They used to exist. Xiaomi, Huawei and BBK devices uses to have iOS-like features. Sure, they’re not FOSS, but they release their ROM trees. But it’s not that. People want to own a status symbol. Conspicuous consumerism, if you get what I’m talking about. People are bullied and shamed for something as simple as having green bubbles.
Also, I’m pretty sure you can add skins to phosh that imitate iOS. Adwaita is very similar to iOS, but the only issue is that it is less aero and more material-ish.
That’s great! It’s still a bit disappointing that so many people decided to stay on Reddit, though. They made a big protest just for everything to go back to normal.
I didn’t know that and then it would make me happy to know that Lemmy is beating Reddit at something, but I still think we’re far away from having open source phones we could use every day in every situation.
I was the idiot that made that happen. (◕‿◕) r/piracy entirely migrated off of Reddit, and instead of failing with an Aether migration, it was a success with Lemmy.
Well, maybe privacy too lol, because I ran r/privatelife to counter the Reddit privacy cabal nonsense, and as soon as I announced a full migration to and primary platform being Lemmy, r/privacy became completely shit, and r/PrivacyGuides was abandoned by mods/admins for lemmy.one PG instance.
I also helped make c/datahoarder atleast an official alternative for r/datahoarder community.
Sorry, but this looks like one of many hundreds of almost identical pages where they just change the device and ROM names to create each new page. These instructions almost certainly won’t work - typically aftermarket ROMs for a device only provide updates up to 2 or 3 versions newer than the Android version the device originally shipped with due to hardware requirements.
Probably never. Gnome is working on their own mobile port. If I’m not mistaken this is partly due to the fact that Phosh and Gnome diverged too far from one another. Although I think some Phosh code is being reused.
PinePhone (at least v1) is no longer maintained in Mobian due to changes in tech. It was a great Dev device for it’s time. The camera was terrible and it was awfly slow which isn’t a surprise at its humble $200-400 price.
The device is a SBC Single Board Computer meaning the modem is soldered on the same silicon as the CPU, RAM, Storage, etc…
All Cellular modems are made by 2 international companies last I checked who all have blobs in their modems – this is bad because it means open source can’t have a fair shot at competing when you need their “blessing” to use the Cellular Internet.
Librem 5 is better in some areas worse in others. The modem is a m.2. This allows the Mainboard to cut power to the modem as desired. The modem can’t be entirely turned off in other phones and as they are on the same SBC there is speculation secret commands could be used for data extraction or to activate spyware in cellphones as was recently discovered with Android and iOS. Separating the m.2 isolates the abilities of the modem module as a “firewall” being the closest comparison.
Librem 5 is also slow. The camera is better than PP. It can do phone and SMS okay but loading a webpage on it is not fun. Both devices have hotswap batteries so to speak so the charge is a nominal issue for me.
PPP is supposedly more battery intensive but manufactured in Hong Kong, which has been absorbed into China. For this reason the tech world is not as fond of their PPP as their initial PP before China absorbed them. Considering the last 4 years people are no longer “fond”.
Something newer than PP or L5 is needed. Something that can do basic tasks without binary blobs wrecking The FOSS Dream.
Framework is a little big but if you see what modders have done it is a good candidate.
Having the ability to add mics with physical kill switches and cameras with kill switches or being omitted entirely in my opinion would be optimal.
Not just having a " mute" button in the same way that when you press mute on zoom or “camera off” if the application has access to audio and video it can still capture all that audio and video when users think they are not being watched.
MNT uses RISCV and ARM SBC IIRC and modularizes a small form factor SFF device and maybe someday will rise to the occasion, or what I mean is modders have a better shot with that kind of thing.
Moving out of the Cellular space away from Phone numbers and to Element, or SIP or VOIP just makes sense for communications. It “cuts the cord” of the ATT / Bell monopoly that has plagued humans for decades.
Eventually we will see “phones” move away from cellular to satellite. This may be the jump we need to break free of all this blob nonsense cock blocking Linux.
There isn’t a optimal answer just yet, like do I build a phone out of a RPI5? when RPI5 and ARMs in general have blobs.
