Ask Lemmy

Phone manufacturers don't release drivers, leaving phones in a state of either it works with generic drivers (almost never works 100%) or someone needs to make a custom driver (a lot of work) so we end up in a situation where every new phone would need a full team working on it for weeks/months just to make Linux support it, so it rarely happens. and when it does, by the time you reach full functionality, the phone is already outdated.

With computers this doesn't happen as they are essentially modular (being built from mostly a combination of off the shelf parts) where each part already has a driver (often even contributed by tge manufacturer) while phones are almot completely custom, with each model having custom parts that are often completely unique to it.

there's not many supported devices mostly due to lacking manpower and money. also the lack of applications. plus the os itself is usually not polished enough for a daily driver sadly.

theres no standardized, and its too complicated for the person not in tech. only my bros in tech would be able to utilize it. thats why its Windows or APPLE.

Because they are not ready and dual-booting between Linux and Android is not possible/practical.

We expect phones to do way more than we expected from PCs when Linux was started. Linux phones basically need to become feature-complete while almost no one is using them as daily drivers. On top o that hardware keeps changing and is hard to work with. This makes the project extremely difficult.

I think it's instead useful to notice how weird it is that we have Open Source desktops and laptops at all.

Basically nothing else in our society works this way. Basically nothing has changeable firmware. It's practically a quirk of history that x86 was cloned and reverse-engineered and had a bunch of competitors spring up making compatible but swappable hardware that was all interoperable. It became an ecosystem, basically because of corporate piracy, rather than anything else. My hardware needed to work like the others or I wasn't in the club, and my next generation hardware needed to be backwards compatible with the club or I was out of the club. And laptops were just desktop parts made smaller, so they ran whatever the club ran.

It's practically a quirk of history that early computers didn't have enough ROM to do anything useful, and so they needed to be coded from scratch every time you booted them. And when we got tired of doing that, we attached external storage like punch cards and tapes and hard drives and floppy disks that we controlled from outside the computer and essentially just programmed the computer for us because the ROM needed input and it was a lot to type. And because we could control it from outside, we could put different disks in on different days and it would do different stuff.

My microwave didn't work that way. My VCR didn't work that way. My digital camera didn't work that way.

So the way phones work is a regression to the mean. The reason open source on phones sucks is because the hardware is specific to my model and manufacturer, but because the components aren't removable or swappable there's no ecosystem. I can't take parts from a Motorola phone and use them in a Samsung phone, so there's no standard. As long as Motorola ships a device that works with its hardware, it doesn't matter that it won't work on LG hardware. And vice-versa. And so long as Motorola's next phone ships with firmware that suits that hardware, it doesn't matter that it's totally different incompatible hardware with last year's model.

So every single phone that comes out has some hardware no one's figured out yet, but it may be unique to that one year and manufacturer and model, and so until it gets reverse engineered your phone just won't work. And then the next year a completely different device gets released, so there's no momentum to keep investigating the old hardware because no new person will ever have it again. It's not a good way to foster a community, with a shifting landscape of small minorities, brought together only by which device they happen to use, and breaking apart every time someone upgrades to a new device.

So long story short, if we want the situation to improve, we need to produce laws that require things to be an ecosystem. We need to force compatibility where it doesn't make financial sense, we need to force things to be swappable, we need to force things to be flashable, we need to force things to be removable, replaceable, and repairable. We can't hope it just happens again like it did for desktops, we need to make sure it does.

Because our phones run two operating systems, one of which you can modify. The baseband SoC has its own OS and manufacturers are reluctant to give out the info required to write OSS drivers for it. Security through obscurity and all that.

Operating systems are niche nerd stuff. Your average iPhone user doesn’t know what iOS is. Most Android users don’t know they’re Android users - “I have a Samsung” or, worse, “this is my iPhone” (it clearly is not).

The market for alternative mobile OSes is basically software developers and tech/privacy nerds. It’s not an enormous market and it’s full of customers that see through the usual profit-generating enshittification that plays well in the mass market. There’s not that many of us and we’re fickle bitches.

Laughs in Ubuntu Touch

Cries in Ubuntu Touch

I run Linux on my desktop and laptop at home and enjoy the tinkering. My phone on the other hand should just work and I should not have toput any thought and effort into it.

Most people just want their phone to work. iPhones are as popular as they are because they restrict options, not open things up.

Hardware drivers is a big problem in the mobile market. Reverse engineering drivers for every possible piece of hardware is too much work. We really need hardware manufacturers to want to open source their drivers so that open source OSes can work on a broad range of hardware.

