[yjftsjthsd-h]

Well... yeah, don't do that. I mean this seriously, not facetiously; when I say I want a Linux phone what I mean is I want a phone that runs Debian or whatever (on bare metal, with good quality of experience, and with a mainline kernel) and where I install software out of the official repos using apt (or whatever).

(Also plenty of people on desktop Linux do `curl | sh`, and some of us are getting most of our Android apps out of F-Droid; I'm not sure the distinction runs quite the way you're suggesting.)

[kaba0]

You can have a pinephone, and it will work fine for like 2 hours, warming like hell, and having you wait for minutes for an app to open. That’s where the linux userspace is. Maybe we should take a look at android and simply re-use the multi-million dollars spent on actually making a working mobile OS?

[linmob]

While my experience with PinePhone has been significantly better (sounds like you may have had a faulty unit), we have working close-to-mainline ports for a few Qualcomm-powered phones (e.g., Xiaomi Poco F1, OnePlus 6(t), Google Pixel 3a, ...) in OSes like postmarketOS or Mobian. Turns out these work a lot better - having phones build with components for phones makes a significant difference.

[kaba0]

I didn’t mean to “shit” on the project, I did buy it as a means to both support it and to toy around with it - and yeah, the “free hardware” (which is arguably a bit naive and marketing-y goal) definitely doesn’t help create a device fit for everyday use, but I’m afraid the userspace is just not even ready to tackle the complexity, and I don’t see it happening anytime soon.

Android has a proper security, IPC model, the whole userspace has a focus on battery-saving, apps are made in a way to be suspend-able, etc. “GNU/Linux” is living in the past where C-posix binary goes brr is considered safe and enough, and I just don’t think that’s the case.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I don't understand what any of your comment has to do with this thread, which is about security models and application sources.

That said,

> You can have a pinephone, and it will work fine for like 2 hours, warming like hell, and having you wait for minutes for an app to open. That’s where the linux userspace is.

No, that's where the pinephone hardware is. I mean, also it sounds like maybe you have a defective unit because mine doesn't do what you're describing, but this is like judging Android by the cheapest phone I can buy, which is also agonizingly slow. If you don't use a device built out of really old+cheap parts, ex. postmarketos is perfectly fine.

[kaba0]

> but this is like judging Android by the cheapest phone I can buy, which is also agonizingly slow

Nope, even running android on the same pinephone hardware results in a smooth system - it’s almost like google has been spending dollar billions on fixing and developing stuff that won’t magically appear in a userspace stuck in unix times. The kernel did get some upstreaming, that’s why linux laptops are remotely portable.

But for a mobile device you need a used space that understand the resource-constrained environment and are good citizens. This makes a huge difference in an age where racing-to-suspend is the way to conserve battery.

[seba_dos1]

Just because Android can bypass PinePhone's underpowered GPU when doing some of the animations doesn't mean the whole system gets significantly smoother. There's nothing preventing phoc or KWin from doing the same, aside of its relatively low priority on development roadmaps as other devices don't suffer so much from it.