As much as we laugh at IBM and Intel nowadays and praise the success of ARM, the x86-based IBM PC ecosystem with standardized BIOS that maintains compatibility for decades is such a blessing, a huge breakthrough that we don't even notice anymore because we're so used to it.
Before that the OS development was tightly coupled to hardware development. Booting an existing OS on a new device even with the same CPU required prior patching, configuration and re-implementation of the floppy drive driver. And it wasn't seen as odd because that's the way it was.
I don't think the problem is a lack of OS enthusiasts, we probably have more of them than at the time Linux was born. The problem is they're fighting an uphill battle against a swarm of slightly different CPUs and device trees and uncooperative vendors that do anything they can to lock the device.
The devices ship with a kernel that can use them. Is there anything we can do to make it easier to extract whatever device tree or other information from the compiled kernel it ships with, so it can be used with any other Linux kernel?
Device tree is a file in /boot that can be decompiled. The missing artifact is open-source driver code.
A lucky accident that IBM failed to prevent, they didn't want to have such a market, Compaq made it possible, with a clever way to prevent it legally.
> uphill battle against a swarm of slightly different CPUs and device trees
Economic incentives for "differentiation", e.g. device tree with upstream Linux and uboot support for feature A, but non-upstream uboot blob enables feature A+B.
It’s even hard to find the uboot patches for clockworkpi hardware, and they open source almost everything.
Nokia had a chance for greatness around 2010 with Maemo and Meego. And either by stupidity or malice they ruined that. It was the right moment to have a chance, the smartphone game was still starting up, Nokia was still very influential in that arena, and the 2 devices it made (the N900 and N9) were great in their own way, for what was around that time.
But between their own internal sectors still betting on Symbian, not being open enough and the mole that Microsoft introduced with Elop that opportunity was lost.
From there on there was Sailfish (that never managed to get enough adoption), Ubuntu Touch and Firefox OS among others, but no big vendors backing.
And the opportunity moment was already passed, as the de facto platforms for mobile development were iOS and Android, not even Microsoft was successful pushing their own platform there. All the killer apps are already released for those platforms, trying something new won't give the essentials to communicate with others and participate in society as of today.
> All the killer apps are already released for those platforms, trying something new won't give the essentials to communicate with others and participate in society as of today.
I don't know about that. What's left are the things the existing platforms won't give you.
Example: uBlock, but for apps. Runs the app in a container and blocks network requests to tracking servers, or otherwise modifies the app to remove misfeatures. Think: Game Genie for social media apps.
The problem is you don't just need the killer app, you also need all of the existing apps, and hardware to run it on. So the real problem is you need your new system to be able to do that, but also to be able to run common Android apps on common Android hardware.
I still use Sailfish OS, but it's becoming more frustrating with more and more things locked into proprietary apps (which are only available for android and ios) with no option to do things over a web interface. Just the other day I had to leave a laundromat because they only accepted payment via their mobile app.
N900 was my first smartphone and still miss the feeling of having a proper Linux box in my pocket. Unfortunately didn't buy the n9 as it was clear it was dead in the water by the time it came out.
Based on my contacts at Nokia it was simply underfunding, believing that symbian would remain dominant in developing countries and seeing the meamo/meego line as a distracting and expensive side project as well as internal competition which people sought to sabotage internally. Some ex-Nokia people blogged quite extensively on it.
Nokia may have had an opportunity; however, you may not remember history, but the iPhone 1 was a game changer, and one thing that Android did right was to immediately adapt to the new form factor. Android won its place in the duopoly because it was and still is technically excellent, it adapted faster, and because it was immediately available to use by phone makers, borrowing many good lessons from Windows.
The truth is, there was no more room left for a no. 3. The writing was on the wall for those able to see, Nokia's alternatives were out, much like Blackberry, regardless of what they did.
I, too, was unhappy with Nokia's move to producing Windows Phones. But Microsoft, compared to other companies, knows how to build operating systems and create developer ecosystems around them. If Microsoft failed, IMO, Nokia did not stand a chance.
Android was fortunate to recruit Matias Duarte with experience from Danger Sidekick and Palm WebOS.
As ex-Nokia, it was a game changer in the US market where Symbian didn't had much luck in the market.
