5 ms·
I imagine most of us here will look elsewhere when we next upgrade. But are those numbers large enough to form a viable alternative?
by buzzwords 5mo ago
I imagine most of us here will look elsewhere when we next upgrade. But are those numbers large enough to form a viable alternative?
- ge96 5mo agoI'm doubtful, I for a bit bought a lot of the Pine64 devices thinking about this eg. not just Android/iOS... but the lack of feature parity eg. missing drivers, lack of apps, old hardware. Unless people are paid to do it vs. volunteer
- cogman10 5mo agoThat's the depressing part. I keep looking for something I could potential run the likes of kde mobile and maybe waydroid on, but there's really just nobody doing this. You are basically locked into a vendor kernel if it's even available.
- kuhsaft 5mo agoPeople forget how much the mobile hardware industry relies on non-free infrastructure. Infrastructure developed by companies that make the standards. You really can't make a good open-source phone because you, pretty much, have to play by the rules of the companies in these consortiums.
- fsflover 5mo agoExcept Librem 5 has been created and is usable by the HN people.
- handedness 5mo agoDoes the Librem 5 not rely on any non-free code or infrastructure?
- juliangoldsmith 5mo agoNo true Scotsman would ever use binary blobs.
- seba_dos1 5mo agoDepends where you draw the line. There is not a single non-free blob in the OS that runs there once the bootloader is up (unless you put some there by yourself, which you're of course free to do).
- kuhsaft 5mo agoI think you misunderstand what the Purism Firmware Jail is. I don't blame you though. They seem to make it purposefully misleading. It doesn't isolate what runs in the OS. It just isolates the OS updates from the non-free blob updates. The OS still runs the non-free blobs. It just loads it from separate flash. https://github.com/linuxboot/heads/blob/c859c28b88b7bc197c16b473a92bf45ece09bcd5/blobs/librem_jail/README https://github.com/linuxboot/heads/blob/c859c28b88b7bc197c16... https://forums.puri.sm/t/the-librem-5-blob-list/28815/26 https://forums.puri.sm/t/the-librem-5-blob-list/28815/26
- seba_dos1 5mo agoIt is you who is confused here. The first link is completely irrelevant to the Librem 5, and the second one points to a thread where the actual information present has been written by me. The only non-free piece of code executed by the ARM Cortex-A53 cluster on the Librem 5 is the SoC's mask ROM bootloader. Once the control is passed to u-boot/ATF there is not a single non-free blob that runs there. Some peripherals may need blobs to be uploaded onto them to work, such as DP, DDRC and one of the used Wi-Fi cards (handled by ROM/u-boot/Linux respectively), while others boot from their own internal memories. Not all of those firmwares are non-free, but most are. In the end, as I said earlier, the assessment depends on where you draw the line. I happen to draw it at the main CPU and the blobs that need to run within the user-controlled OS, which are unacceptable for me and which aren't present on the Librem 5.
- 627467 5mo agoDont get me wrong: I'd love the linux phone "rebel" community to be as large as the android one. But... i doubt it will be anytime soon? The problem is getting the hw investment done first. Android ecosystem is equivalent to windows one: its open enough to sustain a large number of vendors and tinkerers. I doubt this scare-campaign (OP link) will drive people constructively towards (effectively) innexistent linux alternatives. It's more likely to do nothing or push people towards iOS
- seba_dos1 5mo agoI've been a happy user of several of those "effectively inexistent" devices for nearly two decades now and I'm typing this on one of them. Whether they "exist" for you or not is your choice.