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by MathMonkeyMan 876 days ago
> This was the standard way to compute in the 60s. But we have evolved. Nowadays, you buy a computer and nothing keeps you from doing anything with it.

Depends on the specifics of "you," "nothing," and "anything."

> Wake me up when Linux is ready for everyday phone use, because Google is a poor alternative.

I have UBports (i.e. Ubuntu Touch) installed on an old Pixel for use as a remotely controlled camera, but I don't use it as a daily driver. It's a thick wrapper around Android, though. There's no getting around proprietary hardware, firmware, and drivers.
1 comments
geor9e 876 days ago
Since Linux is a kernel, and Android runs off the Linux kernel, I am confused by that "Wake me up when..." final sentence. I know he probably means desktop Debian on a Pixel phone but it's very poor phrasing.
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MathMonkeyMan 876 days ago
I've read (don't remember where) that Android's kernel barely resembles upstream Linux.

A little more about UBports...

It's not like you can use /dev/video to use the video camera on a Linuxified phone. Instead, the system is a Debian wrapper around Android, and Android is used to get access to the proprietary device drivers. Those capabilities are then exposed to the Qt-based SDK.

So, to take a picture with the camera every few minutes, instead of running a command on a cron job I had to write a whole [GUI app][1]. Either I manually start the app using the phone's touchscreen, or I think I can launch it in dev mode remotely using tools on my laptop, but the phone still has to be manually unlocked.

To top it all off, there's a memory leak in some camera-related Android service, so the app crashes after a few hours. The bug is allegedly in the Android code, so the UBports maintainers can't do much about it (maybe backport a patch onto the source from which the Android base image is built? Who has time for that?).

For all I know, it's a good phone, but for my hacking use case it's less than ideal.

Still, any old phone camera is way better than the webcams I have lying around.

[1]: https://github.com/dgoffredo/ubuntu-touch-intervalometer

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