Before that the OS development was tightly coupled to hardware development. Booting an existing OS on a new device even with the same CPU required prior patching, configuration and re-implementation of the floppy drive driver. And it wasn't seen as odd because that's the way it was.
I don't think the problem is a lack of OS enthusiasts, we probably have more of them than at the time Linux was born. The problem is they're fighting an uphill battle against a swarm of slightly different CPUs and device trees and uncooperative vendors that do anything they can to lock the device.
How profitable do you think this would be?
Economic incentives for "differentiation", e.g. device tree with upstream Linux and uboot support for feature A, but non-upstream uboot blob enables feature A+B.
now with apple and arm pushing for an alternative platform via emulation at first, we are heading for a fragmented mess yet again.
But between their own internal sectors still betting on Symbian, not being open enough and the mole that Microsoft introduced with Elop that opportunity was lost.
From there on there was Sailfish (that never managed to get enough adoption), Ubuntu Touch and Firefox OS among others, but no big vendors backing.
And the opportunity moment was already passed, as the de facto platforms for mobile development were iOS and Android, not even Microsoft was successful pushing their own platform there. All the killer apps are already released for those platforms, trying something new won't give the essentials to communicate with others and participate in society as of today.
Based on my contacts at Nokia it was simply underfunding, believing that symbian would remain dominant in developing countries and seeing the meamo/meego line as a distracting and expensive side project as well as internal competition which people sought to sabotage internally. Some ex-Nokia people blogged quite extensively on it.
The truth is, there was no more room left for a no. 3. The writing was on the wall for those able to see, Nokia's alternatives were out, much like Blackberry, regardless of what they did.
I, too, was unhappy with Nokia's move to producing Windows Phones. But Microsoft, compared to other companies, knows how to build operating systems and create developer ecosystems around them. If Microsoft failed, IMO, Nokia did not stand a chance.
So, from the technical standpoint they could have adapted much faster. However, the Maemo team didn’t stand a chance against allpowerful Symbian internally. The team was tiny (50ish people on the software side if I recall correctly?), wasn’t given neither the resources nor the goahead to try and build the smartphone on the platform.
It took years for the executive to realize Symbian’s not going to cut it and devote more resources to Maemo. Finally, with the launch of N900 Nokia two years later had a capable horse in the race.
It promptly went to kneecap it by announcing, in the same announcement speech that introduced the N900, that the platform is obsolete and the new version will use a different platform (qt instead of gtk, rh instead of deb, etc etc). It was the worst ever act of self sabotage I have ever seen and to this day I don’t believe it wasn’t a malicious act by some executives, nobody could be that stupid.
Anyways, Nokia proceeded to rewrite the entire platform, tied up with Intel in the process, and just wasted time until Elop told everyone to jump off.
In 2007-2008 Nokia stood a fighting chance, but internal power struggles, short sightedness and politics killed it.
(when I say Nokia I mean the smartphone division)
Symbian development community wasn't that happy with Windows on Nokia phones, that is why most pivoted into Android and iOS.
Nokia was mostly an anti-Microsot culture shop when I joined in 2004, we had HP-UX, Solaris, Red-Hat Linux and Symbian. Windows was only used as thin client.
This would have maybe delayed the inevitable though for some years anyway, just sayin.
I don't know about that. What's left are the things the existing platforms won't give you.
Example: uBlock, but for apps. Runs the app in a container and blocks network requests to tracking servers, or otherwise modifies the app to remove misfeatures. Think: Game Genie for social media apps.
The problem is you don't just need the killer app, you also need all of the existing apps, and hardware to run it on. So the real problem is you need your new system to be able to do that, but simultaneously be able to run common Android apps on common Android hardware.
https://spreadprivacy.com/introducing-app-tracking-protectio...
10+ years ago I had an HTC touch pro 2 with Lineage OS and I miss it dearly. Amazing hardware keyboard, linux in my pocket, no BS. And that phone originally ran Windows Mobile, funny enough.
Then Microsoft came and ruined the N series by making nokia release some broken version of the OS (code named anna and then bella) so that people would buy Lumia. After a couple of months, there was no more application store. What terrible blunder that was.
Naturally most went elsewhere.
Meego, Maemo was really early experimentation IMHO. WebOS and Tizen were two worthy contenders, but both of them went to die in enterprise institutions that have no understanding how to create a product. HP absolutely smashed WebOS, and Samsung in its usual ultra hostile fashion destroyed any open source potential Tizen had. HP, Samsung, and Oracle is where Open Source goes to die.
I used that Pre until the plastic shell started falling apart and by then the writing was on the wall that it wasn't going to be the next big thing for phones and I regretfully bought my first Android phone with my own hard earned money.
They obviously didn't want to put all their eggs into one basket and kept releasing Android phones in parallel. Eventually, Bada died a silent death, although some of it probably found its way to Tizen.
It did't come to reality on the PC, but sneaked in through the backdoor with the advent of mobile devices.
I have little hope that this can be undone, but we need to be prepared to nip these tendencies in the bud for the next paradigm shift.
