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Comment by fractallyte | Hacker News Reader

Right now a Jolla phone (with Sailfish OS and Android compatibility) is a readily available handheld native Linux computer. It even comes with a terminal application! Since it runs a variant of openSUSE, there's a whole lot of other software that'll run without problems - emacs, midnight commander, wget, etc.

Add a bluetooth keyboard - one day, perhaps even a TextBlade (https://waytools.com/) - and this comprises a serious computing and communications tool.

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> Right now a Jolla phone (with Sailfish OS and Android compatibility) is a readily available handheld native Linux computer.

The point of the Pyra is not just to provide a GNU/Linux distro, it's also to provide physical controls and not just a touch interface. If you focus only on the OS you are missing half of the point of the device.

Even though Sailfish OS is quite nice and Linuxy, the original Jolla phone was published on 2013 and even then its hardware wasn't that good (especially the display), so until there's some modern hardware actually running Sailfish and the price is ~400 €, there's no point of talking about any Jolla/Sailfish phones :(

I'm very late to the smartphone party, but I've read that although the Jolla hardware is weak by today's standards, the OS makes up for it by being light and sleek, even outpacing a modern Android device.

My phone cost <€200, with FedEx delivery included.

It is too bad the TOHKBD[1] is sold out. It would be perfect for this.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2028347278/tohkbd-the-o...

well, the bluetooth keyboard kinda defeats the purpose of having a handheld in the first place.

As an owner of Psion's 5mx and Revo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Revo), I've experienced the absolute minimum in a touch-typing keyboard. These machines offered, to me, the very best form-factor for a small computer (the clamshell design was ingenious). Sadly, nothing like these is currently available.

Conversely, a smartphone with bluetooth offers the flexibility of a touch-enabled computer with optional keyboard - one that's suitable for actual real typing!

So instead of an all-in-one solution, perhaps there's a case to be made for modular components too?

> It even comes with a terminal application!

Linux without a terminal wouldn't be Linux

> Linux without a terminal wouldn't be Linux

Linux without a terminal wouldn't be GNU/Linux.

> Linux without a terminal wouldn't be GNU/Linux.

Linux without a terminal wouldn't be Python Foundation/Perl Foundation/SQLite/Xorg/OpenBSD Foundation/RedHat/GNU/Linux. GNU tools are only a few of many components of a Linux kernel-based operating system that people use every day. There are a myriad of entities that produce code that makes up a modern Linux system, not to mention the many Linux systems out there that don't use a GNU userland. Insisting on GNU/Linux is just petty and silly.

> Insisting on GNU/Linux is just petty and silly.

Wasn't it the point to recognize that without GNU there would have been no Linux in the first place?

Linus would have written a kernel with or without GNU. There were other Free userlands available at that time, like that for Amoeba, as well as Free compilers. So saying there'd be no Linux without GNU is a dubious statement at best.

Do you think that without the GNU toolchain Linux as a combination of GNU and the Linux kernel would have reached the point where it is now ? ANd there's also the valid point of the kernel being licensed as GPL2, which also helped for its adoption - and a direct influence of RMS on the young Torvalds.

To be honest, one of the big reasons Linux is successful is it hit in a very narrow window during the USL v. BSD lawsuit where using a BSD distribution was questionable. So it's possble it wouldn't have, and other kernels, like BSD, or Minix, or any of the other kernels which had heavy development before the kernel research winter that we're still trudging through, would have seen the uptake instead. Linux being under an open source license was hardly an interesting thing back then -- Mach, the BSDs, etc were all under various Free licenses. So it could have, it could have not. Linux's success is as much luck as anything else.

No, the point was to show that there are lots of Linux systems without a terminal, but not GNU/Linux systems.

Knowingly or not, you've stepped into a long running linux v. gnu/linux debate

isn't that implied nowadays?

Not when you have Android/Linux

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