Symbian development community wasn't that happy with Windows on Nokia phones, that is why most pivoted into Android and iOS.
Nokia was mostly an anti-Microsot culture shop when I joined in 2004, we had HP-UX, Solaris, Red-Hat Linux and Symbian. Windows was only used as thin client.
Only thing to add that it was funny how Blackberry didn't get for years that the browser is so important in the phones. Others missed that as well, everyone was doing the stupid half-browser thing. Of course they did as a normal browser needed a level up from their hardwares to be a PC leauge player.
This would have maybe delayed the inevitable though for some years anyway, just sayin.
Blackberry did eventually get their act together, but it was too late. There was a Blackberry KEY2 phone based on Android, with a valiant effort to sandbox Android/Google with Blackberry security policy controls. That phone belongs in a museum of adversarial interoperability, alongside Godzilla/Kong memes.
We need more devices with runtime competition between tech titans. Some remnants are visible on iOS with Apple v. Facebook on ad targeting and contact databases.
The N900 was phenomenal for its time. One of the best smartphones ever made. If you just wanted to use it as a smartphone you could but if you wanted to dig deeper it was such a versatile and capable device.
> Nokia had a chance for greatness around 2010 with Maemo and Meego. And either by stupidity or malice they ruined that. It was the right moment to have a chance, the smartphone game was still starting up, Nokia was still very influential in that arena, and the 2 devices it made (the N900 and N9) were great in their own way, for what was around that time.
Meego, Maemo was really early experimentation IMHO. WebOS and Tizen were two worthy contenders, but both of them went to die in enterprise institutions that have no understanding how to create a product. HP absolutely smashed WebOS, and Samsung in its usual ultra hostile fashion destroyed any open source potential Tizen had. HP, Samsung, and Oracle is where Open Source goes to die.
WebOS was absolutely amazing. The Palm Pre on the other hand felt like plastic trash. I was young enough when it came out that I was dependent on my parents to buy and pay for my phone still and I dragged my dad to a Sprint store at 5:00am to make sure we were first in line to get one so they didn't sell out. When we got there I figured I must have the wrong date because we were the entire line.
I used that Pre until the plastic shell started falling apart and by then the writing was on the wall that it wasn't going to be the next big thing for phones and I regretfully bought my first Android phone with my own hard earned money.
There was also Bada OS, Samsung's attempt to cut the dependency on Android. I was actually running a device with 1.0, and it was surprisingly usable. The investment in building a development community was also there. They released lots of documentation and the SDK. Sadly, they followed with a 2.0 that really wanted to feel like Android (but wasn't).
They obviously didn't want to put all their eggs into one basket and kept releasing Android phones in parallel. Eventually, Bada died a silent death, although some of it probably found its way to Tizen.
Palm/HP WebOS descendant lives as open-source based on OpenEmbedded, shipped on LG TVs.
My understanding as well that Nokia bet everything on Symbian.
Even the N8 was comparable to the android I have today after 14 years. Full touch screen, great battery life, excellent camera quality, great maps, regular OS updates, ran all the software it had smoothly and could be programmed in C++ with Qt Creator.
Then Microsoft came and ruined the N series by making nokia release some broken version of the OS (code named anna and then bella) so that people would buy Lumia. After a couple of months, there was no more application store. What terrible blunder that was.
Something I think people in tech sometimes don’t realize is that the complexity of modern software generally requires a lot of money to be thrown at it to get meaningful amounts of stuff done, and that money is getting thrown at open source by the giants, who may have whole teams dedicated to advancing it. That means they’re the ones directing the R&D and advancing the state of the art, so your little indie/hobby/crowdfunded/grassroots thing isn’t going to be able to keep up, probably. Call me cynical, but that’s just what I seem to see right now.
I've given up on ever expecting an open source phone. Apple likely spends more money developing just the keyboard than these OSS companies have to spend on the entire phone, software and hardware. There is just no way they can release something that's even usable, let alone competitive.
Did have an unexpected win in the form of the Steam Deck though. Never thought I'd have a powerful hand held, desktop linux gaming machine at an affordable price. Back in the day I was following the Dragonbox Pyra project and really liked the idea, but couldn't justify spending so much on a device that couldn't really do anything.
