Discounting Android as "Not Linux" enough is a mind boggle to me. Perhaps not "GNU" enough, but certainly the spirit of Linux -- customized for the particular needs, stable, fast, works on a plethora of hardware, etc.
I think most people rooting for “smartphone Linux” are looking to be able to swap and customize OSes on their phones and tablets as easily as they do on their x86 PCs without futzing around with device specific ROMs and the like.
They added value, just not for end users.
Perhaps in the past, but it feels like more and more this is shifting toward the expectation, rather than the exception.
Check out the current PRs in gerrit: https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open+-is:wi...
There's about 5% of commits made by people with e-mail domain different than google.com, android.com or chromium.org (6% if you count the last one too).
Pretty much the same result on another one: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base.gi...
Do you get to see the code of yet unreleased versions of Android? Sure, they do accept some patches, but "developed in the open" doesn't seem to describe their development model.
The Steam Deck does this perfectly!
The Steam Phone could be a game changer.
I'm literally writing this comment from my Steam Deck.
Especially if the smaller steam deck clones like Aya neo Air Pro ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw-0ngNgGC0 ) can support voice calls and a decent camera (the only other things my "mobile gamer" friends care about in a phone), I think there will be a niche market around it. Nokia N-Gage reborn!
We already have decent enough android apps support on linux using anbox / waydroid. For the edge case android apps.
MS on the other hand, drank its own Kool Aid, threw it's weight around, went all in...and walked away empty handed. There was little value add. There was zero coolness. Etc.
There are some similarities but that was then, this is now. A device that's "proven" - and some privacy tossed in - can probably find a market just beyond the gaming niche.
If nothing else, you simply couldn’t get the parts and manufacturing capacity needed to go beyond a niche product without effectively building the capacity out of pocket. Not to mention the headaches of dealing with network providers. And you basically will have to become an advanced digital camera manufacturer as well. Add battery life, size and price into the mix and you end up with portable consoles instead of phones. Like we have today.
Simply put: by not doing a general purpose device, you skip several metric tons of issues that occupy your focus but gain you very little.
I think Microsoft is an organisation that's just too fragmented. Different BUs pulling it into different directions without a clear overall strategy.
Like with edge, they do some good stuff like ad/tracking blocking but at the same time introduce really nasty buy now and pay later scams that undermine any chance of it becoming a respected product. And that have no place in a browser at all.
Google was actively sabotaging access to their services, like Youtube, at that time. With the amount of regulatory scrutiny they're under today, they wouldn't dare try it again.
The Steam Deck is very impressive.
What it is is a laptop in a funny case.
I think you can see some of their thinking with the removal of exec; they just want to undercut termux because that isn't needed for V8, but as long as loadable generated native code is still needed for Chrome, termux could potentially create their own ELF loader to replace exec).
That's just the opinion of the manufacturer, we don't have to agree.
Phones have banking and government apps, they are general purpose computers from their usage alread
We are approaching the sunset of general purpose computing in the consumer space. There's nothing you can do. Accept it and move on.
It is in contrast to a special purpose computer, which smartphones clearly are not.
I agree that governments and big business (not just banks, think about media services with DRM) don't want us to have full control of our computers for many reasons.
I disagree we just have to accept it though. I will keep fighting that forever.
It does not have a built-in Basic-like language for immediate fiddling; this is sad, of course.
I spent the better part of a year doing Android OS dev only to conclude there just is no way to trust it or make it sustainable.
The Librem 5, Pinephone, and the Precursor are shaping up to be decent options. For now no phone at all suits me fine.
We love it. When we want to look up something we see in a video we just open a browser. We also use them to order food etc. No proprietary software required.
They're called "Ultrabooks" now. Buy an older one on the used market if you don't care about top performance.
In fact they would like to because a majority of their users install it. But there's a lot of legal strings attached to it.
Legally though, Linus Torvalds gets to define what Linux is because he owns that name.
You'll miss features like push notifications, Google accounts outside of the browser, an app store and various other features.
But there's no reason the open source community couldn't add these, a package repo/app store equivalent and push messaging would probably be the deal breakers for me as a phone where chat apps don't work isn't useful to me.
The binary blobs to get driver support are also a problem, but it's also true in desktop linux, see for example Nvidia's graphics card driver.
Here's the thing though, this is not even about abstract ideals. When we say Android is not 'real Linux', what it comes down to is this: there's a certain peace, a sense of relief— of being respected— that comes with running Linux on your personal desktop or server. It feels really, really different from using an OS whose main function, which has driven its evolution, is just to sell you paid apps and services. That makes it fun, and it lends itself to a certain fluency.
Running any variety of Android is just an alien experience to all of that. Android doesn't feel good to use the way that Linux does for people who like running Linux on other contexts. And that's why it makes perfect sense to say it's 'not Linux enough'. The experience speaks powerfully enough for itself that it hardly seems worth explaining tbh. If you actually get what is good about running Linux and you've ever sought those virtues in Android, you already get it.
