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Posts
2
Comments
185
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • Debian is GNU/Linux and that's what almost always people mean when they say Linux. Android is not GNU/Linux and doesn't even use the mainline Linux kernel - just some old, heavily modified version.

    Mobian or Manjaro ARM on the other hand are GNU/Linux distributions. They run the same software that you can run on your desktop distro.

  • I bought the keyboard addon with the extra battery and that has increased my og PinePhone's battery life a lot. So maybe give that a try. The downside is that it makes the phone pretty big and it might not always fit in your pocket. But it might be useful while traveling for example.

    For PinePhone Pro there is also some proprietary firmware, which is supposed to help. Are you using that? I probably wouldn't want to install it, but it's supposed to increase the battery life to that of the original PinePhone.

  • A lot has changed in 2 years. But the camera on the original PinePhone will always be bad, since it's a 5 megapixel camera. For that reason nobody has even bothered to implement video recording, but there are scripts, which will let you do that.

  • Potentially a proton-style layer could really ease transition, like on the steamdeck

    But if people still use proprietary software, then what's the point? Steam OS is a proprietary operating system. Is that really what we want?

  • GNU/Linux is not aimed at people who want the most features. It's made for people who value freedom above everything else.

    I would love to see something like Proton but for .apks instead of Windows executables. If it were as easy to install and run android apps on a mobile Linux OS as it is now to install and play Windows games on Linux, we would be in a great place to see a proper Linux phone.

    You mean Waydroid? I've read that it works pretty well.

  • The goal of GNU/Linux is not to make it possible to run proprietary apps (but if you really need to run Android apps you can use Waydroid). It's to create a fully libre operating system that people can use.

  • I'm optimistic about the apps and desktop environments. We have made huge progress. But the problem is the hardware support. It seems that there are very few ARM SoCs, which work well with the mainline Linux kernel. So PinePhone uses a 2010 SoC and PinePhone Pro a 2016 SoC. And after all that time and despite community's efforts to upstream everything, the mainline support is still not complete and we still use custom kernels.

    https://blog.mobian.org/posts/2023/09/30/paperweight-dilemma/

  • I think they use some very old and heavily modified version of the Linux kernel, so it's not the same Linux kernel we use on desktop. Then each phone manufacturer adds custom patches on top to support their hardware. GNU/Linux phones also require a custom kernel, but the community is working on upstreaming those patches, so that they can run mainline kernel some day (PinePhone Pro and Librem 5 probably already can now, but some stuff might not work).

    Yeah, using the name Linux for both the kernel and the operating system makes no sense and it's super confusing. When people say Linux when talking about the operating system, they almost always mean GNU/Linux (like Linux Mint, Arch Linux, etc). But then there is Alpine Linux, which isn't GNU/Linux and that makes things even more confusing. If I didn't know what Alpine Linux or Arch Linux was (and had no knowledge of distro names), based on their name I would assume they are some kind of fork of the Linux kernel. Arch Linux should have really been called Arch GNU/Linux and Alpine Linux should have just been called Alpine OS.