from Hacker News

219 days of postmarketOS

by ajr0 on 1/22/18, 3:00 PM with 110 comments

  • by AdmiralAsshat on 1/22/18, 5:14 PM

    The frustrating part about this is that it's getting more difficult to flash ROMs onto most phones, not easier. For instance, all Samsung Galaxy flagships since the S6 have a locked bootloader. If you have the US-based Snapdragon models, it's nearly impossible to unlock them and load custom ROMs. And if you somehow do, Samsung caps your battery at 80% or so.

    There are notable exceptions. The OnePlus phones are easy to flash, as are Sony Experia models. But for the average person just looking to get a few more years out of their device, the OEMs have made it very clear how much they resent you keeping your phone beyond the two year mark.

  • by TuringTest on 1/22/18, 4:03 PM

    May this be the way open source arrives to the masses? As a solution against planned obsolescence?

    If people gets used to giving their old devices a second life by lending their old devices to a fellow geek, to install this "weird app" that allows them to keep using it, that could become huge exposure for FLOSS operating systems.

  • by badsectoracula on 1/22/18, 7:33 PM

    I have a couple unused phones lying around doing nothing. One is cheap "GoClever" phone i bought a few years ago and had it die or something some years ago (it is most likely fixable, but my mother had a phone she didn't want anymore due to upgrading and i got hers instead) and another is the ill-fated ZTE Open with Firefox OS which i bought the instant it was available (through ebay because nobody local would have it available).

    What i'd really love to do is to replace the entire OS from the ZTE Open one with a barebones Linux, and X server (no Wayland) and a few custom apps to use for music playback, note taking, etc. It was on my mind since i actually got my hands on it and saw how an awful idea was to have an OS that is built around "web applications" (i already knew it, i just hoped it wouldn't be too bad and wanted it for the novelty of having a phone with the Firefox logo :-P). The hardware is theoretically more powerful than the PC i had back when i played Quake 2 in full software rendering mode, yet it was barely usable due to everything being slow (i've actually lost calls because the UI was frozen).

    I see from the hardware list that some related devices seem to be supported so at some point i'd like to try doing that. It is more for a "here is how to actually make use of hardware resources without sucking" personal statement than something i really need (my 1st gen iPod Touch still works fine after all), so it might take a while for me to bother trying :-P.

  • by GranPC on 1/22/18, 3:39 PM

  • by floatboth on 1/22/18, 5:40 PM

    Nice to see open GPU drivers freedreno and etnaviv being able to run complete desktop environments. Looks like lima might join the party too, eventually https://github.com/yuq/mesa-lima/issues/29

  • by _wmd on 1/22/18, 4:03 PM

    Is there good documentation anywhere regarding the minimum set of blobs (kernel, HAL, modem, display etc drivers) necessary to gut an Android device back to its bare shell? I love these alternative OS projects, but really I think a lot of that effort may be misspent for non-purists like myself. Maybe sometime after a simple, basic UI and apps are running on the phone, then a complex project like Microsoft's Android app sandboxing could be attempted

    Would love there to be something that provided just enough glue code between HAL and, say, Qt, alongside a bunch of shell scripts for gutting images of common handsets. But getting there myself, I've really little clue about this stuff, but I'm sure there is tribal knowledge buried all over the forums the Android dev community use

  • by Abishek_Muthian on 1/23/18, 2:27 AM

    [Off-topic]

    Most manufactures when they had small consumer base were developer friendly, it is when they gain significant market they stop being one.

    I can think of few technical reasons as well,

    1. To sustain competition they have build their IP (e.g camera blob, Personal Assistant) .

    2. Security as a commodity, especially for enterprise customers.

    OnePlus has deep relations with XDA community, Oppo's Find series phone was actively contributed and If I'm right; the mods got free devices then. Oxygen OS team was by itself Paranoid Android team.

    OnePlus devices could be the best 'modder' friendly phone right now, the question is how long they would be able to keep it that way.

  • by ocdtrekkie on 1/22/18, 3:46 PM

    Really cool to see Glass hit this list, I'd love to break mine out again if I had a way to use it without Google tracking.

    The thing I recently got to play with wearable computing is a Vufine+ and an Intel Compute Stick, both of which can be powered by a regular external phone battery.

  • by Fragoel2 on 1/22/18, 4:16 PM

    Project is really cool and I am looking forward to it. Still, rather than make 10 different desktop environments run, wouldn't be better to implement critical features that are currently missing (i.e. calls)?

  • by rsync on 1/22/18, 4:38 PM

    I was interested in the list of compatible devices and I saw, of course, Android based phones and Nokia Nxxx series, etc.

    Why not Apple iphones ? Why don't I ever see proof of concept boot loaders or linux init on an iphone ?

    I understand they only run signed boot loaders / kernels / etc., but that was also true of the PS3 and that was broken wide open some years back ...

    Has, truly, nobody gotten an alternative OS to boot on any of the 8+ generations of iphone ?

  • by zeveb on 1/22/18, 3:47 PM

    Argh, the site specifies its own background colour but not its own foreground colour, making it unreadable with a default dark theme.

  • by breakingcups on 1/22/18, 3:53 PM

    This is such a cool project. I'm looking forward to trying this on my old i9300, which is in the list of supported devices.

  • by peatmoss on 1/22/18, 4:20 PM

    Tangentially related: I keep wondering what to do with old Apple devices. I have an old 3rd gen iPad that is intolerably slow, but has such a nice form factor and screen that I hate to get rid of it.

    If someone made a swap-out logic board to Android-ify these things, I suspect there’s still got to be tons of them laying around.

  • by greenhouse_gas on 1/22/18, 8:30 PM

    Does postmarketOS use android-based binary blobs, and what does it have over such projects as Google-Free LineageOS (as in, if you don't flash opengapps) or Replicant?

  • by znpy on 1/22/18, 5:49 PM

    I would even subscribe a recurring donation via patreon or something similar if only they at least promised to get calls working in at least one model.

  • by leeoniya on 1/22/18, 4:19 PM

    > Sony Xperia Z1 (sony-honami) (fourth below)

    > Sony Xperia Z3 Compact (sony-aries)

    looking forward to trying this one day on my Sony Z5 Compact (sony-suzuran)

  • by XorNot on 1/22/18, 10:49 PM

    I love this project. A genuine practical option for open source on mobile is something we desperately need.

  • by miguelrochefort on 1/22/18, 7:31 PM

    Why do all of these OSes have to be so ugly?

    It's a major turn off.

  • by rnotarog on 1/22/18, 3:40 PM

    Dead link?