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?
Well ARM is not the point, but phone devices, and i don’t think it’s especially targeting Chromebooks, i think Samsung wants to enhance their ARM chips to make competitive smartphones, both Snapdragon and Apple devices have better GPU’s than the Exynos chips.
Yes there might be a market for gaming oriented Android phones, but how would one benefit from that on a Gnu-Linux phone? Ok you might be able to run some Android games though Anbox, but if your device is primarily for gaming its probably better to stay on Android or get a x86 GPD-Win3 i.e. something more suitable for Linux gaming.
Well it might sound petty, but good 3D effects and smoothness is what makes Iphone devices so popular. I think having fluid GTK apps is important. Mi point is not “we must have gaming GPU’s on GNU/Linux phones”, my point is “we need AMD on the mobile market since they provide really decent drivers”.
The newer ARM Mali GPUs with the really decent FOSS Panfrost drivers are actually quite nice and more than sufficient for good 3D effects and smoothness on a mobile phone. The problem with GTK3 apps is simply that don’t use any of that GPU acceleration and are generally very inefficient.