That's because you treat a FOSS project with a commercial mentality.
Remember the first post Torvalds made for the kernel?
He didn't say "I'm doing a project to compete as fast as I can with commercial UNIX machine so please help"
He sid this: "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)"
And it became huge. By chance.
A FOSS phone doesn't have to support Whatsapp. It should be open, fun to tinker with, modular and, maybe, with enough logic to handle carrier signal and SMS.
Even if it's not successful, the code and schematics will still live somewhere on the Internet, ready for anyone to create a weird steampunk phone.
Most people that want a Linux phone don't care about freedom of tech. They just want some portable Unix workstation with all the comfort of a commercial phone.
Which it's not wrong by itself. But demanding Open Source to create another "commercial-like but gratis" it's already a bad attitude to start with
> A FOSS phone doesn't have to support Whatsapp.
What apps does it have to support, in your opinion? A computer in my pocket is useful for a lot of things, but central to its usefulness is communication. it can choose to not support all possible modes of communication, but it needs to at least support some of them, in order for there to be any adoption.
The unforgivable part for me was Google prohibiting Android forks in their vendor licensing agreements for their add-on software.
It was a deeply cynical way of doing an end-run around the GPL, and I've held them in utter contempt ever since.
As an analogy: I use Sway but it doesn’t stop me from running GTK apps. I could use Gnome as my desktop software — a giant GTK app for running other GTK apps — but I don’t have to.
Job scheduling, URL handling, settings daemons… we have standard tools for doing this as well on a Linux system. Somehow they remain only very loosely bound together and different bits can be omitted or swapped for alternatives.
With Android / AOSP, are the components bound tightly together? I suppose the acid test would be: can I run Google maps APK on my Linux desktop as an app showing in a native window, or do I have to run an entire android emulator which has to take over a portion of my screen (and provide separate versions of all its own system services) to run one app?
If a WINE-for-Android like thing exists, then I’d be very happy to run a standard Linux system on my phone and have it boot into an Android launcher that could run Android apps, but also be able to do anything else I wanted to do with a bare Linux system.
Steamdeck from Valve does exactly this and it’s very good. The stock behaviour is to boot into their launcher (SteamOS) but if you sang you can toggle to a KDE desktop, get a shell in a terminal emulator, and hack away on what is just a regular PC.
I think you're looking for waydroid? AFAIK it does in fact have most of an android system bundled into it and it doesn't do rootless windows (Android apps are rendered into a single window that contains an entire Android UI), but it absolutely works. Funny enough, I use it on my laptop because Anki has dependency problems on my system but the F-Droid version is fine.
We already have it, but people aren't willing to use it. Using a real libre system will always be a little harder than using a nice and polished billionaire funded walled garden. For obvious reasons. People just aren't willing to sacrifice even a little bit of comfort for the freedom, so products like Librem or PinePhone get mostly just complaints, comparison with Apple, and current users are ridiculed as nerds or weirdos. We will never have freedom as long as this is the prevailing culture. It's up to us, the customers, the commenters.
No we really don't.
What we actually need is to do all over again what has been done for the last 30 years on computers: developing and reverse engineering open source versions of the various drivers for mobile devices' hardware. Without them you will be forced to pray for ABI compatibility at every update and you will never get to know your actually hardware
We already had not one, but multiple. They lost to android. I imagine there were multiple reasons, really, but one of them seems pretty basic: simple SDKs. Even when there was no Android apps, making one was easier, than making... whatever. Now, when there are thousands (maybe millions? I have no idea) Android apps, I don't really see anything else catching on. To be fair, now there is this react-native approach, but still, all these permission frameworks, drivers, really necessary apps nobody will port and everybody needs...
Google AVF/pKVM will allow unmodified Linux VMs on Pixel 7+. GrapheneOS has shipped early plumbing support, not yet exposed to users.
All hail Big G in our Temple of Tensor. Amen.
In comparison, Apple shipped a hypervisor 2 years ago, then removed it because users were running VMs. 2024 M4 iPads have silicon support for nested virtualization, but Apple prevents users from running VMs.
At least Google has upstreamed pKVM to the Linux kernel. Since Pixel Tablet can run GrapheneOS, there's a path to running unmodified Linux VMs as open-source pKVM support matures.
