this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
393 points (82.4% liked)

Technology

71989 readers
3400 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Lembot_0002@lemm.ee 145 points 2 months ago (11 children)

We need phones with standard Linux. Without strange "Java only mediator" or something. Just a normal OS.

Android is a pain in the ass.

[–] redlemace@lemmy.world 51 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

Exact! And please no bloatware!!

Oh wait, before anything else : NO, and I really mean NO AI and/or VR shit. Just none. None A T A L L

[–] 01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 21 points 2 months ago (1 children)

So you exclusively want ai. Got it.

-Microsoft, probably

[–] altphoto@lemmy.today 7 points 2 months ago

Clippie coming right up!

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 6 points 2 months ago
[–] muusemuuse@lemm.ee 5 points 2 months ago

Dude, you get free third party bullshit with every update. What’s not to love?

[–] tal@lemmy.today 31 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I don't believe that they're likely to do GNU/Linux. I bet that they're going to do a fork of Android off AOSP or something like that.

Android's had a huge amount of work put into it to make it suitable to be a consumer mobile phone OS, and the companies here aren't doing this because they want stuff that GNU/Linux does, but rather because they're Chinese companies worried about a US-China industrial decoupling and its risks for them. Like, they were okay with the technical status; what changed was that they started to worry about having the rug pulled out from them.

That being said, I can at least imagine that helping GNU/Linux phone adoption. So, think about what happened with video games. There were some major platforms out there -- MacOS, iOS, Windows, various consoles, Android, GNU/Linux. That fragmented the market. Trying to port software to all platforms became a huge pain. What a lot of game developers did was to target a more-or-less platform-agnostic engine and let the engine handle the platform abstraction.

If the mobile OS space fragments further -- like, Android splits into "Google Android" and "China Android"


my guess is that that'll help drive demand for platform-agnostic engines to help improve portability, and porting one engine to GNU/Linux is a lot easier than every individual program.

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 19 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Is this the year of the Ubuntu Touch Smartphone?

Probably not, but it should be.

[–] Num10ck@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

is it ready for normies to daily drive?

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Seems pretty polished, but I genuinely don't know. None of my devices support it, so I haven't had the opportunity to test drive it.

At some point, "normies" are just going to have to break down and learn something.

[–] Num10ck@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Palm OS was really good, but without a great app store it never stood a chance.

[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

No. I have a second phone with it just to play with.

It's functional, but rough. App support is lacking, VoLTE doesn't work still which means on countries like the US which shutdown 2/3G you cannot make or receive calls. The UI is clunky and dated.

I think a lot of these issues would go away pretty quick if it got a lot of attention. But then it's unlikely to get much attention without that stuff. Vicious cycle. It's a good base to build on.

[–] Num10ck@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

thanks for the insight. if you use google voice app on it would that work as a replacement for VoLTE?

[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

There isn't a Google Voice app. It's not Android.

You could probably place calls from the browser but not receive them.

I heard of some people setting up IP phone stuff for it, but it doesn't seem simple.

[–] redlemace@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Oh dear ..... Are we gonna be forced to snap on phones too?

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I would love to have a phone that I could just plug into a USB C dock and use as a normal computer. They've got plenty of processing power for that now. Every single program I use except for games could run on a phone if it used normal GNU/Linux.

[–] Buelldozer@lemmy.today 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Samsung Dex already does this with Android.

[–] philpo@feddit.org 4 points 1 month ago

Was about to say that - while it's sadly proprietary and most FOSS Apps are not well supported, it is a nice showcase. But I don't think it's actually used much by people.

Which is kind of sad.

[–] KryptonNerd@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 month ago

Honestly love Dex, it's such a smooth transition

[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 1 points 1 month ago

Convergence! I think Ubuntu tried to go that way for a while.

[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 8 points 1 month ago

We need phones with standard Linux.

Already exists. Several iterations are active and work as a daily driver: phone, sms and mobile networking works reliably, apps exist. Just not as many as on Android, and some features are not part of the OS. This is enough for many to declare them "a failure". That and limited hardware support.

Google has coddled us for way too long, and at what price.

[–] undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 6 points 2 months ago
[–] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Honestly, I think the old FirefoxOS could do well these days. Literally everything an app can do can be done by a browser with a decent caching/local storage scheme. Slap a decent camera on that and it would be amazing.

[–] hazypenguin@feddit.nl -5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you can implement an equivalent to Apple's Secure Enclave on a device running that, I'll be interested. I haven't seen even a device running Android doing that yet though.

[–] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

Samsung actually added Knox to their Android implementation a few months before iOS added Secure Enclave. I think Qualcomm had some sort of trusted execution environment around that time, too, if I recall correctly. And Google added Trusty to the AOSP two years ago. So it's already running on Android, and has been for ages.

But I'm not convinced a TEE would be necessary for a device that doesn't run any third-party native code. Browser tab sandboxing is already pretty robust; I haven't heard of an escalation exploit being found in ages on any major JavaScript engine, meaning that the risk of data exfiltration or bootloader compromise are extremely remote, and would be much quicker (and less risky!) to patch via browser updates than firmware/OS updates.

The only other reason I know of that you'd need a TEE is for DRM, and I'd be willing to wager most people who would want a FirefoxOS phone would actively prefer not to have that on their device.

[–] jonne@infosec.pub 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] Lembot_0002@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago

I worked with it. Just Linux. Rpm was at that moment.

[–] hazypenguin@feddit.nl -5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Let me know when there's a phone with Linux that has a security implementation that matches Apple's Secure Enclave.

[–] Lembot_0002@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago

No idea what that is.

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org -5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

GNU/Linux is about 100x more painful than Android...