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Comment by zests | Hacker News Reader

A walled garden is a plus for most consumers. Especially non-technical consumers who want to download something and be sure it's not spyware that will brick their phone. If you want to be able to install anything you can buy a pinephone but I can't imagine it would be fun to install anything on a pinephone.

Apple offers a walled garden as an offering to i-device users. Other companies try to mimic Apple's success. Mobile devices simply do not have the same "must be able to install anything" requirements that a standard computer has.

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> I can't imagine it would be fun to install anything on a pinephone.

It's actually fun to do "apk add audacity" (yeah, there's also multiple gui frontends...) and have it installed and working as well as on desktop. OK, that one uses a traditional desktop interface, but it is still usable. Plug it into a docking station and use a mouse and keyboard + screen if you prefer.

Okay, that's not really sideloading, especially as each distro has its packaging format. You can use flatpaks for this (and they are sandboxes), some CIs provide builds as flatpaks (KDE does this).

One issue is that Linux executables are still very much architecture-dependent.

If you take off the linux hobbyist blinders you will see that having to type in "apk add audacity" and getting a mobile unusable interface is a non-starter for 99% of people. Compare that to the experience of typing in to a search bar that loads suggestions and gives results with pictures and ratings and descriptions.

I like the pinephone and am going to buy one myself but I'm buying it because of linux reasons, not because I actually think it will be a good daily driver.

Of course I have blinders on. Of course it isn't for 98% of people.

1. I did say it was usable, I am pretty sure most people could use it, although it wouldn't be a great pleasure (an personally I loathe these "addictive" mobile interfaces). One could get real work done with it.

2. I did say there was a gui for this. You don't have to type that if you don't want to. There are multiple gui front-ends with categories, descriptions, screenshots, ratings, etc. Courtesy of appstream metadata and packagekit, that both abstract away platform-specific package manager subtleties and provide "modern" store metadata.

3. This way a contrived example, there are simpler tools if all you want is record & play back.

4. "fun" is very subjective, that was part of my point.

Oh, and while we're on it, most distribution repositories are in fact walled gardens with a curated software selection (the audacity example above is part of it). That doesn't prevent you from sideloading whatever you want.

> If you want to be able to install anything you can buy a pinephone but I can't imagine it would be fun to install anything on a pinephone.

If an application is properly sandboxed, and I can fully control the permissions of that sandbox, then I see no problems with that.

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