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Comment by le-mark | Hacker News Reader

> It's insane that I can't even develop for my own phone without paying an extra fee to Apple.

A Linux phone can’t come fast enough. Yes there is at least one, on ancient hardware. IMO a viable Linux phone requires hardware at most one generation old.

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That Linux phone is called Android. It runs plenty fine enough even without GApps (or with shims like microg), and the sheer amount of engineering needed to make baseline linux even usable as a phone system is over a dozen years away.

Android with binder is a strictly superior architecture that anything else that has come for strict isolation. As a bonus, it's battle tested, and latest Android phones just... run linux. You can have a shell and GTK if you so desire.

When you say "just... run linux", are you referring to termux, or something else ? How do you run a linux userspace in Android ?

I mean a fully fledged regular debian

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/bringing-desktop-linux-...

https://source.android.com/docs/whatsnew/android-16-release#...

While this is mostly a KVM setup, there's nothing specific about Android that prevents a linux userspace from running in there. Each app is almost one already. Most of its core components have been integrated into linux's main repository (like binder), and AOSP isn't that far off from a regular Linux. Sure, zygote, user & power management are not exactly a standard install, but they're not that crazy either

That’s all very convincing. For users who just want a Linux phone? Not there yet. Android or not.

Aside from a misplaced obstination to have _Linux_ as the base for your phone with all the awful power management, high energy use, bad governors, terrible process isolation and fleeing security holes everywhere in a phone that most of the times contains access to your entire life, what does Linux give you that Android doesn't? Both are FOSS.

Okay, so suppose I want a linux and not an android phone, so I get an android phone, disable login password etc, and delete everything except "Linux Terminal" and put my linux there.

What sort of tradeoffs would I see? Performance? Battery life? Security (secure enclave access?)

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