Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

> The FSF has been supporting earlier free software mobile phone projects such as Replicant,

Hopefully this project will go better than Replicant. Here are my notes on running Replicant on the (then already very old) flagship Samsung GT-I9300:

https://www.neilvandyke.org/replicant/

The hardware was a little difficult to obtain in the US, and WiFi worked only with a blob of questionable provenance.

It looks like Replicant has been stuck for several years, and they recognize that they need to find a new device, funding, etc.

(After Replicant, I spent some time on PostmarketOS with various devices, and then gave up and bought iPhones, and then got ticked off and moved to GrapheneOS.)

I wonder whether the FSF is already collaborating with Purism on this, to leverage their work on the Librem 5 and PureOS, which I believe the FSF is well aware of. If the FSF manages to muster a lot more open source volunteers on a more affordable hardware, but that work is also usable for Librem 5, then it could be a win-win. (And Purism also has something called Liberty Phone, which is a made-in-USA Librem 5 phone, so their lawyers should talk about trademarks in any case.)

https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/

I am pretty sure that it's not going to be the Librem 5, despite Purism's efforts to get it RYF certified (which, thinking of the Redpine WiFi card) went so far that they seriously impacted user experience.

Why? There's no Android port for that device and they keep mentioning LineageOS.

Even the PINE64 PinePhone would be more likely, as that has Android support and even some LineageOS 22 support [1]. The Replicant project had eyed it as a target device [2].

That said, I'd expect a different device, and, assuming LineageOS supports one, and I would not be suprised to see a device that's not powered by a Qualcomm, Mediatek or Samsung SoC.

[1]: https://github.com/GloDroidCommunity/pine64-pinephone/releas...

[2]: https://blog.replicant.us/2024/03/replicant-status-and-repor...

You make it sound like the Redpine card ended up being shitty because of RYF efforts. The Redpine card was chosen because of its internal flash, but the fact that the vendor failed to properly support the advertised features (and even removed some that worked before), abandoned its mainline driver and pretty much halted the firmware development after SiLabs acquisition is orthogonal to that and could have happened with a different card as well. So nice it was a replaceable M.2 card, isn't it? ;)

> Why? There's no Android port for that device and they keep mentioning LineageOS.

The LineageOS folks are working on supporting their OS on Linux-first devices running a close-to-mainline (not AOSP) kernel. So it could go either way. Of course if they do choose an Android-first device, their efforts would ultimately also make it easier to run a mainline kernel on it as shown by projects like pmOS.

That's nice to know. Do you happen to have some links to where I could read up more on this effort?

> That said, I'd expect a different device, and, assuming LineageOS supports one, and I would not be suprised to see a device that's not powered by a Qualcomm, Mediatek or Samsung SoC.

Is there any actually relevant alternative to this oligopoly? Apple doesn't sell to third parties, NVDA lacks a baseband and so does (to my knowledge) Broadcom, and it's been ages since I saw anything from Intel in the mobile space.

UniSoc maybe? It appears to be reverse-engineerable [0].

[0]: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Jolla_C2_(jolla-c2)

I just noticed the part about FSF Librephone being based on LineageOS (therefore, Android).

Has anyone told the FSF that it isn't "GNU/Linux"?

I suspect that Purism has the better idea for a sustainable starting point for an FSF-ish phone.

I'd be curious why FSF is barking up the Android tree again (the massive, intractable Android source code tree).

> If the FSF manages to muster a lot more open source volunteers

First line of my pitch is, "When hundreds of millions of people need something, it doesn't make sense to wait for a handful of volunteers to build it for free."

hahahahaha 2k for a phone that cannot last a day. yeah no. i d rather go for a redmi with postmarket os. it does not even have a blob free modem

That's their US made patriot phone, the regular less than half of that. Also, please read up on the concept of economies of scale.

If you go with postmarketOS (good!), and don't want to touch anything that touched Purism, better avoid anything GTK (Phosh, GNOME Mobile and related apps). While Purism did not make a competitive phone, their investments into libre software went great and keep paying off.

no i wont. it is literally that simple. the regular device has 3 gb of ram. the flagship has 4gb for 4k and released 4 years ago. also yeah i do try to avoid anything gtk but not for any particular reason. i just prefer qt.

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