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Comment by iE4mHBzmoYezwbx | Hacker News Reader

> Desktop Linux is better today than it's ever been.

I honestly have to strongly disagree with that. Desktop Linux is more complex, more fragile, and more choice-less than 10-15 years ago. It might have a bit better hardware compatibility... but even back then it would run on just about anything.

> Librem and Pine64 are doing great work in the mobile Linux space on the hardware side

But can you actually use them as a phone? Can you use all (or even any) of the apps that people want to use?

> They'll never grow to billions of users, nor should they. The tech industry's "grow massive or the product is worthless" mindset is pathological, in my opinion.

Without that, they'll also never get the things that people want their phones to do.

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> Desktop Linux is more complex, more fragile, and more choice-less than 10-15 years ago.

More complex, sure. Bare ALSA was simpler than Pulse/PipeWire. But the benefit of the additional complexity is that nowadays, sound just works. PipeWire gives us flexible audio routing pipelines like Jack, but for all audio applications rather than just pro audio! And as a counter-example, the X11 to Wayland transition considerably reduces the complexity of the display stack.

I'm not sure what you're getting at with "more fragile", but I definitely disagree with more choice-less. Sure, I wouldn't want to run modern Gnome on a full-size desktop/laptop (we have MATE, Xfce, and countless minimal WMs/compositors for that). But modern Gnome is great on tablets. Non-systemd and non-glibc distros are out there if you're into that sort of thing. Flatpak, etc are available if you're into that - if not, nobody's forcing you to use them.

> But can you actually use them as a phone?

Yes, with effort and some sacrifices. The velocity is in the right direction - the situation is much better than it was a year or two ago.

> Without that, they'll also never get the things that people want their phones to do.

I agree that there needs to be a sufficiently large community that things get developed. But this doesn't mean we need billions (or even millions) of users.

Some apps exist: https://linuxphoneapps.org (Contributions welcome!)

They aren't all perfect, but TBH, I would get by. I only miss Threema to switch fully at this point (which I've migrated many of my contacts too, so that's on me), but as work on a Matrix-bridge is ongoing there's a lot of hope. (I could also just use Waydroid + the Android app to fill this gap, but… that kills the battery (at least for the PinePhone).

FWIW battery hungriness of Waydroid should be perfectly fixable. I had a quick look and it doesn't really seem to care about not doing useless work when there's nothing to do and happily wakes up multiple times per second all the time the container is running. A lot of low hanging fruits there.

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