These include Sailfish OS, postmarketOS, Ubuntu Touch, Mobian, etc. They never gained a significant market share/adoption.
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 and when it does, by the time you reach full functionality, the phone is already outdated.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.
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.
Ecelent explanation. This is my biggest issue with Fair Phone actually. They didn’t make a proper ecosystem where the parts are interchangeable between models. They made the production more fair and repairable which, dont get me wrong, is a really good thing, but I really wish they be more like framework where a main board from the newest 13 inch laptop still fits in the old chassis from many years ago, and the hardware follows standards so they can be easily interchanged.
That’s my biggest issue with Fairphone and I’m typing this comment on one.
The way it feels to me is that Framework actually cares about the principles it espouses at its core which is reflected in their design decisions, whereas Fairphone merely decided to target an underserved niche within the context of capitalism.
Don’t get me wrong, Framework has their own issues, and I’m well aware of the problems that phone manufacturers face when it comes to hardware not being as interchangeable, but FP really hasn’t done anything on the hardware side to make uplifting a current phone viable.
Something like keeping the same battery form factor so a higher energy density chemistry for the newer generation could be used on an older generation for example.
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.
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 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.
That and an actively hostile hardware environment to open source dev in the aarch world.
OS’ on x86 are also a nerdy niche, yet Linux numbers are growing by the day, even seeing large vendors moving to first part support. None of this is allowed to exist in the mobile market exclusively for the profit margins of a few companies.
Side note imagine how cool it would be in a world without that enshitification, old phones could be recycled for 90% of pi projects, with better specs than the most expensive pi.
I worked at “Big Box Orange Counter Retail” for many years. Us nerds, us who actively choose linux, know how to build computers, hell even know what a terminal is, are the vast minority. I installed drivers for people. I uninstalled malware. I upgraded ram. All normal. What’s also normal? Showing them how to log into their email. Showing them how to open an application. Showing them how to use a file browser. This is all mystical shit to them. Us at black tie computer repair in big box were made fun of by computer nerds because “har har just install linux”, “har har why pay them 130 dollars just do it yourself”. Bruh, the vast majority of people don’t know what a browser is.
It can feel like the opposite. Lemmy and Mastodon are heavily tech related, Reddit was too, and we build ourselves into echo chambers where we assume everyone has a specific level, but we are a teeny tiny fraction.
Linux was ~1% of the Steam survey for decades. That’s 1% of PC gamers, PC users who have Steam installed. It was a tiny fraction of a fraction. We’re now at 5%, which is great, but that’s still a tiny fraction of total users across all desktops. On top of that, a huge chunk is thanks to Valve for pre-installing a linux distro and going with that as the default. Us who installed Linux as a primary PC and game on it are a very tiny percentage.
Then, to add mobile operating systems into the mix, the percentage is even smaller. We are a part of a part of a percent on mobile. It’s why things like locking down Android doesn’t concern them. They know we’ll switch, they don’t care. We’re an edge case to them, a rounding error. What they can say is that 99.999% of people are now locked in.
Normies don’t even know what clipboard is. I was gobsmacked I don’t even know how to explain it as plainly as possible.
But also found out apparently MacOS doesn’t have a clipboard? At least when I was frantically searching online when someone said they copies something earlier and want to paste and give me to it
Laughs in Ubuntu Touch
Cries in Ubuntu Touch
Fuck Canonical.
Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Because Google rigged the system in their favor.
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.
We don’t need to want them to. They will need to be forced into it.
(Which most don’t want, because they make money by selling your data)
Most people just want their phone to work. iPhones are as popular as they are because they restrict options, not open things up.
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.
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?
Before I learned how to solve rubik’s cubes, I just took them apart and re assembled them
xD
You could do that with electronics…
Its $1000 lego 👀
3 whole Lego sets of LEGO!
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.
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…
I’ve got a Motorola edge 30 works great with lineage is on it , encounder no problems during 8 months of use , located Belgium
I tried using LineageOS on a motorola phone and I get zero data…
This happened to me when i switched too. I had to do a bunch of troubleshooting and eventually had to open a support case with my carrier, which got escalated to tier 3 before someone knew what was wrong.
I had to manually enter the APN settings for my network because the ones it pulled when it checked in were completely wrong.
No normal person is going to fuck around enough to get that to work. They’ll just upgrade their device to whatever the latest model is.
Oh, even with the factory operating system apn settings are something that I’ve needed to configure before just to “bring my own phone” to a carrier… which yeah, is also not something the average user does. Most just walk into the carrier store and go “that one please 👉”.
Oh wow maybe I just had more luck in my internet searches, but I found the manual APN input as a solution a long time ago on like XDA forums I wanna say?
I think part of my problem there was I was on a small, then-independant carrier, so that information was not published anywhere publicly.
The carrier has since been bought up by one of the big 3 here and at that point documentation got a lot better, but all the perks they had evaporated.
