[Nextgrid]

> 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.

[fsflover]

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....

[Nextgrid]

> 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.

[fsflover]

> 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.

[Nextgrid]

I think my point still stands if you replace "apps" with "functionality" - they're still reimplementing from scratch and without much resources nor expertise something that Android has a (correct me if I'm wrong) permissively-licensed, mature & battle-tested implementation of they could just use.

I don't think using permissively-licensed Android components wouldn't compromise user freedom and would actually increase it because it would put a non-user-hostile, freedom-respecting, usable phone in the market right now. You can just patch out or choose to not include the user-hostile bits (though most of those wouldn't be part of the open-source release in the first place).

Of course, this only applies if the objective is to deliver a usable, competitive product rather than practice effectively useless ideological bikeshedding similar to the war on systemd and refuse the admit that the typical GNU/Linux userspace is at this point prehistoric and significantly lacking compared to other alternatives (whether proprietary or open-source such as Android).

[astrange]

Your desktop has active cooling and storage rated for enough daily writes that it can have swappable VM. Your phone has neither.

[palata]

Android runs the Linux kernel, but the rest of the OS is very, very different from typical Linux distributions.