I think major headway has been made in the software front thanks to KDE, Gnome, Purism, Mobian, PostmarketOS and others.
I think the death grip is nearly over as more SFF production capabilities are commonplace now.
A winner hasn’t really been declared, hell a Steam Deck could even be modded (x86 too) to run off the shelf Linux tech and the OS could be on MicroSD and the modem could theoretically be in the m.2 slot. Purism does sell the modems for $50 on their store.
Anyways, there are more questions than answers, at least in the present tense – Who Will Deliver? Could this be the year of the Linux Phone? Maybe for some.
PinePhone (at least v1) is no longer maintained in Mobian due to changes in tech.
The original PinePhone is still maintained. I don’t know for how long, though.
The device is a SBC Single Board Computer meaning the modem is soldered on the same silicon as the CPU, RAM, Storage, etc…
I’m not sure what you mean, since PinePhone’s and Librem 5’s modem is not integrated into the SoC. It’s a separate chip connected through USB.
Librem 5 is better in some areas worse in others. The modem is a m.2. This allows the Mainboard to cut power to the modem as desired. The modem can’t be entirely turned off in other phones and as they are on the same SBC
PinePhone also has a killswitch to power off the modem. I think the only difference between them is that Librem 5’s modem is removable and PinePhone’s modem is soldered onto the board.
there is speculation secret commands could be used for data extraction or to activate spyware in cellphones as was recently discovered with Android and iOS. Separating the m.2 isolates the abilities of the modem module as a “firewall” being the closest comparison.
Android phones have some modem isolation too, but I don’t know much about it.
PPP is supposedly more battery intensive but manufactured in Hong Kong, which has been absorbed into China. For this reason the tech world is not as fond of their PPP as their initial PP before China absorbed them. Considering the last 4 years people are no longer “fond”.
I haven’t heard of that, but I’m pretty sure Librem 5 is manufactured in China too, just like most phones.
Something newer than PP or L5 is needed. Something that can do basic tasks without binary blobs wrecking The FOSS Dream.
Binary blobs are fine as long as they are not present in the operating system or executed by the main CPU. At least that’s the Free Software Foundation’s opinion until we can do something about it. This is where Librem 5 does better than PinePhone.
Framework is a little big but if you see what modders have done it is a good candidate.
It has a x86 CPU, so it probably requires proprietary BIOS. I assume you will also need to install proprietary firmware in your OS to get working WiFi. So I don’t know if it’s an improvement over GNU/Linux phones. It’s probably not very energy efficient either.
Having the ability to add mics with physical kill switches and cameras with kill switches or being omitted entirely in my opinion would be optimal.
PinePhone and Librem 5 have killswitches for the cameras and the microphone.
Moving out of the Cellular space away from Phone numbers and to Element, or SIP or VOIP just makes sense for communications. It “cuts the cord” of the ATT / Bell monopoly that has plagued humans for decades.
Phone calls are not end-to-end encrypted, so they suck. But to use Matrix you will need to use the internet. So you still need a modem probably. If not, you can just disable it with a killswitch.
Eventually we will see “phones” move away from cellular to satellite. This may be the jump we need to break free of all this blob nonsense cock blocking Linux.
I think the main problem is lack of SoCs that have good mainline Linux kernel support. Removing the modem won’t solve it and you will still need proprietary firmware for WiFi and Bluetooth, which sucks.
There isn’t a optimal answer just yet, like do I build a phone out of a RPI5? when RPI5 and ARMs in general have blobs.
Yeah, it has the same problem.
A winner hasn’t really been declared, hell a Steam Deck could even be modded (x86 too) to run off the shelf Linux tech and the OS could be on MicroSD and the modem could theoretically be in the m.2 slot. Purism does sell the modems for $50 on their store.
Oh, that’s interesting. It probably still has blobs, though. And if you want to use WiFi, it probably requires proprietary firmware installed in your OS.
Librem 5 is probably the best in terms of software freedom. I think it doesn’t require any proprietary firmware in the operating system, because it was moved to separate chips. But I think binary blobs are still executed during boot, which is why they didn’t manage to get the RYF certificate from the FSF.
