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The Fairphone 5 released, is the sleekest repairable phone yet
(www.androidpolice.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Android
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No good for free software OSes then :-(
Can you elaborate on why? Like, I'm not surprised, I just am not involved in this space enough to know why.
Proprietary drivers/firmware. Basically makes it impossible/very hard to develop custom ROMs/operating systems (the lack of openness makes it super hard to extend/modify/verify the software running on these chips).
The drivers are well separated via HAL so you can absolutely make custom ROMs/OSes without changing those. The Android OS has way more code above the HAL layer than below. You can't however arbitrarily update the Linux kernel, modify the drivers or fix security issues found, beyond the security support window provided by Qualcomm.
So you can't make free software OSes.
Are there any better alternatives? The only ones I'm aware of off the top of my head would be Samsung's Exynos, Kirin, and MediaTek. From the little experience I have in the space it always struck me as Qualcomm being the least shitty option, not necessarily the best.
Rockchip RK3399(S) is the best you can get in terms of freedom. The rest are much of a muchness.
I am so new to this so bear with me. There is Lineage OS for fairphone 4 - does this mean there won't be FOSS ROMs available for the fairphone 5?
What do you mean?
Lineage OS, graphene, caylx, yk the stuff you jailbreak a phone for. People are saying this can run Ubuntu touch, and yet other people are saying this will be troublesome for the Android ROM community to develop for. Bear with me, I'm new to the concept and certainly might be wrong about something.
No, it does not mean any of the projects you mentioned will be unavailable. None of those projects are free software OSes.
What would be a good phone for free software OSes?
There are no good phones due to the way the SoC and modem manufacturers work. The best phones, like the PinePhone or PinePhone Pro, are simply the least bad.
The processer has Linux support though. Isn't it more the device drivers that are the problem?
If thie phone gets mainline linux support I wil buy it in a heartbeat.
By the way. It does already have an entry on the postmarketos wiki https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Fairphone_5_(fairphone-fp5)
PostmarketOS isn't a free software OS.
I said it's no good for free software OSes, I didn't mention Linux. I'm not sure what you think it means for Linux to support a processor or why you think that's relevant. Linux can be and often is used with non-free OSes.
Fairphones have always used Qualcomm SOCs, there's nothing new here. I don't understand the fuss here if I'm being honest.