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Comment by gaius_baltar | Hacker News Reader

What I think is that Purism got it wrong by creating its own mobile distro instead of starting from a pure-FOSS Android (AOSP) and patching the missing things with thinks like microG, better permission system, isolation and ways to force closed source apps to behave and obey the user (app wants my address book and refuse to work if I deny it? Nice, take this randomly generated list of names and numbers! Location? Take this random place. Phone or cell ids? Take this random stuff...)

Advantages is that they can start with a bunch of free apps (F-droid is nice!), do not get too far from what SoC vendors already have and can move to another distro (even running both them in parallel) once they sold a good number of devices and the business is sustainable. All while respecting user freedom even when they really need some proprietary stuff (e.g. bank apps).

But, well, that ship has sailed. Let's see what we can do.

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Eschewing Android for an actual Linux OS was the point. Alternative Android distros have been around a long time.

The link addresses one point about apps: "With the Librem 5 phone you are running a full-blown desktop computer in a mobile form factor. If you plug it into a keyboard, mouse, and monitor you will have PureOS and the many thousands of applications available as you would from any desktop computer. This means that we are starting with many thousands of applications that “just work” as a desktop application"

Besides web apps and dedicated apps, you can also just run anbox if you want something from F-Droid.

> Eschewing Android for an actual Linux OS was the point. Alternative Android distros have been around a long time.

Correct, but we have Android _distros_ not phones that support them well.

We need to get some expensive phone from a supported list, unlock it (losing warranty in the process) and flash the distro. Not a thing we can say to even technical users who are not really inclined to HW hacking. To say nothing about the non-technical people who are the ones more vulnerable to the current mobile environment.

> We need to get some expensive phone from a supported list

LineageOS runs on a range of phones from very cheap to expensive. I have owned two Xiaomi phones on which I installed LineageOS that cost only about 100€. Later I upgraded to a Motorola phone that feels fancy in comparison, but still wasn’t more than about 200€.

See https://esolutions.shop/

>If you plug it into a keyboard, mouse, and monitor you will have PureOS and the many thousands of applications available as you would from any desktop computer

But who actually wants this? Id rather want an enjoyable mobile experience. When I want a desktop, I will use a desktop; I dont need a half arsed experience in my pocket.

Desktop and mobile convergence means you can take your desktop with you in your pocket everywhere and use any desktop apps on it whenever needed. It does not have to make the mobile experience worse. More info: https://puri.sm/posts/investing-in-real-convergence/.

This feature has been around for many years now.

I've never seen any indication that it is a popular one. Let alone popular enough to justify prioritising desktop apps over mobile ones.

> This feature has been around for many years now.

If it's been available for years I'd love to know to find it. There's some attempts in the android ecosystem to do this but they pale in comparison to a proper Linux desktop environment - the main problem being that you're running android apps designed for a mobile screen instead of responsive apps designed for both small touch screens and large desktops.

Google makes such tinkering difficult with every release. I won't be surprised if they have teams that basically look at this part of making it difficult to alter core Android framework.

There's LineageOS (been around for sometime; even more if you count its earlier avatar) and they are usually one or two version behind Google. OEMs are catching up with Android release schedule now because they usually don't touch the core Google features and services (the privacy nightmare land) and usually just add to it and in some cases (unfortunately at that) tweak the UI (for the worse - Samsung has been at it since the day one).

One problem with Purism/PureOS I see is, it is too small and started alone. I hope I am wrong but it may end up not going anywhere other than remaining a vanity phone - that "other" phone - the "privacy" phone.

https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...

I can say with 100% certainty that I would never have backed that.

I may not agree with everything about the Librem 5 (in particular I care much less about hardware openness and would prefer better performance + battery life), but the whole point for me was to have "proper" GNU/Linux on a phone, none of the shenanigans that come with trying to use and Android smartphone as a general purpose computer.

I think NOT being android is a feature.

Give them agency. The source will be open and it won't be affected even tangentially by whatever decisions google makes.

There will be a way to put android on this. Other purism machines come with pureos, but they also have qubes. (I use arch linux on my purism notebook)

For reference check out pine - their phone has many distributions.

That already exists:

https://e.foundation

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