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Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

> The only surviving plan for any Linux-phone: make it web-centric. You have to port ONE app: Firefox.

You are aware of the failure of firefox OS right?

> Purism just have shown that they wasted precious time on badly looking GNOME Clocks, Emacs, Password manager, a game, a half-baked music player, Torrent client (on a phone!), and Drawing app made with their native UI.

They haven't wasted time, pretty much all of these are existing apps, you can run most of them on a gnome desktop.

> Focus on releasing the hardware

That is what their doing and what differentiates them from most previous efforts like sailfish, they are a hardware company making a phone the runs linux, others were trying to re-create android and leave the hardware for others.

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I think Firefox OS didn't have to fail.

1. Allow non-kernel updates without carrier interference. Google has had to learn this lesson the hard way. Let the carriers lock down the lower layers, but Firefox and the user-facing stuff should still be able to update well enough for a few years.

2. Don't launch on crap, low-memory devices. KaliOS works on low-end devices, but that's because it is hyper particular about which apps run and what web APIs they use (and a lot of websites don't run very well). There's no reason a web device can't work for high-end devices. Most people run the same 50 apps as everyone else (and 25 of those ship with the phone anyway). High-end devices also open up other options like running Android in a linux container (like ChromeOS does).

3. Make WebAssembly (then asm.js) first-class. "Native" wasm apps with more direct access to APIs and access to a standard set of canvas widgets (sorry, HTML sucks for a lot of things). New APIs need to be available for more specific cores (especially things like DSP or ML units). Finally, add support for fully-native processes for trusted programs because sometimes 25-50% slower is too much and sometimes a spec (eg, Vulkan) simply isn't available as a webAPI yet but competition is needed here and now.

4. Be different. Make something that tries to clone Android and people will expect it to be Android. Firefox OS would have gone much farther looking and acting like webOS (which is still a better UI than Android more than a decade later). You can't disrupt a free, mature project with an identical, but immature project and a bunch of ideals that 95% of people simply don't understand.

> You are aware of the failure of firefox OS right?

Right. And this was a mistake by Mozilla: they tried to make an OS, and a browser and interact/negotiate with 3rd-party phone vendors. I did not care for FirefoxOS-based phones indeed because they where "same old ridden-with-firmware black boxes".

Mozilla makes a good browser, they'd rather keep doing that.

Purism is a different story. It seems they understand that some folks appreciate open hardware, privacy-focused designs. Cool, one ingredient for the success: check. But in order to be a successful product, the phone has to be useful out-of-the-box. And if the hardware company will attempt to make a whole "native" software stack, they will fail the same way as Mozilla failed at being an OS-company and HW-facing company: not enough resources.

So, how about Purism makes a great hardware (+ drivers), and integrates exactly three apps: 1. a phone app that is able to make/receive calls, 2. a short-text messaging app 3. and a blazing-fast browser to access the world. Done. Basics are there: I can make calls, I can receive/send messages, I can access email, slack, hail uber/lyft, use web-based maps/navigation, listen to online podcasts/music, use web-based calendars, etc. A phone I could use everyday.

Purism pretty much is doing what you're suggesting.

They're working with upstream packages so that when you install Linux on it, it just works, no hunting for additional drivers to make it work.

Those apps already exist. Again, they're working with those apps to make the phone "just work" when you install the apps/programs/packages/whatever. They don't need to reinvent Firefox, they can let Mozilla focus on that, and Purism can focus on what they're doing.

Failure of firefox os and success of kaios, based on firefox os and with investment from google

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