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by ge96 57 days ago
I'm doubtful, I for a bit bought a lot of the Pine64 devices thinking about this eg. not just Android/iOS... but the lack of feature parity eg. missing drivers, lack of apps, old hardware.

Unless people are paid to do it vs. volunteer
1 comments
cogman10 57 days ago
That's the depressing part. I keep looking for something I could potential run the likes of kde mobile and maybe waydroid on, but there's really just nobody doing this. You are basically locked into a vendor kernel if it's even available.
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kuhsaft 57 days ago
People forget how much the mobile hardware industry relies on non-free infrastructure. Infrastructure developed by companies that make the standards. You really can't make a good open-source phone because you, pretty much, have to play by the rules of the companies in these consortiums.
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fsflover 57 days ago
Except Librem 5 has been created and is usable by the HN people.
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handedness 57 days ago
Does the Librem 5 not rely on any non-free code or infrastructure?
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kuhsaft 57 days ago
It does. They obscure the usage of non-free hardware/firmware by not shipping it as part of the OS, but as a bundle on separate flash storage that is loaded into the OS by initrd. That blob is updatable as "firmware". The 100% free open-source is just marketing. It's just for the OS. A lot of the hardware and firmware is proprietary.

https://github.com/linuxboot/heads/blob/c859c28b88b7bc197c16...

https://forums.puri.sm/t/the-librem-5-blob-list/28815/26

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fsflover 56 days ago
> The 100% free open-source is just marketing.

100% FLOSS is in the OS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25504641. It is not the end of the road, but this is the only phone that can run such OS.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47943487

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seba_dos1 57 days ago
Depends where you draw the line. There is not a single non-free blob in the OS that runs there once the bootloader is up (unless you put some there by yourself, which you're of course free to do).
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kuhsaft 57 days ago
I think you misunderstand what the Purism Firmware Jail is. I don't blame you though. They seem to make it purposefully misleading. It doesn't isolate what runs in the OS. It just isolates the OS updates from the non-free blob updates. The OS still runs the non-free blobs. It just loads it from separate flash.

https://github.com/linuxboot/heads/blob/c859c28b88b7bc197c16...

https://forums.puri.sm/t/the-librem-5-blob-list/28815/26

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juliangoldsmith 57 days ago
No true Scotsman would ever use binary blobs.
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