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Tell me more about the phone! This has taken so long and I am ready to migrate to an open phone even if it's only for texting at this point.
Screw this OS monopoly by Apple and Alphabet.
Open to simple solutions here. I have a Pixel 4a 5g and iPhone 12 atm.
This is the original article
https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-turns-forty-with-a-new-president-and-a-new-campaign
I've got a Google Pixel 3a with postmarketOS installed on it right now for testing, and it really is a two-pronged issue with both hardware and software. Because it's an older phone the battery drains within a few hours, nowhere close to all-day use. Because most of the software is designed for the desktop certain things are just impossible to use (the big pain point for me is Anki, but on the other hand it's impressive how many GTK apps conform very nicely to the screen). The keyboard still feels pretty rough.
Hopefully the FSF dipping their hat into the ring will help existing projects like this in a rising-tide-raises-all-ships sort of way. Would be a shame for them to put effort into a software stack that goes nowhere (GNU Hurd), and pour $$$ into a hardware project that doesn't make it to market or doesn't do its job better than a cracked smartphone from 5+ years ago.
I think it is possible to switch to it now and have things mostly work out for you, but it will make your life harder. I remember switching to Ubuntu around 2010 and it's almost to that level of experience. You'll be giving up a lot, apps you "need" won't work, but it's at the point where it is a complete usable experience. For those that are willing to suffer for FOSS, I mean.
Damn. Software has existed 40 years now?
Not only that: it was big enough to get mad at 40 years ago already.
What a nice thing to do
Hopefully this will recruit projects that already have significant headstart, such as Pine64. Otherwise, it would merely be performative.
I salute the early adopters who will suffer all the inconveniences of startups so the wider public can enjoy a non-corporate phone in the future. o7
I'm looking forward to get one of these just to play around with it, and maybe making some custom stuff for it.
As soon as my current phone is paid off I am going to get this. No more fucking Spyware up the ass.
The project just launched and is a software-first project. We won't see a Libre Phone available for a while yet.
I hope they can pull this off because we really need this.
Oooh, I wonder if they're going to pursue a free phone based on Risc-V. It's a longshot but if they pull that off, it'd be like feeding two birds with one scone.
I really hope this is super based
Linux mobile phones are the fusion power of the FOSS world, always right around the corner.
All the pieces are there, but none of them work together smoothly enough to be functional for anybody except the most hardcore FOSS enthusiasts.
When Proton started, it was kind of a joke, killed the Steam Machine idea in large part because the game compatibility was so limited. A decade later, we have a multi billion dollar handheld PC market lead by the Steam Deck, a Linux handheld that can play tens of thousands of Windows games without issue, in some cases with better performance than their native platform.
So it's certainly possible for things to completely change, but we need a big player or consortium of players to unite with a shared goal of getting a Linux Phone to the state where it's genuinely able to replace a traditional Android or Apple phone.
I'm very cautiously optimistic, I think it would come together much faster than Proton did for Linux gaming, but again, there needs to be a really heavy push into a singular device to start off. Like how the Steam Deck was, it allowed devs to have a singular platform to target for compatibility. Then, as the platform matures, competitors & innovators can enter the market and expand options, like how now there are multiple distros with builds for handhelds, like Bazzite, Nobara, and CachyOS.
Bazzite sounds like it would be a good start for the OS, though, and that exists now.
I would love if Valve shipped and contributed to Plasma Mobile and Plasma Bigscreen alongside the existing Plasma Desktop. Or even if more Steam Deck users installed it so that it would get more interest.
I want a Linux phone so bad that I refuse to think about what it would be like because i'd be upset afterwards. 
I have an original PinePhone. The phone itself is horribly outdated and slow, but the software itself (Phosh+Gnome) is suprisingly okay. Given a good enough phone (as in hardware) I can see myself actually using it and not being annoyed more than I was with early Androids.
Unfortunately what I understand is that FSFE doesn't intend to do hardware, only software platform, so I wonder whether they'll come up with anything interesting.
Running PostmarketOS on hardware such as the Oneplus 6T (which is 8 years old now) shows that you could truly have dog shit cheap hardware for this. As long as you have decent driver support for it.
Just because it's a libre phone, doesn't mean it's necessarily a linux phone. Or at least any more so than Android is a linux phone because it uses a heavily modified (almost unrecognizable) linux kernel.
There's nothing in the article that says they're just going to use a mainline linux kernel and throw a touch optimized version of some existing desktop on it (ubuntu touch, etc...)
Heck, they could be meaning that they're planning on making their own heavily modified kernel for their very own OS so as to skip all of the trouble that trying to make mainline linux into a handheld device has been so far. (similar to I believe how SailfishOS is doing it)
Finally, a GNU/Hurd phone! /s
Does anyone claim so? And does it matter much outside of (potentially) app support?
Why couldn't they just use usual Linux for that? Why a modified kernel? Is Linux as is not suitable for a phone?
Can't they just, idk, make a distro? Maybe from scratch? Pop!_OS is working on COSMIC. Can't they have their Linux-based OS, perhaps with its own things as needed, such as a phone-optimised DE? Or whatever the phone equivalent of a DESKTOP environment would be. A Mobile Environment, perhaps
If my laptop had touch screen with no other method of input built in, and were way smaller, could it not run Linux? Or is that different altogether?
Linux by design gives the user enough rope to hang themselves with.
And that's certainly not a problem when dealing with tech enthusiasts who know what, when and where to touch to avoid messing things up. But when you're dealing with getting a phone into the hands of ordinary people, that isn't going to fly because all of those people will at some point start mucking around inside and then expect tech support when they mess up.
For mainstream adoption, the linux kernel must and the desktop environment must be at least somewhat locked down.
We have immutable distributions already, that is something that isn't a problem. It's replacing those pesky proprietary blobs used to talk to the hardware that is a headache.
Between capabilities, namespaces, control groups, mandatory access control (AppArmor etc) and other mechanisms, I think there are plenty of ways to reduce user access to any part of the system.
Too many bits of a smartphone are proprietary hardware without open drivers.
My hopes and my expectations could not be more at odds with each other, and the only thing I know for sure is that one of them will be smashed.