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by jkhanlar 817 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_operating...

> "Base system is open source, but many devices use proprietary drivers for hardware support, and most Android operating systems include Proprietary apps (such as Google Play and other Google apps)."

Okay, so, look at history of AMD GPus and NVIDIA GPUs for proprietary linux drivers and open source/free software alternative drivers that even without the AMD/NVIDIA companies to help at all (regardless of if they did, especially NVIDIA blatantly refusing to help and intentionally making it difficult and whatnot), still there are open source drivers for practically every single AMD and NVIDIA graphics processing unit hardwares to make them work. So, why not the same possibility outcome for mobile computers running Android operating system or other Linux AArch64 or ARM64 architecture o/ses. How is it that barely any signs of strong brave developer programmer humans remain able to dedicate their attention to these efforts that decade ago such skilled programmer developer humans existed but no longer

> "Google Pixel 5a... The last Google product before they went full Apple." - resource_waste https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39733518

lol

1 comments

first you have wrong facts about the open source drivers for gpus timeline. They are still not 100% complete, and only were usable last couple years.

Second you forget that while not supporting full 3d performance on those gpu, you still had at least a 2d framebuffer to use your system.

On mobile, Without those blobs, the CPU doesn't initialize. The bootloader won't pass some signature safeboot check. The radio won't turn on. Wifi and bluetooth won't work. The screen won't display anything. the digitalizer won't work. no battery charging. usb into otg? nope. etc etc etc.