Android/Linux Dual Boot

[toastal]

This will become increasingly important as Google has boiled the frog too fast while trying to force its new store policies + banning sideloading; however, all of the pieces are now in place for them to try again in a year or 2, which history shows us they will. It’s certainly time to start toying with Linux phones if you haven’t already. This year I picked up an Xperia 10 to flash Sailfish OS on—which has rough edges (many of the hardware issues should be fixed in the next release), but Android App support bridges some of the gaps in application support.

[24t]

> sideloading

It's called installing. Language matters and I see no reason to concede this point in Google's favour.

[tapia]

I just bought a second Fairphone 4 just to play a bit with pmOS. I'm really surprised by the state it is. It's not fully usable as a daily driver yet, but with some work it can get there. Waydroid works also pretty good. Of course, the major problem are banking apps and similar. I hope that some progress can be done in this direction. And, who needs working audio, if you can have python and git in your phone!? :P

[palata]

What I never get is: why not prepare to fork AOSP? I like the security model of AOSP :-).

[gwbas1c]

> I picked up an Xperia

I had an Xperia for awhile. I liked it while it was new, but after a year the back started peeling off.

Pretty lousy for a phone that was supposed to be waterproof. At that point I realized that the Japanese change out their phones every 6-12 months, thus Sony didn't realize that the market demands much longer reliability in a smartphone.

[ianso]

I think this stuff is super important, simply because there is a ton of stuff we can't do using our phones today.

Think mesh networking, resilient ad-hoc application clustering, non-Internet P2P, like Freifunk but everywhere. We shouldn't have to depend on Google or any of the big tech companies for anything except the hardware.

That would offer much more freedom. There are also contexts where this kind of thing could also enable life-saving applications. And unlike todays Internet where a database query in Cloudflare or a DNS bug in es-east-1 can disrupt half the services we use, this kind of technology really could withstand major attacks on infrastructure hubs, like the Internet was originally designed to do.

[dlcarrier]

Twenty years ago, if you told me that by today we'd have smart phones with eight or more cores, each outperforming an average desktop computer of the time, with capacitive OLED touch screens, on a cellular network with hundreds of megabits of bandwidth, I'd find it believable, because that's where technology was headed at the time.

If you said that they'd effectively all be running either a port of OS X or a Linux distribution with a non-GNU but open source userspace, I'd consider that a somewhat unexpected success of open-source software. I would not at all expect that it would be as locked down as video game console.

The more time passes, the less I use my phone for, and the more likely I am to whip out my laptop to accomplish something, like it's 2005.

[ysnp]

>Think mesh networking, resilient ad-hoc application clustering, non-Internet P2P, like Freifunk but everywhere.

(if dumbed down) What's are the gaps in features and functionality between what you're describing and what might be achievable today (given enough software glue) with an SDR transceiver and something like Reticulum [1] on an Android?

[jimangel2001]

I installed PmOS on my old Xiaomi redmi note 9 with KDE Plasma Desktop. It works remarkably well, with the exception of sound. I am using it as a full Linux PC when I am on the go with my large power bank and a full sized folding keyboard/track pad.

For my use case it's beyond great, albeit the small screen and the aarch architecture I can develop small projects as if I was on my PC.

My current phone OP13r doesn't is supported yet by PmOS, when someone does it Im gonna try to install it on one of the slots.

[dotancohen]

The wiki has instructions for the N900! Not everything works, but it appears to be a work in progress.

[hexagonwin]

For the N900, Maemo Leste <https://maemo-leste.github.io/> would be a good choice, if not even better.

[Scene_Cast2]

My biggest worry is that it's harder and harder to find a phone with an unlockable bootloader.

[greentea23]

Lineageos maintains a list and you can filter for devices with official bootloader unlock https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/. Buy only these devices to signal to these companies that this matters.

Noteably OnePlus 13 and Pixel 9a, both 2025 phones, can be unlocked.

[jojobas]

It's a shame phones didn't get anything similar to BIOS back in a day.

Imagine if every laptop manufacturer had not a couple of incompatible sensors, but a whole unique boot system only allowing you to boot a crippled version of Windows ME.

[mjg59]

There's a lot of UEFI in the phone ecosystem, it's not the BIOS later that's missing - it's the ACPI layer.

[nobody42]

pmOS device compatibility matrix: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

[tetris11]

If anyone wants a table for the testing devices (which are arguably still quite stable!), here's a table I put together by scraping the site a few months ago:

https://pastebin.com/Wq4fWyvj

If anyone wants the code for scraping and reformatting, let me know.

[erelong]

have thought about trying this but was wondering how hard is it to unbrick your phone if you screw this up

[metalman]

google/android/apple/microsft are fighting for there lives, as there is no reason for there continued existance all the important types of comunications can be hard coded into chips and operate free of any external OS, everything else is two way media, 95% of which can be handled on local networks what big tech is trying to build is something alien to human needs, false promises and enticements, faked up ideals bases on faked up images and outright lies served by monsterous AI data farms that look more and more like the set of "the matrix" the issue with that, is that it is essentialy empty and boring, demanding that the viewer suspends ANY judgement or discernment and further defend this completly impossible and artificial media creation as real. litteral zombies.

[intrasight]

In a competitive market, companies are fighting for their lives. The companies you listed are fighting to put up barriers to competition and are succeeding to a great measure.

[wiseowise]

But have you thought about shareholder value?