A couple times a year I get the joy of reading Kernel Newbies release notes for new kernels. And just being so delighted at all the amazing improvements happening. So many won't affect me or won't be big changes. But often there are amazing new capabilities and options too that do entice. Performance wins keep landing. Compatibility with other devices expands. Improvement is ongoing & continual. https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_6.17

It just takes my breath away, is existentially scary, to hear folks be ok with being totally stuck on place. With devices that use open source but which are so fundamentally dead, are tuned out from that amazing growing goodness, are shovelware devices thrown over the wall that never improves while time marches forward.

This would be totally unacceptable for anyone on a computer. But somehow on consumer devices, it's just expected and accepted that everything is just stuck where it is, that it's ok to be so so so much worse than what everyone else is doing. It sounds like such a miserable existence, and I think it's just gobsmacking that such apathy & pass giving gets a break.

Will some things break sometimes? Honestly I think that's way overblown a concern, but yes, some, a tiny bit of things will break. Especially at first. I tend to think the risk is generally quite small. And often with engineering, the way to deal with your hard parts is to keep doing them. If anything, I expect that the risk of staying where we are is huge: we have thousands or perhaps millions of different kernel trees out there, bespoke special magical trees, for various devices, forked from magical point in time vendor BSPs, with special magical changes that we have to keep perpetuating, while integrating important fixes. This all sounds ridiculously unstable and risky, and inordinately costly to maintain. It seems reckless and dangerous to stick to this absurd course, to do everything so badly, at such human cost. Getting the fricking drivers upstreamed, maybe getting rid of this ridiculous anti-support GKI layer that apparently does no good and only makes it easier to be bad at updating & negligence & caring: that would reduce risk. That would decrease society from having to test these thousands or millions of kernels, and let us create a known predictable focus for our energies and tests, rather than this madcap batshit infinite vendor diversity that GKI has only sort of tamed.

This is such a shit situation to be in, and Android brings shame to computing, and if it's going to be so bad at Linux, it ethically doesn't deserve to have Linux. It is breaking the pact of what Linux can and should mean, and betraying consumers, by letting itself be a product that rots into obsolescence like this. This is a techno-spiritual sin, and it is a mortal sin.