theregister.com

tuckerm, to privacy in Telegram CEO calls out rival Signal, claiming it has ties to US government
tuckerm avatar

I know that Telegram has a lot of users, so I'm not describing all of them here. But I've noticed that it seems especially popular among people who kind of like to "play pretend" as underground hackers. You know, the kind of person who likes to imagine that the government would be after them.

This mudslinging feels like more of a marketing campaign than anything else. An info op that will work well on the Telegram users who like to imagine that they have outmaneuvered all the info ops.

rottingleaf,

Yes. And those pretenders are always people who can’t install Synapse and “delete” their messages thinking that’s very smart.

autonomoususer,

Because we keeping saying Signal and Telegram instead of Anti-Libre Software, Service as a Software Substitute, and Centralised.

We should reach them in their spaces, moding, hacking, piracy and beginner programming channels.

pastermil, to linux in Furi Phone FLX1: Debian smartphone debuts • The Register

Is it better than PinePhone?

AVincentInSpace, to linux in Furi Phone FLX1: Debian smartphone debuts • The Register

Huzzah! A Linux phone with specs that wouldn’t have looked pathetic five years ago!

Actually, those specs are comparable to the Pixel 7a I’m writing this on at a slightly cheaper price! Has the era of the Linux phone begun?

wisha, to linux in Furi Phone FLX1: Debian smartphone debuts • The Register

According to the Librem people: this is Android kernel (& other low level stuff) with Debian userspace, not a true Debian phone. social.librem.one/

theshatterstone54,

At least it might actually get delivered, unlike the librem 5… /s (but not really)

wisha,

It’s already delivered - a Mastodon user got one.

But getting an OEM to make a phone under your brand is easy. The real question is how long will they keep the software maintained?

These people seem like passionate Linux enthusiasts, so one can hope.

fluxx,

So, not the droid we Are looking for… :(

azvasKvklenko, to linux in Furi Phone FLX1: Debian smartphone debuts • The Register

A phone for furis? How nice :3

wiki_me, to linux in Furi Phone FLX1: Debian smartphone debuts • The Register

So it will have good mainline linux support?

wisha,

No. It uses Hallium (Android kernel, basically).

boredsquirrel, to linux in Furi Phone FLX1: Debian smartphone debuts • The Register

I mean Android is not magic, but a huge step up from desktop Linux regarding security, minimalism, battery life, …

They also just use an LTS kernel, and I even found a Vulkan package.

The simple, core principle, security without compromises, is not hard, everythig is there.

And at the same time you can fix many of the Google issues, privacy invasiveness, design that sucks…

just_another_person, to linux in Furi Phone FLX1: Debian smartphone debuts • The Register

We’ve tried this before. Didn’t work out very well from what I remember.

sabreW4K3,
@sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al avatar

Sometimes ideas are ahead of their time.

Asyx,

I don’t think this is the case here. Like, this is dead on arrival in most of Europe without WhatsApp. My phone is my most important device. I cannot access my bank account without it. But banks will not allow me to use that phone as a factor for authentication.

5 or 10 years ago you could have forced those companies to either support something third party or develop for a new phone os but now we are stuck with android and ios until something really messed up happens to our economy or until one of them really fucks up and gets into legal trouble to a point where they can’t sell phones or services anymore.

sabreW4K3,
@sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al avatar

You’re not wrong. But remember that with the new law, third party apps can send and receive WhatsApp messages now.

Petter1,

And you can use matrix bridges or whatsapp web via phone as a server at home

possiblylinux127,

I personally refuse to use anything that requires that I install a proprietary app. F-droid or the highway

Asyx,

Yes but then you are half a percent of the user base that a new phone manufacturer would want to attract. And in Germany at least it is literally impossible to have a social life outside of the nerd bubble if you don’t use WhatsApp.

cm0002, to linux in Furi Phone FLX1: Debian smartphone debuts • The Register

Yet another Linux phone with subpar specs. That processor is quite underwhelming even compared to Google’s Tensor G1, a proc that many regard as crap as is and it beats this Dimensity 900 handily.

Petter1,

I think about creating a phone out of a raspberry Pi compute module and include a dedicated NPU in the build 🤔

possiblylinux127,

That would be just as proprietary as Android

Petter1,

😮

toothbrush, to linux in Furi Phone FLX1: Debian smartphone debuts • The Register
@toothbrush@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Im very interested in an officially supported linux phone, however the fitmware seems not to be upstream(yet?). I hope it will be upstreamed, or else were back to square one with linux mobile hardware support if they stop working on it!

GolfNovemberUniform,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

China and upstream do not combine. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bootloader was non unlockable too.

ProgrammingSocks,

Hong Kong only recently became part of China. I’m sure the protests are fresh in people’s minds still. If anywhere would want private phones it would be HK.

GolfNovemberUniform,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

Wait China conquered HK already???

wisha,

They will upstream stuff, but sadly they are not going to mainline.

mastodon.social/

refalo, to linux in Furi Phone FLX1: Debian smartphone debuts • The Register

Chinese

straight into the trash

toothbrush,
@toothbrush@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Its a small company without VC, seems ok so far. Chinese track record for open sourcing things isnt too good because chinese courts dont care about the GPL I think, however they sound like linux enthusiasts, so Im optimistic.

refalo,

I was more concerned with government ties.

Tekkip20, to linux in Linux geeks cheer as Arm wrestles x86 • The Register
@Tekkip20@lemmy.world avatar

Does this possibly mean the end of x86 or will it be a coexisting scenario?

