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by Demiurge 620 days ago
Every vendor that is not Apple already supports Android. Even the ones that don’t want to have the GSuit built in, and some of them care about privacy, while some don’t. A smartphone is comprised of more than one cpu, and there are proprietary chipsets with closed firmware all the way to battery. This is a much different world than x86 PC with pre EFI BIOS, when you could flash everything (except cpu?)

What do you expect to be able to achieve with just the word “Linux” added to the mix? Can you build new 5G drivers for Linux as well? Smartphone market is moving pretty fast, the hardware is nearly disposable, and the consumer doesn’t even know what an OS is.

GNU/Linux smartphone, that is competitive? Good luck with that.
2 comments
snapplebobapple 619 days ago
The firmware side of things is a different can of worms that also affects X86. That's not he ask I was making (although it is a good second phase). I just want phones to be more like X86 in that I can install whatever I want to them and have a more standardized interface than the current wild west situation so that it's easy to bring on new devices. It would be nice if the hardware vendors were not actively blocking installing my own operating system as well (in addition to the technical non standard issue).

Why do you think I care about competitive or commercial viability? I just want the behemoth pushing apple and android crap to be forced to make their devices easier to boot an alternative and leave the rest to us to figure out and see what interesting things can be done.

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Demiurge 619 days ago
If you don’t care about competitive smartphones, why do you care about smartphones or phones at all?
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snapplebobapple 619 days ago
It's not about making a competitive linux smartphone, it's about making the hardware ecosystem more conducive to software competition by making it easy for people to run their own software on their own hardware.
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heavyset_go 619 days ago
It's a solved problem for ARM platforms with standards like SBSA. Thankfully, a few ARM notebooks implement ACPI, UEFI and whatnot that makes standardizing boot images easy instead of requiring bespoke images for every model.
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snapplebobapple 619 days ago
Then i guess all that is really needed is legislation to force manufacturers to stop being a bunch of dickheads locking down the devices they sell?
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