Because Google rigged the system in their favor.

I think it's because of the lack of native linux mobile apps (relative to iOS and Android). And it's a catch 22: people won't adopt a linux mobile OS if there aren't many good native apps, which in turns doesn't make it attractive for devs to make apps for linux.

Because people buy consumer electronics to use for their intended purpose and not for tinkering. Look around your home. Your clothes could fit better, your couch could be comfier, your locks could be more secure, your coffee brewer could make better coffee. Most anything from could be improved by taking it apart and redoing it. Why are you not?

Average people need their phone service to work...

I tried using LineageOS on a motorola phone and I get zero data...

So... Yeah.... I doubt the average person has time for troubleshooting this shit...

Also those phones require specific devices, you cant just flash random linux into your current phone.

Now look up "carrier whitelisting"

so yeah... good luck trying to get a carrier to allow you to use an "unapproved" device on their network...

Really it's a question of history. When computers first started getting popular in the 90s, it wasn't standard for them to be sold with an operating system. You had to buy that on top - or use Linux, and even for that you generally ordered floppies, since the internet was just emerging back then. Just look at some of the old Windows ads - there's no talk about an OS shipped with your computer, you're supposed to order floppies and then install it. Windows wasn't the de facto standard, yet, either, so hardware companies needed a way to ensure that their customers were able to install whichever OS they wanted to. So they created standards, and those standards live onto this day, providing Linux with a comparatively simple platform to operate on.

Smartphones only started becoming a thing in the early 2000's. And by then, it was normal for a computer to be shipped with an operating system, and people had become used to just sticking with what their computer came with. Add to that that smartphones were not built on x86 chips (which is still what powers the vast majority of desktops and laptops), so new operating systems had to be built anyway, so there was not much of any incentive to create some universal standard that can be used by other operating systems. In the meantime, Apple has shown how lucrative it can be to completely lock your customers on your platform, and Google has taken note and followed suit. So now, it's not just "can the OS run on my device" (which is enough of a clusterfuck in and of itself) and "will the apps I need run on this OS", but "will the apps I need refuse to run because my phone doesn't 100% look like Apple or Google want it to".

Yes, it's pretty frustrating. If not infuriating.

1. The OS needs to support X device the person is using
2. People need to know how to flash the OS(Graphene has made this SO easy, but still)
3. People have to want to flash a different OS

I remember flashing Android on my HTC HD2 20 years ago. I'm a super geek for this stuff. I've been wanting to flash Graphene on my pixel but...I need my phone every day. I can't have a phone out of commission to try and find a way to install all the apps I need. With Graphene I can resort to just installing the Play Store but...I'd rather not use the Play Store at all if I'm already de-Google'ing.

I'd love to have a Linux phone, not android, but I haven't seen a solid alternative yet. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Because Google pays everyone to remain a monopoly. The trick is that they have to make more selling your data to a third party. Thus enshitification.

Theres a metric ton of Linux devices that are handhelds (like retrogames, music players, etc...etc...). But phones are a special beast.

The drivers are almost ALWAYS binary blobs. If you are a dev and want to make your own OS its not too hard to get the OS on the device...but calls and other such functionalities are difficult without at least some help from the hardware manufacturer. Thats one of the reasons theres a lot of OSes that support phones like the fairphone, because of their open specs.

Ive been part of some Linux ports of tablets and they have a lot of the same parts. Its the special hardware that almost always gets you. Most are just not worth the trouble. Def when you can get a really cheap EXP32 and make an ebook reader. Or a small raspberry pi and make a retro game console. Or make a VERY cheap VOIP phone with a couple of parts like the PaxoPhone. But most people use their phones as the everything device. And if you are not a multi-billion company, its hard to get manufacturers to listen to you.

I was looking forward to getting Ubuntu touch on my phone, I hunted down a decent phone within my price range and installed it on to it. I knew straight away I didn't like it.

But, hopefully they'll keep moving forward with it, and I'll look at it again in the future. I love the idea of it, it just wasn't for me in its current form back then.

Which of those are daily drive-able? I suspect the answer to that also answers your question.

Inertia.

I don't know of any that iterated on usability enough times to compete with Android. It's also very hard to get power management right on the weird proprietary hardware that almost all phones use. We're in a crap situation because the modern worldwide web demands a huge and ever-increasing amount of compute power from the browser, so phones always have to use bleeding edge hardware to get decent battery runtime.

I think of giving up and switching to a small laptop, but then it's a backpack device instead of pocket sized.