• 2 Posts
  • 614 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • Yes, Android has issues but what I’m saying is that so far Linux on phones really hasn’t been able to compete. No one want’s a phone with no camera, no GPS, no apps and terrible battery. Making Linux phones is just super difficult and sadly I don’t see it happening anytime soon. Android is a good platform with lots of hardware and apps. You have Fairphone offering long tern support, f-droid offering privacy oriented apps and LineageOS offering stable OS. Getting more phoes to support it is a better bet than getting Linux to properly work on modern phones.


  • Yes, it’s all true but the issue is you can already do a lot of those things with a lot of cheap hardware that is is simply easier to support than old phones. And when it comes to phones being phones Android is really good and has a lot of apps. I think the problem with Linux phones getting more popular is that the overlap between desktop/server and mobile is very small. I mean I use my phone only for phone things and a lot of things I do on my phone I can do only on my phone (e.g. charging an electric car is basically impossible without a Android/iPhone). Having a phone that can do some things desktop/server can do but can’t do a lot of things a phone can do is pretty much pointless at this point.

    When we’ll get a proper Linux phone with full Android apps support and convergence it will be really awesome but I just don’t think there’s enough interest to get there at this point.


  • I honestly don’t really get what there is to gain by using “Desktop Linux”.

    More freedom I guess. I remember my n900 and how fun it was to just ssh into it and dig in my home directory, install apps with packet manger, edit config files with vi and so on. It really felt like having small Linux machine in my pocket. With Android everything is definitely more locked up but then again, I’m not sure what would I do if it was more open. Writing apps for Android is easier than for desktop (or just as easy), there are no more hardware keyboard phones so using terminal on them is terrible anyway and phones just work anyway so there’s no need to mess with the configuration. Personally I mostly gave up on the ‘Linux phone’ idea and if I need any new features I will simply write cross platform app that runs on Android (for example with tauri).


  • AOSP. Sad but true.

    When first pinephone came out I really believed it’s heading somewhere. It thought that it will be kind of like raspberry Pi (fun, cheap platform to play with) and that we’ll quickly see copycats and it will slowly grow the way Linux on desktop did. AFAIK nothing like this happened. You still can’t get a phone with decent Linux support which for me shows that we’re stuck with android. I think most people that would help Linux phone happen are simply satisfied with LineageOS so there’s no incentive to put as much effort into it as it requires.


  • No, it doesn’t. First, changing constitution would be impossible. Two, even if you did all this it would just make right wing states get even more extreme (there’s nothing in the plan that would let central government protect human and constitutional rights in red states).

    Unfortunately US political system wasn’t designed in a way that let’s it change with time. To introduce big reforms like this it would pretty much have to collapse and be rebuild from scratch. Realistic way to make things better is simply organizing locally to inform/educate people about progressive/socialist policies, electing moderate/progressive politicians to take over Democratic party and simply creating a political force that can actually oppose Republicans instead of trying to comprise all the time.

    No so long ago it was generally accepted that Republicans will always be a minority party. They managed to take over the government though smart PR, well organized (dis)information campaigns and long term, bottom-up work to take over institutions. Now Democrats have to do the same.














  • This was written by someone who never dealt with user requests. Typical user not only doesn’t know how to define requirements in a clear way, they also don’t understand limitations of the technology, side effects their changes can cause or different aspects of usability, compatibility and accessibility.

    Those are the abilities that limit who can contribute to projects, not coding skills.

    So for example you want an adaptive rewind time. Is it on by default? Where is in the settings? How does it interact with current auto-rewind feature (can you enable both at the same time?)? How do you name it so that typical user knows what it does? It’s not that those are difficult questions to answer. It’s that you need think about all that before you start changing code other people will use. Typical users don’t have the knowledge or experience required to do it. And it gets way more complicated with bigger changes.