Yeah man, I think the article I initially read about PP Mobian situation was this one here just for reference if I am even remembering right – blog.mobian-project.org/…/paperweight-dilemma/
I forgot about the toggles under the PP cover, I didn’t know they acted as hardware kill switches like L5? Interesting for sure
Yes most SFF tech is still China, maybe someday we’ll have more diversification. It’ll have to do for now.
x86 is a power suck but I still think it’s a interesting use case as it delivers on webpage rendering and demanding tasks. Ideally I would imagine RISCV would be the golden standard.
I guess if I wanted to be puritan maybe starting with a Librem Mini with Secure boot might make a good frankenstein phone.
I won’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good until we are in a position to be choosers, until then its pretty much a community effort to get the whole thing off the ground.
BeepBerry was a really interesting concept but lacked the sophistication needed to take off.
I forgot about the toggles under the PP cover, I didn’t know they acted as hardware kill switches like L5? Interesting for sure
Yeah, they have the same purpose. They are just a little less convenient to use.
x86 is a power suck but I still think it’s a interesting use case as it delivers on webpage rendering and demanding tasks. Ideally I would imagine RISCV would be the golden standard.
I think the power efficiency of x86 is getting better lately, but still not good enough.
I guess if I wanted to be puritan maybe starting with a Librem Mini with Secure boot might make a good frankenstein phone.
It would probably be pretty big and power hungry. It seems that it uses Coreboot, which contains proprietary blobs. Most x86 devices need those.
I won’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good until we are in a position to be choosers, until then its pretty much a community effort to get the whole thing off the ground.
I hope some next phone will get a RYF certificate from the Free Software Foundation. That’s already a pretty high standard.
BeepBerry was a really interesting concept but lacked the sophistication needed to take off.
Yeah man, I think the article I initially read about PP Mobian situation was this one here just for reference if I am even remembering right – blog.mobian-project.org/…/paperweight-dilemma/
I wonder about this too. And instead of a secondary, backup android, can’t we just emulate andoid in a vm/container under linux? Sounds crazy, but it isn’t really.
How did they determine these numbers? I have postmarketOS on my OnePlus 6T but I have LibreWolf user agent set to Android Firefox because it makes portrait formatting better on some sites, though I switch it to desktop on sites with bad mobile UIs. Also, even with default user agent how do you distinguish a Linux phone from a Linux desktop or laptop other than just lumping all arm64 devices into “Linux phone” category?
If you guys wanna see higher adoption numbers buy used android phones that are supported by one of your favourite distros and donate to the developers. They’re small fry at the moment.
Benefits of the Linux Phone would be: more choice in operating systems, longer supported phones, more FOSS apps, more demand for unlocked bootloaders (Hello EU please force all phone manufacturers to include this), Increased device support, beefed up competition in the mobile market which is sorely needed now.
The issue goes a layer deeper. The hardware itself is undocumented for every mobile chipset and it has been that way for a long time.
This is how Android works: Google takes a Linux kernel and strips it down to the absolute bare minimum needed to run the app environment on top of the kernel. They set up all the hooks so that the only thing missing are the kernel modules needed to support the physical hardware of the device. This is made freely available and well documented.
The hardware manufacturer only has to write the kernel modules to connect into the system. They compile and add these modules at the last possible moment as binaries. No one outside of the manufacturer knows what is contained in those binaries.
This is an orphan kernel at this point. It is frozen in time because the only way to update the device requires the source files that created those binary modules, or you have to reverse engineer the kernel as it evolves in order to maintain compatibility with certain aspects of the kernel at the time the binaries were created. Eventually this task becomes too cumbersome and the project is abandoned when anyone tries this.
Unlike a lot of PC stuff, the processors in phones are pretty much unique to every device so it is not like reverse engineering any device will effectively pull in support for others.
Ultimately, this is the mechanism that steals ownership and deprecates your hardware. If you want this to change, you must care about democracy, citizenship, and the right of ownership. If you have a fundamental right of ownership, open source complete documentation of all digital hardware is required.
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