong.
- ofrzeta 10mo agoThere are some, right? I think I lost track a bit, but one is Sailfish OS. I guess it is super hard for alternative devices/OSs to enter the market.
- tazjin 10mo agoYou can sell the phones alright, and they might even work, but the fact is that participation in society - especially if you live in a city - will be much harder without Android/iOS. Note, not impossible: You can always carry cash to avoid phone-based bank payments (which would be needed at e.g. my local farmer's market, where nobody has a card payment terminal), some taxi services (Yandex Go for example) provide a web view with some of the features, you can open map services in the browser ... But for the browser-based cases the experience will be even worse than the standard app experience, and friction is overall much higher. As a result, only a very small fraction of nerds are committed enough to buy and use these devices. You then have a chicken&egg problem about getting a third option to work. The only way this has been done semi-successfully in recent years is Huawei's HarmonyOS - and they did it by way of a) already being an absolutely massive phone company, and b) keeping around an expensive Android-compatibility core for many years.
- 3abiton 10mo agoYes, the chicken and the egg problem. But here is the thing, the more adopters there are the more likely to get support. Not to mention the userbase will be mainly in the EU.
- tazjin 10mo agoThe EU is entirely dependent on US services, which don't much care about a fringe phone OS some fraction of people in the EU use. It's like adding duck/egg, crow/egg and other similar problems into the dependency web, too.
- alexgieg 10mo agoThe European Commission, as well as many individual countries, are starting to see that as a problem in need of urgent solving, as they've realized it's strategic suicide for a country to be dependent on the goodwill of the (potentially, now turned likely, and going for almost declared) enemy.
- MarsIronPI 10mo agoSailfish OS isn't fully FOSS. I believe the UI is still proprietary.
- dainiusse 10mo agoIt is Linux, isn't it. Jolla phone, etc...
- hommelix 10mo ago> We need a third alternative, based on freedom with your device. No root access, remote control by apple and google, all wrong. There is https://postmarketos.org/ https://postmarketos.org/ Maybe 2026 will be the year of Linux on mobile phone.
- krautsauer 10mo agoThe list of devices in the highest support category hints at how likely this is. https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices And yeah, you can even buy phones with a non-android linux pre-installed, e.g. from pine64. But they come with all kinds of "for early adopters" warning labels. Deservedly so, in my opinion.
- ptman 10mo agohttps://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-preorder https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-preorder
- goku12 10mo ago> Maybe 2026 will be the year of Linux on mobile phone. Considering the ongoing DRAM and SSD crunch, I won't hold my breath.
- opan 10mo agoThis could actually be a reason to work on better supporting older "Android" phones in postmarketOS, to keep the hardware people already have working.
- rock_artist 10mo agoIt’s a circle that needs to be broken. It has multiple parties even without device manufacturers. Users - there is a broad scope of users. For sustainable eco-system you need also user interest and support of such. Developers - that sounds funny. I know. But you need enough leverage to get apps or services to be open. Companies/Software - a modern mobile device takes place in almost any interaction. Commuting, payment, banking, grocery shopping, social messaging, doom scrolling. Biggest hope for the future is ensuring PWA becomes standardized enough. That way the OS lock-in could be reduced.
- goku12 10mo ago> It’s a circle that needs to be broken. It has multiple parties even without device manufacturers. Well, you're right, however badly I don't want to admit it. Google broke that cycle once with Android. I'm sure that Apple would have too, even if they were not the first mover. And there's no question that their wealth and influence had a massive role in it - something an open platform cannot match realistically. But the current situation is simply untenable anymore. I want out, no matter how many others don't care for it. The open platform has to be just functional enough (including app support, even as PWAs), for us to break free from this duopoly. Just like how Linux and BSDs are on desktops. I'm able to do everything on it from work to netbanking. I would hate it really badly if I was forced to use Windows or MacOS these days.
- baq 10mo agoWe need a hardware attestation vendor who isn’t also selling ads on the same device. Something like, I dunno, an identity module which you could maybe insert into the phone?
- edg5000 10mo ago> We need a hardware attestation vendor We never had one on desktop; no real issues. Hardware attestation is primarily in the interest of the vendor, not the user. The user relies on chains of trust. This is how the world works.
