So i have not bought a GNU/Linux phone for several reasons, one of which is that neither the ecosystem nor the devices themselves seem to be mature enough to have a stable experience.
To begin with, GTK3 is far from ideal on these devices, and many applications have not migrated to GTK4 which does take advantage of the GPUs… more or less. I don’t know exacly what the status of the drivers is like, but i’d assume that the pinephone doesn’t support vulkan.
But i’ve heard that AMD and Samsung will collaborate to bring AMD RDNA2 GPU’s to Samsung devices, which in my opinion, it’s the game changer that we need. This is completely theoretical but we lose nothing by speculating.
So AMD is great on x86 right? you have very powerful graphic cards compared to intel’s which have open source drivers and implementations like intel, namely MESA with RADV, unlike Nvidia, a company that offers very powerful cards with closed source drivers.
I’d assume that these new devices will be able to run a full GNU/Linux distro with open source drivers and all the subsequent tools. You would get finally a powerful device withouth compromising privacy from the software perspective.
I understand that the kill switches are something unique that gives the Librem 5 and the Pinephone an advantage in terms of privacy, but using a real GNU/LInux distribution on a powerful and potentially popular device is a big deal.
What are your thoughts on this?
Linux development took way too much time to enter the market, and therefore will face tremendous difficulties, but it is indeed a step in the right direction. Having GNU/Linux phones can open many possibilities in software development, and most definitely, free software. You’re right about the ecosystem issue, though. I have no idea how they will pull it off, but PinePhone has been able to do wonders with their resources lately.
I’d say it’s not time to market so much as the mentality of Linux. It’s aimed mostly at professionals, developers, and power users, and therefore not as much effort goes into polishing the UI and making it easy and intuitive to use as Android, iOS, or even Windows. Instead, Linux UIs seem to focus on control, customization, and being able to run on low power hardware.
Granted, Linux being no nonsense is a big reason I love it, but to the average consumer, it’s a flaw.
This could be merely a question of time, any new “paradigm” could make its way into the average consumer if it shows to be affordable and usable. Linux was actually very used in peripheral countries for a while to prevent the abusive fees Microsoft exploit through intellectual property when an institution uses a pirated Windows copy. The government of my country used GNU/Linux for a long time, and we even had a GNU/Linux operating system of our own, Kurumin Linux.
The only reason Windows became so prevalent in peripheral countries after a while is because now manufacturers of computer machines have a clo$e relation$hip with Microsoft’s very fat offers and the sellers become obliged to sell the machines with Windows installed if they do not wish to get heavily fined for it.
Still, Linux accesibility has nothing to do with its design or its ‘mentality’, in my opinion, but it’s admittedly rarely used nowadays.
I kind of agree… But you have to take a look at distributions like PopOS. I haven’t used it much, but it is very pretty, and super fast to install. In 30 minutes you could be up and browsing mindlessly facebook; from start with clean hardware; even if you know nothing about sysops.
Well, my post doesn’t go against the idea of having a true FLOSS operative system on phone devices, quite the contrary.
Regarding the “ecosystem”, as a GNU/Linux user on a Raspberry Pi, i am more than fine with the idea of having and entire ecosystem of FLOSS applications, the difference between GNU/Linux on desktop and GNU/Linux on mobile devices is that the first one has a real ecosystem, the second one is barely developing one. But it’s a matter of time.
Personally, although i appreciate the impact of the Librem 5 and the Pinephone on GNU/Linux as a mobile platform, especially Libhandy now known as Libadwaita, i have to say, one is quite expensive yet not very powerful, and the other one is not expensive yet it’s very underpowered. I think we need a real middle ground.
I get it, you won’t buy because you think it’s expensive. I think it’s expensive as well. Actually, even if I thought the opposite, it wouldn’t make a difference because I don’t have the money to buy something like that to begin with.
What I wanted to say is, even if I can’t afford it, we will benefit from the development of this industry as well. Because the Linux system is an operating system with a vocal (but extremely disorganized) free software community.