[norman784]

I was thinking that this or opening the bootloader should be required (by governments) for deprecated devices. Imagine all the Android and Apple devices you could give a second life by installing in them linux with some lightweight window manager (with touch support), or even Ubuntu Touch, etc.

[realusername]

While I totally support such legislation (even for current sold devices, not just deprecated), there's a massive pile of android devices with open bootloader which never got any decent second life support.

[norman784]

Those might be niche devices, I think if were Samsung or Pixel devices, it would be a different story, similar for Apple devices, they are fewer variants, that it would be a lot of developers putting effort on adding upstream Linux support if they were open, like is happening with the Macs with the M series.

[realusername]

Samsung is actually the worst offender in the Android world for making variants.

Each device usually has 5 versions for each market (US, EU, China, Korea, Rest of the world) + individual board revisions.

And that's not counting the massive amount of devices they produce outside the flagships.

Let's pick the Galaxy S10 for example, you have the S10, S10+, S10e, S10 Lite, S10 5G. The US ones are on Snapdragon SOC, the other ones on Exynos SOC and each region has additional quirks...

[denysvitali]

That shouldn't stop the regulation from existing, but yes, maybe another regulation in a similar way for forcing companies to open source drivers and bringup code after N years of the release?

[realusername]

Even when the drivers are open source, it's far from easy. I'm thinking about these old Linux 4.2 touch screen drivers, they are there, fully open-source and despite that, almost none of them are in modern mainline.