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Comment by bubblethink | Hacker News Reader

This is such a strange comment that is full of contradictions. Pixels are supported because the manufacturer supports alternate OSes. I don't get what languishing means here. Pixel hardware lags behind the latest Snapdragon hardware, but it's not something that average people know or care about. So, you can gush all you want, but I don't see why it's a big deal. It's great that they found an OEM and it's great for the overall health of the project, but not because of gaming or the latest Snapdragon.

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Does pixel support alternate OSes or it just doesn't get in the way of custom firmware developers?

And for the gaming aspect, there is a huge market for mobile gaming, specially in Asia, so having a manufacturer like Motorola adopting GrapheneOS as a first class citizen will improve the chances that high performance applications will have better performance in such OSes which is a big win.

i mean, that sounds like a subjective distinction, but it lets you unlock the bootloader and then re-lock it with your own keys so eh..?

they used to publish a buildable AOSP tree for the device which is no longer the case

If you conceive a device to be shipped with a specific OS that's a completely different relationship with the developer than just giving the keys to the kingdom and wishing good luck, so I hardly think this is subjective

The Google Pixel has first-class support for alternate OSes (not custom firmware like a Chromebook). The OEM has to go out of their way to support avb_custom_key as mentioned in https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/avb/+/mas... and I believe the GrapheneOS founder strcat was heavily involved in helping Google design this feature and flow for Android Verified Boot.

Lets hope those Motorola devices will be smaller then current Pixels.

Since ~2023 all Motorola phones with Snapdragon SoCs (the ones most likely to support MTE as needed by GrapheneOS first) have been larger or equal to 6.5" screens.

I do hope however having a Snapdragon device will be beneficial to having postmarketOS support.

For now having Android-type OS on a daily driver is a must, but for older devices (thinking of 10 years time) I'd like to explore an OS which doesn't depend of Google open-source drops and delayed security open-source drops, which is the situation for ROMs without an ODM partner.

Do you mean to say that postmarketOS is somehow better on non Pixel devices? I would assume that Pixels are closest to upstream and have the longest software support life in Android world.

pmOS runs well on a couple OnePlus phones (6, 6T). For whatever reason the Snapdragon 845 and 865 have decent mainline support. I expect the OnePlus 8T to join the prior list of phones in the near future. You can similarly look at which gaming handhelds are supported by ROCKNIX and what SoC they use to get an idea for which ARM SoCs have decent mainline support. I expect the vast majority of phones and other ARM devices to not be very well-supported. RockChip is usually the safest bet, but I've been pleasantly surprised with some Snapdragon stuff.

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