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Comment by miclill | Hacker News Reader

My hope is that this lets some more people wake up and finally make Linux on the smartphone a reality.

If that ever does happen I really hope they just focus on making a proper phone, not trying to make it a hybrid phone and workstation. When they were working on Ubuntu touch (or whatever their phone version was called), they would show off how cool it was that you could just plug your monitor and input devices into it and boom you’ve got an all in one device.

But who wants that? It’s cool. But I’d rather just have a fully functional phone that happens to be Linux.

I certainly want that. I use DeX all the time. It's amazing.

You've been able to do this on android since the Motorola Atrix.

> If that ever does happen I really hope they just focus on making a proper phone, not trying to make it a hybrid phone and workstation.

It's not a zero-sum game in that regard. The entire point of Linux phones is to get Linux distros working in phone form-factors. Getting them to work as general-purpose computers is the easier, already finished part. Getting them to work as phones is the harder-part, the new work. Removing the easy, already finished part doesn't make writing the camera drivers, modem-handling software, etc. any easier.

> But I’d rather just have a fully functional phone that happens to be Linux.

Without the "workstation" stuff? That's Android.

I'd love to see this. Could the community rally a phone manufacturer with phones at different price points and focus on that? Most projects I've looked at in the past have been as good as dead, or spread across a bunch of outdated or bad phones.

I secretly wish Framework will do this one day.

Yeah, all you need to add is a desktop environment and some kernel drivers that are specific for phone hardware.... except that's what AOSP already is.

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