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Comment by Vinnl | Hacker News Reader

I think if you're hoping to just pick up a phone, install PostmarketOS, and start using it, it's not for you yet. From https://postmarketos.org/state/ (linked from the "Install" page):

> postmarketOS is for Linux enthusiasts. For hackers, tinkerers, technical people who are interested in pushing their mobile devices beyond what can be done with the stock operating system: more free software, mainline kernel, getting software updates until the hardware breaks, better privacy, less distracting features, etc.

> The goal is to make postmarketOS usable for non-technical people too, but we are not there yet.

Anyway, from casual observance following a couple of PMOS folks on Mastodon, but never having attempted to run it myself, I believe many people are using a OnePlus 6. Whose wiki page also provides more detail on failure modes: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/OnePlus_6_(oneplus-enchil...

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>>For hackers, tinkerers, technical people who are interested in pushing their mobile devices beyond what can be done with the stock operating system: ...

I think this is poor phrasing. If it can't do many of the things that the stock operating system can do it is not pushing "beyond" the stock operating system. It is moving the phone into a little playground off to the side. That's fine if that's what one is interested in, but the phrasing gave me a different impression at first.

> If it can't do many of the things that the stock operating system can do it is not pushing "beyond" the stock operating system.

OTOH if it can do things that the stock OS can't do, then it certainly can be pushing beyond stock.

> I think if you're hoping to just pick up a phone, install PostmarketOS, and start using it, it's not for you yet. From https://postmarketos.org/state/ (linked from the "Install" page): > >> postmarketOS is for Linux enthusiasts. For hackers, tinkerers, technical people who are interested in pushing their mobile devices beyond what can be done with the stock operating system: more free software, mainline kernel, getting software updates until the hardware breaks, better privacy, less distracting features, etc.

Well it just says that above. I am technical. Do I have the skills,time and patience to reverse engineer some proprietary blobs from an unknown chip to manage to make the missing features work perfectly on a mainline kernel, that is another thing but this is not what your excerpt say.

Anyway thanks for the pointer on the device, I think I had seen it but concluded that the missing camera support would make it too cumbersome in most situations. While I often have a digital compact camera with me, it would be super annoying to have to extract the sdcard and mount it on the phone just to access a qrcode or send my partner some informations I am reading on a sign/panel...and entirely impossible when using a film or an instant camera! Or I'd need to find a model that is supported by gphoto or have a usb webcam with me (provided an usb otg cable works with postmarket) https://gphoto.sourceforge.io/doc/remote/

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