[solarkraft]

I love that it exists, but I don't think I'll buy one. The processor having half the power of my 2016 mid-range phone is concerning me a little, especially for the price.

I hope they keep developing because I really do want a linux phone, but with enough power to emulate Android somehow (just can't go around it for some things).

Again though, congratulations for making it this far. The Librem 5 will probably be the standard hacker-phone for a few years.

[benj111]

I suppose it depends what you do with your phone?

Even with a slower processor I have no problems believing it may be better for certain workloads because you won't have a load of background tasks running, that don't need to etc. Will probably be worse for games though.

So the same situation that desktop Linux was in, in the naughties?

Thinking about your Android emulator. That should be fairly easy? Android is already basically a VM running on Linux. I'm sure Google will be working hard to prevent this use case though.

[john61]

Jolla Phone already had a Android emulation for Sailfish OS

[solarkraft]

Alien Dalvik is a great idea and theoretically works well, but it's proprietary software and its developers don't seem to have any interest in anyone actually using it.

There doesn't seem to be any free software effort in prong porting ART to a real linux system (which shouldn't be hard at all), which could've happened for years and I'm not sure (though shyly hopeful) the Librem 5 will change anything about that (so the only realistic option would be full emulation, which would require a good bit of power).

Edit: Just realized that you could theoretically run Android apps via Chrome. But shit, that'll be slow.

[joshumax]

You should check out Anbox. It's basically a containerization platform for Linux that hosts an Android userspace and shares your host kernel a la docker. All you need to do is load the ashmem and binder kernel modules or build them statically into your kernel.

So far I know that there's an Ubuntu touch port of Anbox that works. It's a pretty good all-around solution considering the low container overhead and support for OpenGL ES 2.0

[solarkraft]

> I'm sure Google will be working hard to prevent this use case though

They can't do much about the runtime. ART is part of AOSP so theoretically anyone can come along and just port it. It hasn't happened so far though, for reasons I don't quite understand.

What Google can do (and is doing) though is increase developers dependence on Play services, which they guard well.

[maxsilver]

> The processor having half the power of my 2016 mid-range phone is concerning me a little

Same. I don't know how much the "Pure OS" changes things, but I've built some STB/OTT devices using Android on the i.MX A53 platform, and performance sure felt like a Galaxy S3 from 2013 or so. Slow enough that you'll really notice, even if your just doing some light web browsing or Twitter reading.

That level of performance was totally fine for our needs on that device. But as someone's daily driver phone, there might need to be some carefully set expectations. Even low end $200 Android smartphones today are noticeably faster than this.

[AsyncAwait]

The question is, could you do more on this vs your 2016 mid-range phone?

If I install emacs with org-mode on this, arguably I can already do more than pretty much any task manager offered on platforms running on a more powerful hardware.

[nixpulvis]

I'm curious to see how it feels running the basic software I need (mainly Firefox), I don't play a lot of 3D games of my phone.