[Teknoman117]

Even though android is more open, it's not exactly in much better shape. It's nearly impossible to do anything useful with mainline Linux on most Android devices because the SoC vendors don't upstream anything since their entire financial model is sell new chip every 6 months.

[fartcannon]

Agreed. It's a sad state of affairs.

[fsflover]

Have a look at GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone.

[Teknoman117]

The problem is that they're both way behind the state of the art.

If the day to day experience of the device is still bad I'm not going to be carrying one on me. It gets relegated to yet another thing I can tinker with on the weekend, just like my pinebook pro.

[google234123]

If Linux provided a stable driver interface then they wouldn’t need to upstream.

[southerntofu]

It depends on the perspective. If you're concerned about security fixes and people being able to submit patches for the broken shit drivers manufacturers provide, then we still need the source and relevant schematics.

Of course if all you care about is "it boots" then having a binary blob lying around and doing god knows what with your entire computing is a "viable" option.

Not so long ago hardware vendors sold hardware and provided all schematics along... because that's what hardware manufacturers are for?! Nowadays they're more like a service provider trying to lock you into weird things and it's certainly not for the benefit of us users and maintainers. I think the issue was explained at length in this blog post called "Ok lenovo we need to talk":

https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmu_man/2021-10-04_ok_lenovo_w...