Comment by jkhanlar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jkhanlar | Hacker News Reader

Kind of related, a few weeks ago I've been thinking to myself what happened to the open source free software operating system developments for mobile devices? Specifically, how are operating system environments such as GrapheneOS and CalyxOS, etctera, only able to be used on a single company's (Alphabet Inc) manufactured phone devices and not any other devices and where are the operating systems that work on as many to practically all of the devices that exist and the general idea of linux-style developments that represent collectively compiling all the hardware variations to have drivers and support for practically everything for everyone to get mostly the same experience regardless of which hardware they use

Is the mobile computer hardware industry that hostagedly cowardly locked down that this is no longer possible as it used to be, where people don't even own their own computer devices and instead have to use devices that are owned by other entities? Or what other explanation is there for no such multi-device operating systems? Or did I just miss something that I am blind to?

> how are operating system environments such as GrapheneOS and CalyxOS, etctera

There are ZERO open source OS for mobile. ZERO. NONE.

even the ones you list doesn't have access to essential drivers. What do they do? they get the driver as binary blobs from the original image, and just ship them. So all those projects are 1) full of closed source kernel drivers. 2) stuck on a specific kernel version to be able to use those binary drivers.

So the MOST those open source versions can do, is set a different set of "system apps" everything else must be the same as the closed source OS. It's barely more than theming in practice.

> compiling all the hardware variations to have drivers and support for practically everything for everyone to get mostly the same experience regardless of which hardware they use

Again, there is ZERO open source on those. All you need to support device X is a root exploit so you can get the binary blobs. Done. Now you can ship to that device.

There is Replicant [0] which is completely proprietary blob/firmware free but it has extremely limited hardware support with only support for Samsung devices from 2011-2012.

[0] https://www.replicant.us

you're wrong. I'm a previous maintenaner (before the replicant name change).

the whole project was done by teenagers extracting blobs.

then, one, a single, Samsung model was chosen as the holygrail for no other reason other than two devs had it. they worked on reverse engineering some of the essential blobs and providing very crude drop ins (thing barely functional. absolutely no power efficiency concerns, etc).

that one device then got older and cheaper and more devs got it. continue to reverse engineering.

today, a decade latet, that model is very old. functionality is still stuck on 2g or 3g for a 4g modem.

...if modem is that far behind take a guess how bad is the rest of the components.

it's a shit show. and you are correct in that this one is indeed the best example of a fully open source driver mobile.

> There are ZERO open source OS for mobile. ZERO. NONE.

This is false. Sent from my Librem 5, which runs FSF-endorsed PureOS.

librem5 is a binary blob provider. and you mostly fell for a scam.

they signed the same NDA as other OEM.

your so called open source drivers are full of binary blobs, which ironically are just the chip manufacturer reference implementation code compiled, with little else.

librem5 just shouts the lie louder. it's as closed source as any other device. like raspberrypi in terms of drivers.

...and I'm not going into the illegal investment scam librem company spams every one of their customers.

Did FSF also fall for a scam? Where are the binary blobs in PureOS, show us please. Yes, firmware is proprietary, but it's the best we have. You fell for the security nihilism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975

There is no scam in Purism. I received all my devices, and they're as advertised.

the scam is the illegal investment emails they keep sending to everyone who purchased from them.

about fsf. well, the least worse is still just the least worse. doesn't make it magically open source.

Any source showing the illegality of the investment?

> doesn't make it magically open source

It does make the OS FLOSS, which is all they say.

For example

https://androidauthority.com/grapheneos-3287030/

> "Even if you stomach the Pixel-only requirement"

I have not and will not stomach that at all. Nope!

https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices

Nope! I wasn't paying attention, but if I remember, Alphabet/Google was funded to deploy/release Android operating system, and they also were financed to deploy some hardware phones before disappearing to let other companies continue the things and then reappear somehow taking advantage of all the othre companies to outperform all of their manufacturings and whatnot, and then operating systems exist only for the Google phones and none of the others, and this is normal? What? I say F to that coward hijacking others efforts stuff!

I see https://calyxos.org/#Devices Devices section is showing a little bit more than I remember not too long ago http://web.archive.org/web/20230605161332/https://calyxos.or... but still not comparable to what I remember with the likes of OpenWRT, HyperWRT, DD-WRT, Tomato, etcetera. Therefore I do not and will not trust anything GrapheneOS or CalyxOS. Whatever the efforts were that led to wifi routers having lots of open source firmware developments to be supporting lots of different devices, I'd like to see similarly for mobile phones, and whatever concentration there is to finance only developments for Google made phones only, this is red flag hostage coward impression to me, and I will not submit or acquiesce or capitulate to invest in any of that at all, even if nothing else exists.

edited for grammar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_operating...

> "Base system is open source, but many devices use proprietary drivers for hardware support, and most Android operating systems include Proprietary apps (such as Google Play and other Google apps)."

Okay, so, look at history of AMD GPus and NVIDIA GPUs for proprietary linux drivers and open source/free software alternative drivers that even without the AMD/NVIDIA companies to help at all (regardless of if they did, especially NVIDIA blatantly refusing to help and intentionally making it difficult and whatnot), still there are open source drivers for practically every single AMD and NVIDIA graphics processing unit hardwares to make them work. So, why not the same possibility outcome for mobile computers running Android operating system or other Linux AArch64 or ARM64 architecture o/ses. How is it that barely any signs of strong brave developer programmer humans remain able to dedicate their attention to these efforts that decade ago such skilled programmer developer humans existed but no longer

> "Google Pixel 5a... The last Google product before they went full Apple." - resource_waste https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39733518

lol

first you have wrong facts about the open source drivers for gpus timeline. They are still not 100% complete, and only were usable last couple years.

Second you forget that while not supporting full 3d performance on those gpu, you still had at least a 2d framebuffer to use your system.

On mobile, Without those blobs, the CPU doesn't initialize. The bootloader won't pass some signature safeboot check. The radio won't turn on. Wifi and bluetooth won't work. The screen won't display anything. the digitalizer won't work. no battery charging. usb into otg? nope. etc etc etc.

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