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by wolfskaempf 1207 days ago
In fact there are versions of Android that run on the PinePhone like GloDroid, but it's really not the goal.

The goal behind efforts like the Librem 5 or PinePhone is not to create yet another Android phone, which Open Source or not will strengthen the Duopoly of Google and Apple in the Mobile Phone Operating System market. The goal is to create hardware that can jump-start the development of a true GNU/Linux Mobile Operating System.

With its real world use case, it has brought great advances to Mobile "Desktop" Environments like Plasma Mobile or Phosh by motivating developers who could finally use their creations and improvements on a real phone.
2 comments
charcircuit 1206 days ago
>of a true GNU/Linux Mobile Operating System.

Why is GNU important? toybox's coreutils is a good enough replacement. If you really wanted you could install GNU's core utils. 99% of users don't want to be messing with command line tools anyways.

Android already brought Linux as a mobile operating system to the mainstream.

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jokoon 1207 days ago
why is not the goal?
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fsflover 1206 days ago
Having the same OS on my laptop and phone is amazing. Android turns a general-purpose device into a restricted one, without a possibility to run desktop apps.

Desktop OS allows to use desktop apps on the phone and enjoy convergence: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque....

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jokoon 1205 days ago
> Android turns a general-purpose device into a restricted one, without a possibility to run desktop apps.

You should not run desktop apps on a phone, because smartphone have much less power. This is an important design feature. This is why smartphones OS are built differently.

And even then, I don't see how android "restricts" things. It's software. Android does not "restrict". It's an OS.

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fsflover 1205 days ago
> You should not run desktop apps on a phone, because smartphone have much less power.

You imply that having large power consumption is fine as long as the app is designed for desktop. I disagree: All apps should be as lightweight as possible to fight with the climate change and slow UI. I am using desktop Firefox on my Librem 5 just fine. All desktop plugins work, too.

> Android does not "restrict". It's an OS.

Android is designed in such a way that you cannot run desktop apps, despite the original Linux kernel.

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jokoon 1205 days ago
> Android is designed in such a way that you cannot run desktop apps, despite the original Linux kernel.

What exactly do you mean by "desktop apps"? Of course it's not going to support KDE or GTK or QT or win32 or some other windowing API. But it's an OS, it can run software. And since it's open source, I don't see any reason why it would not run something.

Of course you would need to use the android API to do something, but it makes sense because it's a different OS.

It doesn't behave like a desktop OS, but as opposed to what, exactly? Desktop apps are a subset of software in general, desktop apps are not everything there is about software.

If you mean "I cannot run desktop apps because I need to redesign them so they can work on a phone", then yes, indeed, but a phone is not just "a small desktop".

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fsflover 1205 days ago
> but a phone is not just "a small desktop"

Why not? It's a general-purpose computer, isn't it? Why intentionally design an OS in such a way that you must rewrite all software for it from scratch?

Yes, the UI is very different, but changing the UI is much easier than rewriting the program from scratch. Why is there no full Firefox on Android? It was already adapted for GNU/Linux phones and runs fine there, but not on Android. Same for LibreOffice AFAIK. Isn't it due to the design on this OS?

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Nextgrid 1206 days ago
> Android turns a general-purpose device into a restricted one

Android still runs the Linux kernel and the only reason you can't have shell access on it is user-hostile restrictions, which an open-source build wouldn't have.

I think it would be a lot easier to add desktop apps capability to Android for the minority that actually wants to run Linux apps on their phone than building a touch-optimized userspace from scratch.

If your desire is to run Linux desktop apps on Android I bet you can already do it if you find an X Server APK and got your Linux app to use it as your X display - that would've been a quick, pragmatic solution to satisfy the "Linux desktop" requirement while taking advantage of Android's mature & battle-tested touch-optimised userspace.

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fsflover 1206 days ago
It's the minority, because people didn't realize yet how convenient and logical it is. There should be no difference between a phone and a desktop, except for the screen size. You don't need to develop independent apps. You don't need to learn independent tools.

I can connect a screen and keyboard to my phone and use it as desktop: https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-co....

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Nextgrid 1206 days ago
> You don't need to develop independent apps

That's kind of irrelevant because they are currently developing a lot of apps to replace the functionality they'd get in Android for free. They'd save an insane amount of time and actually deliver a product competitive with mainstream phones right now, which would give them funding & marketshare to continue refining it down the line (potentially replacing it with non-Android components one at a time).

> There should be no difference between a phone and a desktop, except for the screen size

And the input method, which is a massive difference - touch and mouse are completely different, and so are the contexts in which phone vs desktop apps are used. If you try to merge the two, you'd look like the idiots who gave us Windows 8. So there's still effort in making specific UIs for different mediums.

> I can connect a screen and keyboard to my phone and use it as desktop

I'm not sure there's an actual need for it? This has even been tried by large companies such as Samsung and Microsoft and didn't go anywhere - in practice this isn't a problem the vast majority of people has and seems like an absurd thing to start with for a resource-constrained company in a very competitive market.

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fsflover 1202 days ago
> That's kind of irrelevant because they are currently developing a lot of apps to replace the functionality they'd get in Android for free.

This is not true. They are stuck with hardware-specific things like power management, camera, and LTE calls. "Calls" application itself was developed very quickly, for example.

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astrange 1206 days ago
Your desktop has active cooling and storage rated for enough daily writes that it can have swappable VM. Your phone has neither.
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palata 1206 days ago
Android runs the Linux kernel, but the rest of the OS is very, very different from typical Linux distributions.
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