It is no accident that the laptops as desktop replacement are just as vertically integrated, most people not using laptops have NUCs and game consoles, and custom built PC towers are seldom seen outside hardcore PC gamers.
What is getting better are the likes of KDE. Where a good decade ago running Linux still was a pain where it didn't work, nowadays it mostly just works, the System UIs are more usable, more customizable and in many cases better than any of the commercial OS for a while now (and yes, that includes MacOS).
Android is a pain in the rear, IOS similarily so.
Of course they tried to provide alternatives, but they are still stuck 30 years behind, they haven't gotten to phones yet. During Covid they had issues getting videoconferences to work.
Huh? I've been happily using several GNU/Linux phones as my daily drivers for the past 16 years.
FSF also supported Replicant, which isn't something I'm personally interested in but it's there.
(There's the urban legend that you're always breaking some law even when you try your best not to; probably you're also always running some opaque firmware blob even when you try your best not to).
I don't see mobile users making any compromise like this, unless a gigantic scandal happens.
Librem 5 PinePhone and its Pro variant FuriLabs FLX1
Mobian UBPorts PostMarket OS And all the other distributions.
Still what’s really lacking is some kind of critical mass that can’t be ignored. Many many services even in real life are locked behind an iOS/play store wall (even sometimes with no alternative outside needing a smartphone).
We’re not completely locked in yet so there’s still time…
Remember the first post Torvalds made for the kernel?
He didn't say "I'm doing a project to compete as fast as I can with commercial UNIX machine so please help"
He sid this: "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)"
And it became huge. By chance.
A FOSS phone doesn't have to support Whatsapp. It should be open, fun to tinker with, modular and, maybe, with enough logic to handle carrier signal and SMS.
Even if it's not successful, the code and schematics will still live somewhere on the Internet, ready for anyone to create a weird steampunk phone.
Most people that want a Linux phone don't care about freedom of tech. They just want some portable Unix workstation with all the comfort of a commercial phone.
Which it's not wrong by itself. But demanding Open Source to create another "commercial-like but gratis" it's already a bad attitude to start with
What apps does it have to support, in your opinion? A computer in my pocket is useful for a lot of things, but central to its usefulness is communication. it can choose to not support all possible modes of communication, but it needs to at least support some of them, in order for there to be any adoption.
Second of all, you are agreeing with me that independent software can’t compete with massive corpo sponsored projects.
All I’m saying is an indie phone isn’t going to be able to compete on the same level as devices that have billions of dollars of R&D poured into them, and people have this fantasy where the socialism of the commons will give them magic toys (after all look how successful open source projects have been!) without thinking about how all the expert hours are going to get devoted to these things, of even throwing a couple of bucks anyone’s way themselves to fund it.
Crowdsourcing can work (Ubuntu phone got $12.7 million public commitment but fell short of the goal so got nothing) but even then it’s on a whole other scale.
Did have an unexpected win in the form of the Steam Deck though. Never thought I'd have a powerful hand held, desktop linux gaming machine at an affordable price. Back in the day I was following the Dragonbox Pyra project and really liked the idea, but couldn't justify spending so much on a device that couldn't really do anything.
What we actually need is to do all over again what has been done for the last 30 years on computers: developing and reverse engineering open source versions of the various drivers for mobile devices' hardware. Without them you will be forced to pray for ABI compatibility at every update and you will never get to know your actual hardware
Job scheduling, URL handling, settings daemons… we have standard tools for doing this as well on a Linux system. Somehow they remain only very loosely bound together and different bits can be omitted or swapped for alternatives.
With Android / AOSP, are the components bound tightly together? I suppose the acid test would be: can I run Google maps APK on my Linux desktop as an app showing in a native window, or do I have to run an entire android emulator which has to take over a portion of my screen (and provide separate versions of all its own system services) to run one app?
If a WINE-for-Android like thing exists, then I’d be very happy to run a standard Linux system on my phone and have it boot into an Android launcher that could run Android apps, but also be able to do anything else I wanted to do with a bare Linux system.
Steamdeck from Valve does exactly this and it’s very good. The stock behaviour is to boot into their launcher (SteamOS) but if you sang you can toggle to a KDE desktop, get a shell in a terminal emulator, and hack away on what is just a regular PC.
If you launch individual Android programs via `waydroid app intent ...`, they render as separate windows in the parent compositor. The single window for the entire Android UI is what you get if you run `waydroid show-full-ui`.
The paid version even comes with Android App Support - the 'killer feature' that allows a Sailfish device to run full Android apps in a sandbox (https://jolla.com/appsupport).
Some people will inevitably moan that it's proprietary, but that's just the UI layer; the rest is wide open, familiar Linux. I can SSH into my device without any fancy workarounds, and it works almost identically to a desktop machine.
(Besides, how else is a company meant to survive in the super-competitive mobile device market? The OS is cheap. Android App Support is awesome. Pay up and be grateful!)
The UX is simple and consistent, WAY superior to iOS and Android.
