An ordinary day with a Linux mobile device | Hacker News Reader

An ordinary day with a Linux mobile device

dimitris.cc

40 pointsspeckx49 comments

Man I would love love love love to be able to have mobile device running a stock or near-stock Linux distro.

But I also want to be able to use things like contactless payment and banking apps. I actually wish in some ways that Jobs had kept with his original plan not to release an iPhone SDK (that was the original plan, right? I'm not misremembering?), and push the web platform hard for apps. Then mobile apps would have been naturally cross-platform, or at least cross-platform-possible, only requiring new JS APIs to be implemented in whatever available open-source browser.

It's a little ironic, because these days I advocate against closed, walled-garden platforms. But this unrealized future (well, present, I guess) would have required an iPhone that was even more locked down than it is, not allowing any non-Apple native apps on it.

Would it have had to be more locked-down? I think letting the web be a first-class citizen would have been enough; economic incentives would have taken care of the rest, because few companies want dramatically more paid devs on staff (for iOS, Android, BBOS10, Windows Mobile, etc) for a marginally better experience

"Just throw out a PWA" would have been enough for most execs to get behind, IMO, especially in the early days when who knows which platforms will stick around and have been worth developing for in the first place.

I'm grateful for the non-Android mobile OSS ecosystem. Android is increasingly user hostile, notably the apps and features that block you when you obtain root access on your own device you paid for.

I'm about to quit Android, and I'm looking forward using and contributing to true open platforms.

Android is increasingly power user hostile. General users don't want root and don't want malware to obtain root access. This is an HN bubble where people talk about rooting their devices.

Years ago I would have argued for better education of users so that they can all become power users. These days I see that as a lost cause.

> General users don't want root and don't want malware to obtain root access

"Ordinary people do not need freedom of speech, since they have nothing to say, or right to repair, since they can't do it anyway".

I disagree, everyone is concerned. The vast majority of apps on the android ecosystem are adware with dark patterns all over the place. My mother complains about it every day.

Google is currently blocking many quality open source apps like VLC and Termux from updating on the play store, because they require the signing certificates, in their quest of controlling everything. VLC is not for power users, it's the most common player in the world.

Recently I wanted to reencode a video to upload to Whatsapp. I tried 10+ apps, all freemium and terrible, 4 tried to trick me into a 1 year subscription. ffmpeg did it in 5 seconds.

Samsung Gallery can edit and reencode videos.

Of course not, just Google-approved malware, right?

Seeing the abysmal state of non-Android Linux on mobile really puts into perspective the sheer amount of skills and professionalism that it takes to create smartphone. It's 2024 and these phones do not have even 1/10th of the reliability, smoothness and features of the original 2007 iPhone. Heck, even a 2005 BlackBerry. Heck, even a 2003 Nokia.

> these phones do not have even 1/10th of the reliability, smoothness and features of the original 2007 iPhone

As someone daily driving Librem 5, I completely disagree. Yes, it's somewhat less smooth and reliable, but the amount of available features is much more than in 2007 iPhone. Some features aren't available anywhere else, like desktop mode with desktop apps.

How many more of those do they need to make before all the preorders are released now? I see they’re pushing the assembled in USA one for a few thousand dollars now, presumably they have the parts in stock and can put one together fairly easily.

What are you talking about? All preorders have been shipped. The shipping time is 10 days now: https://puri.sm/posts/all-librem-5-smartphones-have-shipped.

I check the Purism Reddit from time to time and see people still waiting on devices and with horrible delivery times.

I know a lot of free software purists. I don’t know anyone who actually has a Librem 5.

/r/purism is exceptionally hateful to Purism; they seek any opportunity to harm the company, even by spreading misunderstandings or lies [0]. Are you saying that the official "Products and Availability Chart" [1] is a lie?

The delivery delays are well documented by the community [2]. I received my device just fine (after years of waiting of course), and everyone on their forums confirms that shipping works quickly now [3].

[0] https://forums.puri.sm/t/im-giving-up-on-the-librem-5/18399/...

[1] https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/#availability

[2] https://forums.puri.sm/t/estimate-your-librem-5-shipping/112...

[3] https://forums.puri.sm/t/questions-about-ordering-the-librem...

I’m not saying it’s a lie but that chart is buried on their website.

Generally I find the Purism website lacking. How much data does the unlimited AweSIM provide? Some pages say 20gb, some say 22gb, some say 22gb+.

I’ve only ever ordered one product from Purism (laptop back in 2018) it took a while to ship and was generally underwhelming. I gave it to an Inkscape developer a year or so ago and went back to using a ThinkPad for the next few years.

