• KillingTimeItself
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    -19 months ago

    hot take: No.

    Linux phones just need good linux software support. And then the linux user base will switch over, and everyone who isn’t simply won’t use it.

    I actually genuinely do not want android developers on linux. I refuse to pay for a launcher. My entire workstation OS is developed by volunteers. Genuinely every single android app i have ever interacted with has pretty much exclusively disappointed me. It’s just a bad ecosystem.

    In the same way that the linux community doesn’t need the developers of every application ever on it to thrive amongst itself, the linux phone doesnt need android developers to develop apps for it. It just needs better support for linux applications that already exist.

    • @[email protected]
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      9 months ago

      The only reason I will disagree: there’s already a major FOSS ecosystem on Android. There are tons of high quality free apps that aren’t FOSS

      Linux isnt even that popular on desktop, my point is that people will not move if their pre established software use case is not avaliable. I won’t. I know many people who won’t.

      And if there aren’t users, there won’t be people making quality software to cover wide variety of usecases and get support, if there isn’t quality software that covers a wide variety of use cases and get support there won’t be users. You need to start somewhere, it’s why the windows phone failed. No devs, so no users, and because no users, no devs.

      • KillingTimeItself
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        19 months ago

        I still don’t see your point. You’re assuming that android users will want to use a linux phone in the first place. They don’t and they wont. And that’s fine.

        The only market that the linux phone has to cater to in order to develop successfully is the existing linux desktop market. The vast majority of those people are likely to want and use a linux phone. Which will actually improve the phone. And possibly even in the future bring in android developers and apps.

        I don’t understand why you’re fixing on it growing, it’s just a hardware market, system76 already exists, pine already exists, linux users already exist. We exist as a bubble in a larger space and that’s ok. That’s the beauty of the unix/linux philosophy.

        Realistically this is like releasing a 10,000 dollar workstation/server cpu and then having the general public complain about it being inaccessible, even though it literally wasn’t meant for them.

      • KillingTimeItself
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        9 months ago

        I’m sure there’s a lot of good apps. I’ve used a few good ones, but it’s objectively worse than software on linux.

        File browsers have almost universally just been awful. Horrid, and almost completely unusable. I’ve tried more than should exist really.

        There are other questionable apps, which exist, do what they claim to do perfectly well, but have no utility for anything particularly useful. Even stuff like jerboa is just generally lacking in features. That is also an experience on linux so not really a huge complaint, but i really genuinely don’t see why people like android so much.