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, 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.