Might just be me, but I don't feel any respect coming from whoever are the devs that made this week's flavor of Linux I might be trying out.
Yeah, Windows 10/11 and iOS, and to a slightly lesser extent MacOS and Android, all aim primarily to sell me their shit. I hate them all for that. I run an OS to run the shit I want on my computer, not the shit they want on their computer.
Linux, though, aims to primarily sell me their ideological shit: FOSS, free as in freedom, GPL, Command Line Interface or bust. Instead of commercial pursuits, it's dogmatic pursuits.
They're all the same sides of the same shit sandwich. I get to choose what's in the sandwich, but it's still a shit sandwich until the heat death of the universe. Fuck that noise.
That all being said, Android is Linux. Because it runs the Linux kernel. End of. QED. Anyone who argues to the contrary is just being spiteful of Android succeeding where the wider Linux community could not.
All you have access to are Java, Kotlin, ISO C, ISO C++, and NDK libraries.
Nothing about Linux is public, other than APIs used by OEMs themselves.
Since Android 8, even Linux kernel drivers are considered legacy and all new ones are required to be Treble based.
All the LinuxSE, seccomp,...are also not exposed and can only be customised by OEMs.
People like to pat themselves on the back regarding Android, however it could start using any other kernel and the apps sold on official stores would at most need to be recompiled.
True, but you forget being transparent and giving users control, which are vital aspects of Linux that Android is light years away from offering and will never offer.
The dream is here is not just that we would be running "an open source stack" but that the active development would be on the open source stack. Sure, there are new releases of AOSP. But take a look at the core apps: Contacts, Calendar, Camera, Email, Location services. These are all proprietary now.
Android is open source in the same sort of way that MacOS is open source. There are some open source bits in there.
Sure, there's F-Droid and FLOSS software for Android, but if you're already willing to limit yourself to FLOSS Android apps you may very well limit yourself to FLOSS GNU/Linux apps too. When people say "I can't move to Linux phones because I need these Android apps", they usually aren't talking about ones from F-Droid.
Secondly, you claim limiting yourself to FLOSS android means you might as well just use FLOSS Linux. But that doesn't make sense because the purely open source elements of the android ecosystem work far better than the pure Linux ecosystem, which is my original point. There is no advantage that you can point to for GNU/Linux over Android/Linux other than just being "pure Linux". Android is fully open source and can be easily run unencumbered by proprietary google software. And there is vastly more open source software that is mobile friendly and compatible for Android/Linux than GNU/Linux.
This isn't really true, unless you specifically care about compatibility with (1) proprietary Android apps and/or (2) fiddly hardware that's supported in downstream Android builds but lacks complete support on the mainline kernel. Everything else has basically reached and exceeded parity with AOSP. (To be fair, this is a very recent development indeed, and it's quite normal that most would be unaware of it.)
This described just about all modern smartphone hardware.
> (1) proprietary Android apps
What users want to be able to run.
>Everything else has basically reached and exceeded parity with AOSP.
I doubt it reached parity with the open source software available (!= AOSP).
Do they? I'm using a GNU/Linux phone and I'm happy with it. Of course there are things Android is better at, but that it "works far better" sure isn't something I would say without additional qualifiers.
> There is no advantage that you can point to for GNU/Linux over Android/Linux other than just being "pure Linux".
There sure is. Android ecosystem may be much more mature by now, but it's incredibly hard to hack on. I have recently built a LineageOS image in order to apply bunch of small patches and it took me several hours, 200GB of disk space and couldn't even start building without 16GB of RAM, because the build system was going out-of-memory otherwise. I had to use a VPS because I didn't even have any computer around that I could pull this off on, except of Steam Deck I guess :P In the end, I got two image files that I could flash into the device wholesale that messed up some applications that expected the system to be signed with the same keys as previously.
On my Librem 5, however, I'm able to do `apt source phosh`, `apt build-dep .`, change something and then run `dpkg-buildpackage` to have it recompiled right on the phone itself in a matter of minutes, producing a single deb that I can install and immediately test my changes to whichever system component I want to play with. And if I don't want to hack on the system itself, there's stuff like full blown Python interpreter preinstalled, with bunch of compilers available straight from the repos, for easy scripting and app development right on the device.
If Windows had worked 15-20 years ago when I was still using it like Android does now, I would have never learned the vast majority of what I know about computers now. I gained a lot of knowledge simply by tinkering with my PC, breaking it and learning how to fix it. Being able to patch and change various system stuff by myself was very empowering when I switched to GNU/Linux. These days, most computing happens on mobile phones and tablets with children often completely unfamiliar with common PC workflows that aren't mirrored on mobile; the whole new generation of people, despite of using an OS that's technically Open Source at its core, is mostly deprived from ability to play with their own hardware, and even if they're technically not, the learning curve is often prohibitively high and stuff like SafetyNet still gets in the way - while in my youth I used to learn Python by writing, running and debugging scripts on my Openmoko phone while riding a tram back from school.