1,996 karma · joined February 26, 2017
Portfolio at https://nikodunk.com
Engineer at https://www.pilaenergy.com
- IDEs are no problem. Editors will "just work" for anything you type into the app store - Bazzite handles the special cases for you and installs them through brew taps or Flatpaks.
- For development it's basically just like a Mac where you also can't install system-level packages: Node, Python etc work through brew / nvm / uv same as on Mac. Development that involves containers will be unchanged from a Mac. For compilers specifically, same as on Mac: Install it through brew, or if you need a Debian or Fedora base you do `distrobox create` and you can apt-install in a transparent podman container.
The product: https://pilaenergy.com
brew install llama.cpp
llama-server -hf ggml-org/gemma-4-E4B-it-GGUF --port 8000
Go to localhost:8000 for the Web UI. On Linux it accelerates correctly on my AMD GPU, which Ollama failed to do, though of course everyone's mileage seems to vary on this.
- Apps: It's Linux (like desktop or server), but "image-based" so you install apps in containers like iOS or Android do (and therefore OS updates basically-never break). https://flathub.org is generally the main app store for Linux containerized phone apps.
- Screenshots: It'll look the same as other Linux-on-phones, so like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostmarketOS for instance. It's just built differently.
Very similar to how Universal Blue, Bazzite, Bluefin etc. build at https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite (see their Containerfile), but for mobile.
Has a similar mission to https://postmarketos.org, but with a different build system AFAICT
Google appears to have their AI product game together!
It's also really great for development btw - been doing all of my development on it with Homebrew and Flatpaks for over a year now.
It's just OCI images, like any web-scale project.
The main benefit over psql of course being that you don’t need to pay for a hosted db like RDS, or have a separate database server.
I’ve found a happy middle ground in simply self-hosting psql and my apps on the same VPS with something like dokploy. Local development is still easy enough, and remote deployment in containers is 1-click with Dokploy, and ends up being simpler to reason about IMO. My take below, if anyone’s interested.
https://nikodunk.com/2025-06-10-diy-serverless-(coreos-+-dok...
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/daily-optimist-think-positive/...