Yes. I mean for most stuff we probably don’t need a complicated debate on definitions. I think we could do it for most desktop apps without further questions, like a browser, instant messenger, camera app, video editor, games, 3d printer slicer… They could all just do it and also not get permissions on the entire home directory right away. And we also have the groundworks for it. Linux has cgroups, thread isolation… permissions to use the webcam. There’s just the stuff in the middle missing and then we can’t build on any programming interfaces with the desktop apps.
hendrik
A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.
I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.
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Cake day: August 21st, 2021
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Did it solve these issues with delivering Matrix instant messenger notifications and emails right away? And what’s the internet browsing and occasional social media doomscrolling experience? I don’t think the Librem5 hardware is substantially faster than my Pinephone? So I suppose it’s similar to mine with a Firefox which is rudimentarily optimized for touch but then the 3GB of RAM and slow processor make it somewhat not nice to use? Can you listen to a podcast via standard bluetooth headphones and there’s still some juice in the battery after 90mins? I’d love to try it. Especially if they solved those annoying issues. But seems the PureOS Pinephone ports have all been abandoned a few years ago…
Yes, good job at explaining the app lifecycle. I brushed over it because I had no idea how to phrase it in a concise way. And it’s really the million papercuts that stopped me from using the Pinephone. I tried.
Connected standby is already somewhat possible […]
Yes, it’s a very crude way, though. In practice I never got the messages from my wife to bring milk on my way home. I’d read them a few hours later in the evening after unlocking and tinkering with the device. What worked well is tell people to send SMS or call, because that reliably wakes up the device. But then people forgot they were supposed to communicate with me like in the 1990s.
[…] sandboxing and permissions figured out pretty well with Flatpak […]
We do. That’s how some modern distros like Fedora Silverblue work. But then it’s somewhat problematic with phones. These packages are supposed to come directly from the various upstream projects. And then the phone distros can’t patch them any more to deal with the peculiarities with the inconsistent ecosystem. So we’d either need to have a good platform first and all agree on it, or repackage everything in a way unalike how Flatpak is done today. And then it fills up storage fast with all the runtimes and dependencies and a phone has limited storage available.
I think hardware wise, that leads us to re-invent the laptop. Not a phone by any means. We need a large SSD for all the Flatpaks, lots of RAM to keep the software running in the background and a large battery stapled to it because none of it is energy-efficient enough.
It ain’t easy… I think we’re making (slow) progress, though.
Phone quality on my Pinephone is nice except when it isn’t. We have a largely Free Software baseband running on the modem. You can tell it to run a high samplerate and it does VoIP and 4G. On the flipside it doesn’t always work and there were issues with additional stuff like echo cancellation, which then takes away from the experience. Openmoko was great as well. I think it was so very open, people could do silly things with the phone network. But then it’s old tech by now and the 2G (GSM) phone network is obsolete and they turned off the cell towers in most areas by now. And I think the software on it didn’t really translate to the phone generations after that. Afaik the entire software stack didn’t carry over and we’re using different dialers, messengers, calendars etc now.
And the software side of it is the really annoying part. We’re missing so many components: Connected standby, an app lifecycle management, maybe sandboxing and a detailed, user-facing permission system. And then we need to go ahead and rewrite all the important Linux software to use these (not yet existing) interfaces.
I own a Pinephone, and I feel the Linux phone is within reach since the Nokia 900 (and its predecessors) and that was in 2009, so 16 years now. I believe any effort is very welcome, though. We badly need a good and free operating systems for this important device we all carry around and use hundreds of times each day.
Lower Decks is awesome. That and The Orville were some of my favourite “Star Trek” moments in modern times.
By the way, there’s a bit of a story arc going on at the beginning of Discovery and some things don’t make sense until that gets revealed later on. The show changes some of the tone and atmosphere over time with new seasons. But if you don’t like it, maybe it’s just not for you. It’s not classic Star Trek for several reasons.