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Comment by amarsahinovic | Hacker News Reader

I recently backed Astro Slide on Indiegogo[0] and they do say it will be able to boot Linux alongside Android 11. The designer behind Astro Slide is Martin Riddiford who was also the designer of Psion Series 5[1].

[0] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5

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I made a comment elsewhere in the thread about the Gemini PDA. Do not trust this company to deliver proper GNU/Linux support. Ever. They keep using MediaTek chips and horrible shims to use Android drivers on GNU/Linux and none of it works well at all. It's not even close to the experience you would get with a PinePhone or Librem 5. You are giving up a lot to get those better specs. After getting a Gemini PDA I am never buying anything from Planet Computers again.

Be aware that planetcomputers/astro slide has done a really really bad job of supporting their devices with os updates on the Android side.

Even with some linux support (which I haven't checked lately) it was a hard pass to support the slide.

When I first saw their Indiegogo advertising that it could boot Linux, I tried looking for any pictures/video/evidence of it, and found nothing.

It does "run", but it's not really running Linux. It's just android with a halium layer running Linux software on top. So when android support ends, which it will seeing how they've not been great at software support, your "Linux" build will also no longer get updates. That's why Mainline Linux is such a big deal, as even if support ends, you'll still be able to get the latest Linux kernel and distributions can continue basically forever supporting the device.

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