To be fair, there's not as much effort spent on them than, say, Linux desktops, because they will never be suitable as daily driver for the vast majority of people unless full Android compatibility is achieved m.

I don't know what "full Android compatibility" is, but I can run Android apps on my Librem 5 with the help of Waydroid.

> "the sheer amount of skills and professionalism"

Just comes off as ignorant, and mildly insulting. I'm pretty sure the original iPhone devs would not create original iPhone if none of them were paid.

Either volunteers have the skills or they don't. Being paid is not an argument since there is a huge amount of free software tools that are much better than the commercial offerings and the devs working on them have poured countless hours of their own time

Your argument fails completely, because "FOSS != made by unpaid work". Pretty much all FOSS SW that I use daily and consider high quality is heavily supported by developers working on it for some commercial company. I don't consider those volunteers.

Generic FOSS mobile UI has little to no commercial value, as opposed to say PHP, PostgreSQL, nodejs, Linux kernel itself, etc. Nobody will even ask for your skills or try to buy them even if you've been "semi-prominent" mobile Linux developer for 5 years, whatever that may be.

And stuff I consider high quality and very useful, which is made by enthusiasts, like eg. i3wm - is poopooed by most commenters here just by how its wayland rewrite looks on a small screen, lol. :)

Is this… parody? It reads like it but is done so straight that I can’t tell for sure.

What makes you say that?

The tech they reference is quite real. The setup is somewhat unique but I see it as one of the superpowers of a Linux mobile device - one can do whatever one wants without a big corp dictating the rules or locking down the experience.

Because if this were a Reddit post I’d be 100% sure it’s parody. It describes some Rube Goldberg stuff to achieve extremely basic stuff that folks using a smartphone get with no extra effort. Text interface with an onscreen keyboard to manually trigger updates to your podcast? Those screenshots scream parody. The notes near the end of “Bluetooth works… except not really because Bluetooth. But the headphone jack is haunted so I use Bluetooth anyway. Conclusion: works pretty good doesn’t even crash!” I mean… that’s parody, right?

Some people have different priorities than you. As for myself, and growing increasingly frustrated with Android letting me have less and less functionality in my mobile operating system and device that I paid to purchase, I didn't read this as parody at all.

is the problem Android, for you, or is the problem "Google Android", "Samsung Android", "Motorola Android, by Verizon"?

Given that third-party Android OSes are missing features that many people consider essential (like anything that requires passing SafetyNet), I don't believe these OSes are a general solution, applicable to the masses, even if installation were dead-simple and reliable.

I ran CyanogenMod for years, and every app I ran and every feature I used on the stock Android OS worked properly on CM. I loved it. But these days that's just not the case on Lineage or Graphene or Calyx or any of the others.

So I think for many people, it doesn't matter. "Google Android", "Samsung Android", etc. are the only realistic options, so they are just "Android" to them.

Why would you want "Safety"-Net? If the answer is banking apps, how about pushing back and using web apps instead? Different priorities I guess.

Contactless payments using Google Pay.

"Pushing back" doesn't really work when there's no support, and adding that support is against Google's priorities.

Regardless web experience on mobile is unfortunately generally subpar than native apps, for most sites/apps. I'm not sure I'm equipped to change that situation.

Never understood the appeal of Google Pay (versus contactless cards). I also wouldn't trust Google with anything financial, but that's just me.

OP is just showing a cool thing. You are on hacker news, expect to see people hack on stuff just for the sake of tinkering and having fun.

Because some of the requirements and solutions are so niche as to appear invented. It’s not parody and appears earnest, but deeply specific to this one individual.

Examples:

“I believe that a phone should offer very reliably just these features:

Calls SMS E2E encrypted foss IM Deep sleep and push notifications (or any alternative for notifications without draining the battery”

Very few people outside of HN would agree with this. A phone is currently the primary computing device for the vast majority of people.

And for radio: “Just add some streaming addresses to a simple script.”

Podcasts: “ I listen to podcasts. Sometimes. With a modified version of the sxmo_rss.sh script.”

A staggeringly small population want to handle their radio and podcast listening by just editing a small script.

Even a lot of the HN crowd want an easier life than script editing to solve these sorts of needs.

I'm not exactly the most hip when it comes to using my phone but I sure as shit don't want to be pasting m3u streams and RSS feeds into a script I'm modifying on my phone. Typing on a phone is already awful so typing anything other than prose is even more awful. I very much enjoy supporting developers that make quality apps that don't spy on me and give me the level of control I desire. I could write my own apps to do what I want but writing shell scripts on a phone sounds like a step backwards. This feels like retro computing on some ancient wearable computer from the 90s.