- faust201 10mo agoThis is because of legacy. And even now lots of people assemble and build PC. My worry is one fine day Microsoft, Samsung Apple, and Google (rest of SV Media companies like Netflix etc) will join hands in bringing security and force a ChromeOS or macOS type totally- we decide everything for you.
- baq 10mo agoBut that's exactly why I advocate that the hardware attestation module be separate from the computing device - so I can be in control of what and when I attest, not the vendor.
- edg5000 10mo agoCan you elaborate. Say I buy parts myself and install a fully FOSS OS on my machine. Let's say I want to access my bank, and they demand attestation. You propose I'd buy an off-the-shelf, universal attestation module of my chosing (free market). But how would that work from an implementation standpoint? How would the module help put e.g. my bank at ease?
- okanat 10mo agoThose actually exist. Yubikeys, Nitrokeys (complete FOSS FW) or bank-approved code generators (For Germany these exist: https://www.reiner-sct.com/tan-generatoren/ https://www.reiner-sct.com/tan-generatoren/) are basically that. They provide independent assessment. So regardless of the OS or the browser both parties can make secure transactions.
- pjmlp 10mo agoEvery attempt since OpenMoko proves the market doesn't care. And in what concerns the mainstream desktop/laptop market, macOS Linux VMs, WSL, ChromeOS, versus GNU/Linux OEM devices, proves most people doesn't care either what they can get at regular computer stores, otherwise GNU/Linux configurations would not be online only at very specific shops.
- crote 10mo agoMobile is a massive chicken-and-egg problem. The main purpose of a smartphone these days is to run apps. Nobody is going to buy a smartphone which can't run the apps they need in their day-to-day life. On the other hand, no company is going to write apps for a platform with basically zero users. OpenMoko & friends are selling devices which basically only run Firefox, and sometimes make calls as well. The only people interested in that are diehard FLOSS enthusiasts, which means they have to use ancient hardware because new stuff doesn't have open drivers, which means that even if you ignore the app ecosystem they compare incredibly poorly to mainstream smartphones. No wonder they keep failing. Interestingly, the desktop/laptop market is heading the other way. The move to cloud SaaS products means a decent number of people now only need a browser. What's keeping a lot of people on Windows is often literally one or two applications. Valve's push for Proton is the perfect example of this: the Steam Deck is providing a huge incentive to fix those last few bugs keeping a game from running on Linux, and with the way Microsoft is screwing up W11 it is now ironically the gamers who are moving to Linux. What you are seeing in "regular computer stores" is mostly irrelevant. That market is basically dead. Corporate gets its machines directly from Dell/HP/Lenovo, PC enthusiasts mostly get custom builds, and casual people stick with smartphones and tablets. In-store PC sales is now reduced to a university student's Google Docs machine - and Microsoft is doing a pretty good job bribing the manufacturers to push Windows there.
- pjmlp 10mo agoWhat I see is regular people buy their computers at Media Market, Cool Blue, Saturn, Fnac, Public, Dixon, you name it. Most of them have no clue that something like System 76 or Tuxedo exists in first place. Likewise on corporate world, I have long moved into Windows/macOS as official desktops for the last decade, GNU/Linux is only available on VM or servers, and usually it is the cloud provider's own distro. Those customers where IT allowed the use of GNU/Linux desktops, it was with zero support from them, it was up to us to deal ourselves with any issues preventing our work, and to deal with upper management, in case it impacts delivery. Until SteamDeck gets rid of its dependency on Windows as source, it is pretty much irrelevant. Games developers will keep using their Windows workstations, while a community smaller than Switch, will get those games thanks to Proton. And it remains to be seen for how long Microsoft will tolerate Steam, or use their weight as OS vendor, and one of the biggest publishers.
- cookiengineer 10mo agoCheck out Hackberry Pi devices. Then check out how far Plasma Mobile got, it made insane progress over the last years. I'm currently working on an OS image for the Hackberry devices, maybe it'll get some traction. [1] [1] https://github.com/rogueberry https://github.com/rogueberry [2] https://github.com/ZitaoTech/HackberryPiCM5 https://github.com/ZitaoTech/HackberryPiCM5
- Zigurd 10mo agoOpen Harmony? I can't find what I would call authoritative information on how open it is. There's some hedging language about modules being closed source. But it's unclear if that refers to commercial versions of Harmony OS or Open Harmony, or if Open Harmony is open but somehow crippled.
- demikdmrr0 10mo ago[dead]