It seems like the FOSS community is continuing to grow, and FOSS apps keep getting better (Immich reallh blew my mind recently), which is a big win 😎 but there are still many apps I use that I would kill for an open source alternative. I am curious what you guys think? Are there any apps you’d love alternatives for?
My phone firmware
god i fucking hate android, i await the day linux on mobile actually functions with great anticipation.
I’ve been so excited anytime I see updates from gnome-mobile. It’s looks much cleaner than phosh
i’m just waiting until someone inevitably ports something like i3wm or sway over and it’s actually pretty usable. That’s all i need to be happy in life.
That was 2004. They made a Linux phone not was troll tech or something.
No one bought it.
Android may be ‘meh’ to you. I like it, but only because it’s good enough for what I need. Fair. But it’s got something the green Linux phone never had: massive presence.
Droid is a bad Linux with a huge ecosystem, and that’s why this may be the best we can hope for. We could have a perfect phone, but without that massive presence to get the apps and the dedicated devs, anything with less presence will suffer.
Think about it. It’s a sad fact, but you know it’s a fact.
That’s like how Xz didn’t get trojanned because it was a nothing project: it is a crucial part of everything. It lost its presence and when the sole Dev was deep in burnout he was hoodwinked. Ya need the eyeballs, and that’s a popularity game for foss.
My 2c.
unsure what you’re trying to say, but they make linux phones now, people do buy them, not very many. But for me, a linux user, it’s exactly what i want.
IDK where you got me “thinking android was meh” It’s fucking awful. I said as much. I don’t understand why people keep bringing up market saturation like linux isn’t an enthusiast OS to begin with. It doesn’t need it, perhaps some day it’ll grow beyond that. But for the time being, there is no need for it to do so. It works perfectly fine as is. The only issue right now is app support, and UI compat.
Linux already has the apps you would need, all you need to do is port them, or make a fork. Most apps these days can be used on a web browser, which solves like 90% of everything significant. Literally just build it with arm compat and give it a mobile UI.
no idea what you’re trying to say about XZ, it got backdoored most likely as a result of state actors, and like you said, the dev being burnt out. That’s just part of the game when it comes to open source, unfortunately for that team that was working on it. That’s going to be a highly scrutinized path of action going forward, and much more difficult. Also it never lost it’s presence? That’s literally WHY it was backdoored. It was a prime target for being infiltrated due to basically every linux distro using XZ on a fundamental level, and basically every machine shipping it.