Most importantly, it has an ecosystem: the Jolla app store, a comprehensive SDK, and an alternative open source app repository (https://openrepos.net/).
Website says it's only sold in EU. How is that verified?
Please be welcome to use our software anywhere in the world, however due to our limited resources we can only support the noted regions." https://shop.jolla.com/
For all their flaws, iOS, Android, ChromeOS, and the gone Blackberry, Windows Phone, Symbian, actually rethought the whole programming stack, using modern programming languages, and UI/UX.
On the other hand, Android has a very solid permission and isolation system. This is why I don't want GNU/Linux on my phone; I would rather have a proper FOSS Android.
It was a deeply cynical way of doing an end-run around the GPL, and I've held them in utter contempt ever since.
edit : Unless the goal is also to benefit the linux desktop ecosystem (the whole convergence meme)
If performance is any good (fingers crossed for something close to the latest raspberry pi) then it's the perfect machine: usb C displayport, it fits in your pocket, can run proper Linux, fallback to Android for steam Link until valve releases an ARM version of steam. It'll be perfect.
For actual laptop form factor usage, I'll connect the xreal glasses to get a big display and I'll use the pixel as a keyboard and trackpad, or an external keyboard and the pixel as a trackpad.
Can't wait for people to test android 15.
At least Google has upstreamed pKVM to the Linux kernel. Since Pixel Tablet can run GrapheneOS, there's a path to running unmodified Linux VMs as open-source pKVM support matures.
It's sad that customers have to settle, but non-zero Google table scraps > zero Apple VM slices.
That's would create a much better and knowledgeable world BUT it means having entrepreneurs in chief and managers and technicians aside ate the same level, "high output managers" do really dislike that.
The problem to arrive at the laws is how many know enough to understand why we should and we must have such law, because if for most it's not even clear what is something you own vs something you can use via a proprietary remote service...
Physical ownership is a clear concept for most, digital ownership for most is a mystery... That's the damn issue.
Android has an actual, sane, rethought security model that has a good track record in protecting millions of non-tech-savvy people.
(Also plenty of people on desktop Linux do `curl | sh`, and some of us are getting most of our Android apps out of F-Droid; I'm not sure the distinction runs quite the way you're suggesting.)
https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=PinePhone_Software_R...
Both Librem 5 and PinePhone Pro are much faster than the original PinePhone, although PinePhone Pro is still relatively immature when it comes to software support.
I wonder what would be the closest hardware today that could do it. Smartphone or small tablet form factor would do just fine for me.
Until some government agency gets serious about forcing the cellular carriers to actually allow phones on their network without having to go through the anal violation that is "certification" for their network, the open mobile phone ecosystem will continue to suck.
We can play this “wild west hacker” whatever, but rules are a necessity for a working society, one can’t just start driving on the other side of the road, and neither would we be ahead with random frequencies getting emitted everywhere.
Beyond that, the people developing chipsets generally have better tests for compliance than the carriers, themselves. You should be able to drop one of those chipsets in your phone, plug in a SIM, and get on with life. However, the carriers make you spend a couple of megabucks of bribes and then they will deign to allow your phone on their oh-so-fragile network.
Effectively, the current cellular carriers are acting exactly like Bell System prior to the Hush-A-Phone lawsuit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S...
Userland is as different from desktop Linux as you can possibly get.
Because manufacturers buy random parts from other suppliers, who may or may not own the source code, and they often legally simply can’t share forward that code.
Can the "free trial" be used indefinitely if you don't need Android app support?
The latest device you can use with full support is Sony Xperia 10 III, released in 2021. There have been no further releases; the project never really took off and unfortunately it seems that the OS is slowly dying. The Finnish company behind it, Jolla, had a joint project with Russia (Aurora OS), which I believe provided a good chunk of the funds via Rostelecom. With the war everything changed, and in 2021 they had to cut ties entirely with Russia for many reasons: embargos, and many people rightfully not wanting anything to do with "a Russian OS" on their phone. The company had to be "restructured" in 2023.
At Google HQ, there is a veritable mountain of skulls of Android competitor projects. Please notice the skulls before doing something that will almost certainly add your project to the pile.
What do you expect to be able to achieve with just the word “Linux” added to the mix? Can you build new 5G drivers for Linux as well? Smartphone market is moving pretty fast, the hardware is nearly disposable, and the consumer doesn’t even know what an OS is.
GNU/Linux smartphone, that is competitive? Good luck with that.
What we need is more devices that allow unlocking the bootloader and rewriting the keys.
Also the possibility of postmarket devices running non-bloated OS is a loss for a vendor since it both reduces the appeal of whatever next "+1% cpu +1% battery" lineup update (and its a bad idea to sell 200k "good device model 1" rather than 100k "bad device model 1" and "bad device model 2", because PR/stocks/whatever) and increases the possibility of having users dissatisfied with the brand name because battery/flash degradation is still a thing.
iNaturalist publishes an open source android app to complement their very functional website, and honestly I would give up all of GNU for that one app.
