this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2021
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Linux Phones
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Community about running GNU/Linux on phones. Projects like Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, PostmarketOS, Mobian etc. Either on former Android phones or hardware like the PinePhone.
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I think Linux phones have huge potential going forward. Personally, I've noticed that my usage patterns haven't really changed in at least a decade. I use a fairly small number of apps like calendar, email, chat, media player, etc. The way these apps work hasn't really changed, and if I could get those working well on a Linux phone then I really wouldn't miss Android one bit.
As a side note, it's really depressing to see how hardware keeps getting faster, but software bloat negates all the gains. If we could have an ecosystem of open source apps that are optimized for performance, then we could have phones that last for many years without having to keep replacing them. Imagine if with every update your software kept getting faster instead of slower.
A change would be nice
Yeah same, I don't use my phone for too much, I think with a little more progress I could potentially move over to it for the most part. I do hope android compatibility can be improved though, it would be the biggest barrier of entry down the line. Also I definitely agree with you on updates, it's frustrating that technology keeps improving and getting more efficient and the most of the popular proprietary software doesn't really evolve and gets less efficient.
Yeah, having a decent Android compatibility layer would be amazing. Seems like there's some promising work being done on that front already.
What's that looking like? I'm aware of Anbox but IIRC that runs a full Android runtime and I've seen mixed reports of it working.
Personally I've been kicking around the idea of an API compatibility layer for Android, so an Android app could be built as a standard Java jar and run on top of OpenJDK. I'm not concerned with binary APK compatibility, but there are many apps on F-Droid that I would like to run on non-Android Linux, perhaps without the baggage of something like Anbox. I don't know what it would entail, if there is any interest, or if it's even possible though.