I still believe that as much as some people bark on about, X86 will not die for a long time, it will still keep kicking for some time.

GravitySpoiled, to linux in Furi Phone FLX1: Debian smartphone debuts • The Register

Despite the market domination of Apple’s iOS

Since when?

toothbrush,
@toothbrush@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Despite the market domination of Apple’s iOS and the legions of Android devices out there, there are alternatives in the smartphone market…

just a wierd line break

refalo,

since you crawled under a rock /s

GravitySpoiled,

This is Patrick.

GolfNovemberUniform,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

It just shows the shady nature of this new company

dannoffs,
@dannoffs@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

The register is out of the UK and the bulk of their readership is in the US, in both places apple has above 50% market share.

GravitySpoiled,

Thx. I didn’t knew it was that bad

mesamunefire, (edited )

Some people think it’s a status symbol, but most people don’t care. But yeah it’s above 50 percent now and climbing (in the US).

I have both from time to time. I wish there was a viable 3rd party than picking our favorite multi-billion dollar company, but as a developer, I need both.

Petter1,

It is over 80% if you only look at the youth

boredsquirrel,

True. Apple is straight up dystopia.

someacnt_, (edited )

I mean, do we have viable alternative? Like every popular brand is from similar tech megacorps.

GravitySpoiled,

Android is open source

FreshLight, to linux in Linux geeks cheer as Arm wrestles x86 • The Register

Ok, no shot the title doesn’t contain “arm wrestle” on purpose…

vaionko,

It literally has a picture of arm wrestling on there. I think it’s on purpose.

FreshLight,

Oh, my b

deathmetal27, to linux in Linux geeks cheer as Arm wrestles x86 • The Register

I’d rather see what RISC-V has to offer.

uis,

Or what FPGAs have to offer.

bitfucker,

Punch cards are gonna be back baby

bamboo,

As a fellow risc-v supporter, I think the rise of arm is going to help risc-v software support and eventually adoption. They’re not compatible, but right now developers everywhere are working to ensure their applications are portable and not tied to x86. I imagine too that when it comes to emulation, emulating arm is going to be a lot easier than x86, possibly even statically recompilable.

deathmetal27,

They’re not compatible

This is what concerns me. ARM could dominate the market because almost everyone would develop apps supporting it and leave RISC-V behind. It could become like Itanium vs AMD64 all over again.

zygo_histo_morpheus,

Well right now most people develop apps supporting x86 and leaves everything else behind. If they’re supporting x86 + arm, maybe adding riscv as a third option would be a smaller step than adding a second architecture

bamboo,

Exactly. Adding a third should be much simpler than a second.

deathmetal27,

It greatly depends on the applications.

Porting Windows exclusive games to Linux is a small step as well, but most developers don’t do it because they cannot justify the additional QA and debugging time required to port them over. Especially since Linux’s market share is small.

The reason Itanium failed was because the architecture was too different from x86 and porting x86 applications over required significant effort and was error prone.

For RISC-V to even get any serious attention from developers, I think they need to have appx 40-50% market share with OEMs alongside ARM. Otherwise, RISC-V will be seen as a niche architecture and developers would avoid porting their applications to it.

LeFantome,

We agree.

My point is that “porting” is not such a big deal if it is just recompile. If you already target Linux with a portable code base ( to support both ARM and amd64 for example ) then the burden of RISC-V is pretty low. Most of the support will be the same between RISC-V and ARM if they target the same Linux distros.

The Linux distros themselves are just a recompile as well and so the entire Open Source ecosystem will be available to RISC-V right away.

It is a very different world from x86 vs Itanium with amd64 added to the mix.

Look at Apple Silicon. Fedora already has a full distribution targeting Apple Silicon Macs. The biggest challenges have been drivers, not the ISA. The more complete the Linux ecosystem is on ARM, the easier it will be to create distros for RISC-V as well.

Porting Windows games to Linux is not a small step. It is massive and introduces a huge support burden. That is much different than just recompiling your already portable and already Linux hosted applications to a new arch.

With games, I actually hope the Win32 API becomes the standard on Linux as well because it is more stable and reduces the support burden on game studios. It may even be ok if they stay x86-64. Games leverage the GPU more than the CPU and so are not as greatly impacted running the CPU under emulation.

LeFantome,

That is a risk on the Windows side for sure. Also, once an ISA becomes popular ( like Apple Silicon ) it will be hard to displace.

Repurposing Linux software for RISC-V should be easy though and I would expect even proprietary software that targets Linux to support it ( if the support anything beyond x86-64 ).

Itanium was a weird architecture and you either bet on it or you did not. RISC and ARM are not so different.

The other factor is that there is a lot less assembly language being used and, if you port away from x64, you are probably going to get rid of any that remains as part of that ( making the app more portable ).

princessnorah,
@princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Apple Silicon isn’t an ISA, it’s just ARM, what are you saying?

LeFantome,

Once a chip architecture gets popular on Windows, it will be hard to displace. ARM has already become popular on macOS ( via Apple Silicon ) so we know that is not going anywhere. If ARM becomes popular on Windows ( perhaps via X Elite ), it will be hard to displace as the more popular option. That makes RISC-V on Windows a more difficult proposition.

I do not think that RISC-V on Linux has the same obstacles other than that most hardware will be manufactured for Windows or Mac and will use the chips popular with those operating systems.

princessnorah,
@princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I think you missed the forest for the trees my friend. I was simply commenting on the fact you made it sound like Apple Silicon is it’s own ISA.

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