Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmsimike | Hacker News Reader

I've always had an iPhone (since 3g) and recently picked up an Android phone for testing, and played with that. While I can't really complain about either phone, all I've really wanted is Linux on my phone.

This is the phone I want. The appeal of Linux on the phone is too much for me. As long as it can make and receive calls and somehow deal with SMS, I can take care of the rest.

I've entertained the idea of building a PiPhone [0] and trying it out for a few days.

[0] http://www.davidhunt.ie/piphone-a-raspberry-pi-based-smartph...

View on HN

Linux on a phone (true Linux) is like my holy grail device. If it's able to seamlessly transition between a "desktop" mode when docked and a "phone" mode when not, even better. I have a Gemini PDA on order (dual boots Android and Linux) which is close but not quite there. Maybe 2019 will be the year of the Linux phone.

Yeah I sometimes really wonder where Ubuntu would have gotten if they'd held on for another year. And If they would have produced a simple but nice dock... But I guess you and me are part of a very small group. I feel I have that more often, I also loved my Pebble Time Steel and I'm still waiting for a good quality ARM notebook (with Dell XPS build quality but much cheaper) which could run Linux.

The problem with the ubuntu phone is that they built a special phone UI. None of the GUI desktop software ran and neither did software from any other OS. On top of that the battery life was awful.

I also think it's a pity that Canonical dropped the Ubuntu phone. Clearly, there was big interest in such a device.

Have you looked at postmarketOS, It's running alpine linux on existing android phones and in a few cases even running mainline linux.

Yeah, I think it's one of the more interesting "Linux on a phone" projects out there. The hardware differences between phone generations aren't as pronounced anymore. An OS that let's you run a device with updates for 5-10 years is a great idea.

Android is true Linux. The FSF wants people to use the term "GNU/Linux" for a reason.

The Nokia N900 was (is) already a Debian based GNU/Linux Phone.

Have you tried termux? It lets you run a shell on your phone (and even install and run various compilers).

Termux is awesome and a godsend to trivially shell out on android. But what I'd really want is boot to linux, choice of kernel and distribution, eventually pulling out an android layer on top of that if its UX is needed.

Basically an ARM(v8 64b) desktop-like experience in a phone sized chassis.

What makes this a non-starter is that normal linux applications are not written to be pre-emptable. Hence a default port of a linux system to a phone will kill the battery.

Hence the need for a from scratch effort where the SDK incorporates preemptability as a policy, and applications work off of that. Sadly, this means you cannot use the existing vast application ecosystem.

Librem is an effort in the above direction. It also seems like Fuschia is going this way.

> linux applications are not written to be pre-emptable.

I think I don't understand the way you're using this word.

Are you talking about wake-locks? Linux has opportunistic sleep/suspend and mechanisms for controlling that.

Closest I can explain is mobile applications have to be written to understand "pause" and "resume", and the application is running from "resume" to "pause".

Your typical linux application does not. It expects to be "started" and "stopped", and running the whole time in-between.

Linux processes can understand that already: SIGTSTP/SIGSTOP, and SIGCONT. There are many signals a Linux process can respond to.

I'm sure some adjustments will be necessary, but I'd actually like to fully stop mobile apps, desktop style, quite often.

Oh that, no. That should die with android, it's horribly difficult to understand and unhelpful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com