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Mobile hardware is a nightmare. The best thing we have to cope with it, so far, is libhybris. And I don't see things getting much better.

All we have is Pyra, the incoming Neo900 and semi-closed Jollas with Sailfish.

The Pyra is not going to be released anytime soon, the Neo900 is overpriced... but we do have Plasma Mobile running on a few devices.

The Pyra is a helluva lot closer to shipping than the Neo900. A great many of the components have seen production runs already.

I'm not sure Neo900 has even figured out how competently handle their donated funds, let alone how to get a device to production. ( https://neo900.org/funds-transfer )

The neo900 is so late that it doesn't really matter at this point whether it is ever released at all. You'll have to be a pretty hardcore fan to pay about $1000 for a phone with amateur software and circa 2011 hardware specs, partially made with recycled components.

The Pyra s overheating problems on the sandwhiched SOC have not been resolved at all and now they are even considering adding a fan so late in dev stage. Far from finished I tell you.

> The Pyra s overheating problems on the sandwhiched SOC have not been resolved at all and now they are even considering adding a fan so late in dev stage.

I'm watching the Pyra project very closely, but I have never heard of these problems. Can you give me a source on this?

I know several folks who are actively working on the Pyra prototypes in hand and who voiced the exact same concern.

The Pyra cannot thermally sustain unthrottled operation indefinitely. Neither can any modern smartphone. This isn't regarded as a problem and definitely no one is considering adding a fan (in fact the cases are slated for mass-production this month).

Where did you get this idea?

The cases were stated for mass production a year ago already yet everything gets pushed bacl every now and then for tweaking. I would not bet on anythIng releasing in this year.

There's a "collaborative project to unify the Hardware Abstraction Layer for projects which run GNU/Linux on mobile devices with pre-installed Android" called Halium.

https://halium.org/

Complete with the device mfg's unpatched 3.10 kernel.

Thanks, but no thanks.

I wouldn't write it off so easily, it makes sense as an open source alternative to google's project treble albeit with parts of android still running underneath. A stable linux HAL on a few widely used devices would make all the upstream dev easier. Even if you are stuck on an older kernel because of a blob driver, it's progress and similar to when you can't upgrade the kernel on your laptop now because nvidia haven't updated their drivers.

PocketCHIP can also be turned into a cell phone, don't forget. That actually might be the most promising alternative of them all ..

PostmarketOS is still in it's infancy, but has an active crowd of developers on Freenode https://github.com/postmarketOS

>Remember being able to build a PC from parts bought piecemeal from ads in Computer Shopper, then install your choice of Microsoft DOS, FreeDOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, Solaris x86, OS/2 Warp, BeOS, Minix, Netware, etc., etc?

Uh...you can still do this? Why the past tense

Mostly because I was was illustrating that point with certain archaic details (Computer Shopper magazine, OS/2, BeOS, etc.) and it just came out that way. But yes, your point is valid, you certainly can still "do that" in the PC realm. I should have said something like "Compare the smart phone world to the PC world where you can build a PC ..."

It's true that the mobile landscape is more a more challenging target (device tree is changing this). But I think the embarrassing truth is that the free software community has failed to deliver a decent software offering. Even if I had a phone with all of the drivers (which isn't that uncommon, actually - proprietary firmware and protocols are a problem, as is 3d acceleration special sauce, but most actual drivers are in kernel tree and free) ... what would I run on it? FirefoxOS? Discontinued. Ubuntu Phone? Discontinued. SailfishOS? Closed-source!

Hell, even if I wanted to run straight Debian (let's be honest, I do) - where's the dialer program? It's actually pretty straightforward to plug a GSM dongle into a regular desktop machine and get a perfectly functioning modem TTY that does calls and SMS and all the rest of it. Where's the friendly interface? There isn't really one.

This is something I hope that the Pyra will help with. We'll have regular Debian "desktops" with GSM modems in peoples pockets being used as phones. That's bound to spur some development effort.

The PC market is devolving into something where you can't do any of that anymore either, with non-upgradeable devices like the Apple MacBooks or quite sealed things like the Microsoft Surface products. And average users don't seem to mind.

Maybe it's a subjective thing, but it feels to me like we've actually taken several steps back in the last 5 years or so.