It's sad that customers have to settle, but non-zero Google table scraps > zero Apple VM slices.
It’s happening (albeit slowly?)
Librem 5 PinePhone and its Pro variant FuriLabs FLX1
Mobian UBPorts PostMarket OS And all the other distributions.
Still what’s really lacking is some kind of critical mass that can’t be ignored. Many many services even in real life are locked behind an iOS/play store wall (even sometimes with no alternative outside needing a smartphone).
We’re not completely locked in yet so there’s still time…
We need real FOSS Android. I wish people would start building from there.
There's a lot of building going on. Waydroid builds their own highly specialized Android derivative. As does Replicant, Calyx, Graphene, /e/foundation, Lineage, microg, and probably lots more in the Foss space alone.
What do you want that LineageOS (plus F-Droid) doesn't do?
Google et al pour billions annually into making android a first-class and dominant mobile OS. I think the FOSS community should leverage that and focus on liberating Android instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
It's impossible because of hardware attestation. Until something is done for that (and "legal" seems the only way), there is no solution
Android Virtualization Framework with pKVM on Pixel 7+ can technically allow unmodified Linux VMs to run in parallel with "official" VMs that pass hardware attestation. This feature is not yet exposed to end-users.
The point is that apps you need to run will only do so in the "official" VMs that pass hardware attestation and will intentionally fail in the unmodified Linux VMs.
If a banking app or DRM-encumbered streaming app can run in the official attested VM, what would be the benefit of running such closed apps in unmodified Linux VMs?
If banks and streaming vendors don't trust unmodified VMs, why would open-source Linux VMs trust closed apps with binary blobs?
One benefit of running open-source Linux VMs is access to the vast corpus of mature open-source software applications packaged by Debian, Fedora, etc.
Google is clamping on that freedom by providing ways to detect when you run unauthorized/liberated software (i.e. root or custom ROM)
Your banking app is not going to work on Linux either. If Android is fundamentally broken then fork it. My point is, it seem smarter/easier to take Android and make it more linux-like than to take Linux and make it more Android-like. All the work is already done and paid for. Sailing with the wind vs sailing against the wind.
edit : Unless the goal is also to benefit the linux desktop ecosystem (the whole convergence meme)
This is why it's so worrying that browsers are getting the same treatment. Attestation/WEI will bring this to the desktop (and mobile browser for that matter) and you'll have to use Chrome or an approved Chrome reskin (every other browser, basically) for most things.
> you'll have to use Chrome
That isn't sufficient. You'll also need to use an OS which provides "acceptable" hardware attestation capabilities (as defined by Google) required to verify that the copy of Chrome is legitimate (otherwise this could be spoofed). In practice that most likely means your options are limited to: Windows 11, macOS with System Integrity Protection enabled, Chrome OS, stock Android with Google services installed as system apps, iOS.
Google's first attempt at bringing attestation to the web, WEI, was shot down by hackers, but it won't be the last. Please continue to fight against this.
Honest question - how? I run Linux, Firefox, etc. but I don't know what else I can do to help restore a healthy ecosystem. Run for office with the pirate party?
> Your banking app is not going to work on Linux either.
I think the idea is that no amount of forking Android is going to produce something different enough to entice developers to port their apps to it? If you have to consult `developer.android.com` (a Google-owned domain) to develop for your "totally not Android" platform, it may be difficult to avoid the temptation to do what the documentation recommends and simply embrace proprietary Google Play Services and hardware atteststion and whatnot. After all, 99% of users have those things and it's just these several weird forks that don't...
> Your banking app is not going to work on Linux either
Why is that? I can use my bank through Linux via a web browser without issue. Logging in more frequently is a hassle but not a bad trade IMO.
The native app won't work though. The problem alluded to by grandparent comment and in linked-article.
As much as I like the concept, I'm not sure Linux phone is a good idea. Desktop Linux is not particularly prone to spyware scanning the filesystem and uploading it mainly because they mainly use free software from package repositories that are vetted by maintainers. If Linux phones are used like Android or iOS phones are used today (downloading random binaries, often to interact with real world things you can't opt out of, with distribution controlled by a corporation not too worried about your privacy), it would be a privacy nightmare.