I assume those scripts are edited on a regular desktop/laptop computer and then uploaded to the phone

Or you can do it by connecting a keyboard and a screen to the phone.

I'm less interested in nit picking specifics of what someone did & bad mouthing their efforts as irrelevant. Like, yeah, fine, this isn't for everyone (but I think it would be very interesting for me if it was also a phone too).

Right now almost no one has the option to build what works for them. The phone is incredibly burdensome environment with tons of top down control that constantly bounds what we might do, and requires its own special libraries & tools to get started on.

The story here is humble & simple. But it's doing for oneself, using sensible straightforward & common computing options adapted from the rest of the computing world. It's a tale of what Barefoot Developers could be doing on mobile, about one of many worlds that could be springing up, if we weren't encumbered with such stodgy narrow controlling limited platforms. https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software

It is certainly a case of Poe's law.

Why would "people having different preferences from you" be a parody? What kind of thinking this even is?

It’s not different preferences, the presentation seems designed to make this look awful.

Some person on the Internet documented and shared a way they're using/configuring pmOS/SXMO (i3wm lookalike based mobile UI controlled by a bunch of shell scripts) for several personal use cases. It looks just like SXMO for anyone who knows it.

Not sure what presentation you're expecting. :D

I thought it was for a second too, but I do believe it was written in earnest.

The things I do daily on a smartphone are:

- Web browsing

- iMessage

- WhatsApp

- Social media

- Photography

- Music

- Email

- Maps

- Medical stuff

When I see articles like this, it’s a stark reminder of just how wide the gap between iOS and any of these community Linux phones is. I’m also sure it’s a similar gap between a modern Android phone and the same community projects.

I'm on iOS but I only use my phone for a few things: iMessage/SMS, maps/navigation, and the occasional phone call. I have very few apps installed that did not come with the phone. Web is awful on mobile. Email not much better. The rest of it I don't use.

Most of my personal web usage is mobile at this point. As is a large part of my job.

Email on mobile isn’t amazing but if you’re okay top-posting it can be bearable.

It's not as wide as you'd been made to believe. Ubuntu Touch does around 50% of what you're listing.

Web browsing works fine, though the older Chromium is showing its age and may not be running with full hardware acceleration. iMessage is a non-starter, unless someone wants to implement a client for AirMessage, which would itself be fairly simple. WhatsApp works through a web-app with some rudimentary push (if I remember correctly), but a native app is not outside possibility. Social media could be done through the browser, several Reddit clients and one for HN exist, and I personally have written a YouTube client (needs to be adjusted for API changes). Photography is possible, though maybe not on Google Camera level. Email clients exist. A navigator app with OpenStreetMap data too exists. As for medical stuff, unless it runs in the browser, it likely won't even run in Waydroid (Android compatibility) because SafetyNet.

The UI itself is very snappy even on older devices and the battery lasts enough of the day, through not as much as on Android. While it may feel a bit locked down with its immutable FS (you can unlock it, but OEM updates will reset root) compared to other mobile Linux distros, you can still do a lot, from running desktop apps through DosBox and Wine, to editing the shell's QML for custom UI, to automating system actions with the shell. If you have a Pixel laying, I highly recommend you at least try it. Things aren't perfect, there's a bit of legacy code that needs people, but it's a good daily driver.

Is there a phone I can pick up to try Ubuntu Touch, Graphene, the Librem OS (PureOS?) and CalyxOS?

I’d like to see the state of these things for myself.

PostMarketOS actually has a list :) The one I see most often touted and used on the Mobile Linux corner of the Fediverse is the Oneplus 6 or 6T, but I'm happier with my Pinephone Pro (even if just for the swappable batteries and easy repair)

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

UBTouch has a list of supported devices, too: https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/

The best supported Ubuntu Touch phone is Pixel 3a. One of the core devs owns one and is actively invested in getting all the features to work, get decent battery, hardware acceleration, etc. Other phones may have various compatibility issues, like lacking GPU support, unreliable GPS, no USSD codes, etc.

Be weary of 16.04 devices, they have old manufacturer kernels and can't be made to work with newer releases. Basically anything than ran Android ~4.0 at release is off the table.

"Sorry I left you on read babe, Wayland broke again".

Joking aside this is kinda cool, I'd love to have something like b/dmenu for Android.

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