So, where are the super-polished Linux systems for the Fairphone? I know they use proprietary firmware blobs and that the hardware support is Android-oriented. But they publish device trees, driver sources, and firmware. Most AOSP-based projects support Fairphone, as well as PostmarketOS and ubports.
The problem is not only hardware support, the problem is also that the stack on top of it is very immature compared to AOSP and not something you could give to a daily phone user.
It’s funny that you mention Waydroid. It throws most of Android’s strong security model out of the window.
> So, where are the super-polished Linux systems for the Fairphone?
It still has tiny market reach. Very few people are going to invest the time needed to build a quality user experience for like 1000 users.
Just imagine what would happen if Linux could be installed on the iPhone. There would be SteamOS distributions within an hour of the announcement.
> It’s funny that you mention Waydroid. It throws most of Android’s strong security model out of the window.
Haha yea, it's more an example of capabilities that could be rolled into highly polished user experiences. Again, if Linux could be installed on the iPhone - I'm certain Waydroid maintainers would shut the project down from PRs.
> It still has tiny market reach. Very few people are going to invest the time needed to build a quality user experience for like 1000 users.
That doesn't make sense. Whenever someone wants to build something, they start with 0 users. They don't say "huh, I have 0 users, I'm not going to build a good product".
People who build things recognize that they won't get more users if they don't make their product better. If you have 1,000 users and you want 1,000,000 users, you work more, not less.
The lack of polish is a function of the inability to use the hardware. The hardware is tightly gatekept so competition _cannot_ exist. [...] Once we can actually target the hardware, open source alternatives will be much better than first party options.
So, it's not the hardware gatekeeping that is the issue, it's that nobody is polishing the experience for hardware that already exists and qualifies. The hardware can also be purchased very easily in some regions (e.g. Europe). I can literally hop on a bike right now and pick up a Fairphone in ten minutes. I know that it's different in e.g. the US, but Murena has been selling them in the US for years now.
I think you may be glossing over a bit how annoying / messy / complicated it can be to work with the binary blobs and their quirks, especially when dealing with complex things like camera(s) and the image processing stack. Doubly so for community developers who may have limited or no access to documentation and resources that the device manufacturers get from the more low-level hardware vendors.
If Fairphone wanted, I'm relatively sure that they could form a cooperation with Jolla, Librem, KDE or other entities in the space and get Plasma Mobile, Sailfish or whatever working on their phones and/or design the next-gen Fairphone with hardware that has as few quirks as possible and is as "easy" to get to work with Linux as possible.
I'm also relatively sure that so far, that would not have made economic sense for them. However, there seems to be a bit of a surge in people wanting alternatives. The recent Jolla phone has way more orders and pre-orders than were anticipated, for example. And SailfishOS is certainly "polished" enough that the circle of people who can use it well (or at least live with it) has expanded beyond the developer / hacker / activist crowd.
> dealing with complex things like camera(s) and the image processing stack
It would be wonderful if we could create an abstraction layer on top, so all the trillions of phones already existing that simply can't open source their drivers due to licensing and whatnot could be usable.
> If what you care about is protecting device and application providers' interests from their users, then I guess it does.
That clearly isn't what they care about, or intended with their comment. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
How many years did it take to make a well-polished DE on desktop Linux? How large was the community doing that and how many devices did they have access to?
About 5 years, Mandrake and SuSE with KDE around 1996 were already quite good.
Since then the problem has always been the same, rebooting the DE experience for the sake of it, desktop environment wars, rebooting the development stack from GNOME and KDE, and the problem that despite all OEMs have Linux running on their data centers, the community has to reverse engineer the hardware from the same OEMs.
Yeah, I think people are underestimating how good and competitive the Linux desktop was in the past. Around ~2000 there was a lot of excitement around the Linux desktop, the Linux desktop was pretty mature, especially compared to the tire fire that Windows 9x was at the time (that changed when the NT branch moved to the consumer with XP). There were very user-friendly installers like Caldera OpenLinux (best feature was that you could play Tetris during the install) and Corel Linux. Also a lot of large vendors were making Linux desktop apps, e.g. Corel Wordperfect and Borland Kylix (which was Delphi for Linux). Heck, even Microsoft Office ran almost perfectly with CrossOver.
But yeah, then there was the constant forking, preferring rebooting development over iterative improvement (e.g. GNOME 2 -> 3 was really a hard cut for a lot of people, resulting in forks that exist till this day), hostility towards closed-source applications (you can hate them as much as you want, but people are not abandoning Photoshop/Illustrator for GIMP/Inkscape on a whim), etc.
Hopefully something changes with all the government-driven sovereignty desktops that are popping up, the resulting influx of money, and KDE EV et al. becoming very mature organizations.
By such measure, GNU/Linux phones are already quite good. I use Librem 5 with Phosh as a daily driver, and it is really just fine. Except the battery life, app compatibility and smoothness of the UI.
The difference is that there is already a great open source smartphone OS that works today, it’s AOSP.
The most effective path would be for the FLOSS ecosystem to pour their resources into making AOSP independent from Google. But instead people will just fork N half- or non-working solutions for reasons.
This comes up every time, I just don't understand the argument. You can fork AOSP when that happens. It will still be far less work than bootstrapping a viable open source alternative from scratch. Also maintaining a forked AOSP would be less work than getting the Linux desktop stack on the same level as AOSP.
Given that Android apps target old API levels, it would also stay compatible for years and nothing would hold you from implementing APIs from the docs.
To be honest, I don't think AOSP will fully close up, since Google probably fears the regulatory pressure and the fallout from vendors. The larger risk is Play Integrity, but that applies equally to other Linux systems if you want to tap into the large Android app ecosystem. But the solution for that is not technical, the EU and other regulatory bodies should make forbid it in its current form due to anti-competitiveness.
> This comes up every time, I just don't understand the argument. You can fork AOSP when that happens
Hacking on the Linux stack is several orders of magnitude more practical than AOSP though. AOSP's build system is massively unwieldy for individual contributors to work on. You can't easily work on any of the system components without dedicating >100 GiB of storage for a build, for example. Everything is scattered across hundreds of repositories tied together with a bespoke repository management tool.
This all works for a company equipped with entire build infrastructure teams, not for a grassroots project trying to keep up maintenance with (at best) limited funding. It's why Nura (fka postmarketOS) is a thing whereas the various AOSP forks barely ever modify the core experience.
It's a whole operating system complete with accessibility, hardware abstraction, a bunch of core apps etc. I think it's a false equivalence that you can hack on a replacement system without similar "investmen"
In any case, were google turn malicious, it wouldn't only be in the interest of individuals to maintain a fork, plenty of companies are invested in the health of the platform that will help out.
Android's market share is far larger than even Windows'. It's not just in the interest of a small community, there is plenty of financial interest as well to keep it healthy.
Also, it's a false equivalence - it's also easier to buy a walkie talkie, but that's also not replacing Android smartphones. "Gnu/Linux" userspace is simply not even close.
Now, if we had support for say, a pixel, that would probably change things. Incidentally, there seems to be initial support for the tensor G5 (pixel 10 onwards)
The problem is not only hardware support, the problem is also that the stack on top of it is very immature compared to AOSP and not something you could give to a daily phone user.
It’s funny that you mention Waydroid. It throws most of Android’s strong security model out of the window.