In my mind part of the "Linux Phone" package is moving primarily to a package repo software distribution solution. You can slap an App Store-esque frontend on it, but the software you're installing is (by default) from a curated list of supported open source packages, not random binaries from untrustworthy parties. Of course, this mentality is losing support even on desktop Linux with the move to Snaps/Flatpacks/AppImages/etc, which is a real shame.
Well... yeah, don't do that. I mean this seriously, not facetiously; when I say I want a Linux phone what I mean is I want a phone that runs Debian or whatever (on bare metal, with good quality of experience, and with a mainline kernel) and where I install software out of the official repos using apt (or whatever).
(Also plenty of people on desktop Linux do `curl | sh`, and some of us are getting most of our Android apps out of F-Droid; I'm not sure the distinction runs quite the way you're suggesting.)
The problem with open mobile phones is neither the phone hardware or software. The main problem is the damn cellular network carriers.
Until some government agency gets serious about forcing the cellular carriers to actually allow phones on their network without having to go through the anal violation that is "certification" for their network, the open mobile phone ecosystem will continue to suck.
In the opposite direction, would Android make a decent Linux desktop if it got a little more polish for this use case? What about it's code quality? Is it a mess or is it on par with GNOME + Wayland + whatever?
That's basically a Chromebook, which can run both Android apps and Linux apps.
Yeah, let's make desktops unusable toys as well
Kernel land is almost entirely Linux. Just without open-source drivers for some freakish reason.
Userland is as different from desktop Linux as you can possibly get.
We don't need a non-android ecosystem. The compatibility is nice. The security features are nice.
What we need is more devices that allow unlocking the bootloader and rewriting the keys.
Sadly that isn’t really enough today - since many applications will refuse to function if SafetyNet fails because you have some non-standard image running.
That's not a problem and not getting fixed by diverging farther than android. To date none of my apps have required that, including my banking app. Even so, loss of some financial apps is a small price compared to loss of social and dating apps, public transit and health apps, and more.
iNaturalist publishes an open source android app to complement their very functional website, and honestly I would give up all of GNU for that one app.
"I personally haven't been affected by this, so it's not a problem" is not a compelling argument.
If you only care about Android app compatibility but not safety net, try waydroid?
How do you build such a thing when it doesn’t exist on PCs in the first place? In order to build an ecosystem you need cross compatible applications as well as some kind of strongly supported and strongly emphasized programming interface.
There is sailfish OS. And it runs quite a few Android apps too.
Any recommendations for modern-ish devices which run Sailfish?
Can the "free trial" be used indefinitely if you don't need Android app support?
Is this a parody post?
No, its something i strongly agree with. The phone ecosystem is a locked in disaster. If phone hardware was required to support some standard like x86 computers do we could turn all this apple amd android crap ibto something that actually respects privacy
Every vendor that is not Apple already supports Android. Even the ones that don’t want to have the GSuit built in, and some of them care about privacy, while some don’t. A smartphone is comprised of more than one cpu, and there are proprietary chipsets with closed firmware all the way to battery. This is a much different world than x86 PC with pre EFI BIOS, when you could flash everything (except cpu?)
What do you expect to be able to achieve with just the word “Linux” added to the mix? Can you build new 5G drivers for Linux as well? Smartphone market is moving pretty fast, the hardware is nearly disposable, and the consumer doesn’t even know what an OS is.
GNU/Linux smartphone, that is competitive? Good luck with that.
The firmware side of things is a different can of worms that also affects X86. That's not he ask I was making (although it is a good second phase). I just want phones to be more like X86 in that I can install whatever I want to them and have a more standardized interface than the current wild west situation so that it's easy to bring on new devices. It would be nice if the hardware vendors were not actively blocking installing my own operating system as well (in addition to the technical non standard issue).
Why do you think I care about competitive or commercial viability? I just want the behemoth pushing apple and android crap to be forced to make their devices easier to boot an alternative and leave the rest to us to figure out and see what interesting things can be done.
If you don’t care about competitive smartphones, why do you care about smartphones or phones at all?
It's not about making a competitive linux smartphone, it's about making the hardware ecosystem more conducive to software competition by making it easy for people to run their own software on their own hardware.
Is this a parody question?