Hacker News Reader

Why should Linux users have to agree? run what you want, it's your computer.

Well, if you want a mass market device that runs Linux, you have to meet the market. Otherwise we can start tracking 2525 as the year of Linux on the smartphone. If man is still alive.

The concept of a mass market device is sort of incompatible with the freedoms we generally associate with linux -- Android is really the closest thing we can hope for. It runs a linux kernel, a very non-standard userspace, and is relatively locked down (when compared to a general purpose linux distribution)

I think "linux smartphone" would end up looking very similar -- some UI on top of a kernel with a very non-LSB userspace; therefore the concept is really not all that compelling

> The concept of a mass market device is sort of incompatible with the freedoms we generally associate with linux

But take that far enough and you get Stallman'd into a corner where someone points out that's great, but no phone for you.

Because there are only a few people who actually build this kind of software and if they cant agree how it should look. No projects will have the dev power to come out with a solution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com