One would hope that enough things stay similar between devices that replacing, say, the galaxy s25 paves the way for a far easier implementation of the s26, particularly now that the market is stagnating a bit.

And I’m not knowledgeable about this at all, but intuitively I’d expect apple stuff to be much more customized than the average android phone - they’re famous for vertical integration and owning the end to end process.

>by the time you have it worked out, the phone is obsolete and very few people still use it.

If you work out a phone from 5 years ago, you're not that far off from a phone of today. Nobody designs it all from scratch, you mostly modify the old one. Getting the foundations going will take years - adapting the foundation to a different phone of the same series will only take months.

1) The article states they are focusing on the phone model that they guess will require the least work to become totally free. This may make the project useless, but it does give it some hope of finishing.

2) The hope is that the M2-M5 won’t be that different from the M1 models - after all, Apple doesn’t want to spend their money reinventing the wheel without compelling reason. I think that is less likely with phones from different manufacturers, though Android phones typically share a lot of single source components.

Yes it will take many years. This whole thing has already played out with FSF and Replicant. They ended up stuck working on a couple of ever aging devices as many new generations of devices were launched and all the technologies in smartphones evolved.

If people want open devices they should maybe better explore open hardware. Im not talking about devices, like Librem where the schematics are open but the chips, which are the parts which do all the work, are all closed, but rather devices with open silicon.

> The Apple Silicon macbooks seem a good example. The M1 came out about 5 years ago now and with a whole project and a lot of work later there is still limited hardware support. Having to put this effort in for all the models of phones seems massive.

Apple Silicon isn't a single SoC. They have support for the M1 and M2 lines across both Macbooks, the Mini, iMac and Studio.

It's the same thing with phones, isn't it? You're not starting over for each individual phone. First you get one device working which uses some popular chip, which is a large undertaking. But then all the other devices that use the same chip are nearly working and it's not a matter of starting over, it's a matter of mapping the couple of changes they made to the base design.

Meanwhile the chip designs themselves are incremental, so the 2026 device is really the 2023 device with a die shrink and a new feature.

I thought Asahi Linux had made some pretty sizeable progress, it was a very impressive project and labour of love and talent.

That's certainly not the case here, even if it's true sometimes. The duopoly is gradually tightening their grip on the customers' wallets. It's worth it at any stage to reverse their cash grab.

> because people are generally happy with their phones.

Maybe thats exactly why it can succeed now. The phone tech has plateud to the point where a 5 year old phone performs almost identically as a new one and this is when people can afford to experiment and take more risks.

Also its much easier for free software to catch up now as most problems are already solved and/or easy to copy.

I don't mind having a second phone, esp. if it's a foldable which can be a great reader and a small "linux in a pocket". There might even be some use-cases, for example I recently wanted to implement a type-c external GPS antenna, and found out that it's a pain on Android (done via "developer mode" hacks etc.), and impossible on iOS.

That being said, very low expectations on this project.

> people are generally happy with their phones

I'm not. Samsung treats my phone like dirt. I'd love to have some actual ownership of a device I spent $900 on last year.

I don't think my wife is happy with her iPhone either. She bought one of those little NFC fridge magnet things that locks your phone out of social media apps. She and I are dissatisfied in different ways, but there's a theme here.

The project will accomplish much if those who want it have better choices, even if they’re not perfect.

They don’t need to replace or even challenge Apple and Google for market adoption, just be there and be a viable alternative used by a noticeable minority of people.

Getting half as far as desktop linux would be a fantastic achievement.

> much because people are generally happy with their phones.

Talked to many iPhone owners this year? The 17 hardware has a bizarre choice of a camera button / pointless physical change, and IOS 26 is pretty much hated by everyone.

I use iPhone, and have happily for years but F if this isn’t the worst OS I can remember. The first downgrade really.

I think they will fail because they fundamentally don't understand the problem.

Android does not contain binary blobs because of some evil conspiracy against free software. If they could get away with it, the whole damn thing would be open source.

The problem is those blobs do things that interact with complex hardware for which only blobs are available. Even if you reverse engineer them, you are going to get sued into oblivion because of the patents you are going to need to infringe on to make functional replacements.

But even if you get a blessing from the component manufacturers, your new hippie binary blobs need to be certified to legally operate on cellular and wifi frequencies in most parts of the world. If you decide you don't like something and change it - as is the open source way - that new version with your modifications needs to be certified too. Carriers do not allow uncertified devices on their networks.

> The time is right, but I still don’t think this project can accomplish much because people are generally happy with their phones.

Is there survey data available on this? Anecdotally, everybody I know hates their phones. In fact, I think if you asked, "what's the biggest pain point in your life right now?" I think most people will point to their phones.

Why not used?

I'm kinda the opposite, I don't want to buy new any more. Currently rocking a 2nd hand Pixel 7a running GrapheneOS and loving it.

If battery life is the issue, that's fair enough. I've bought a couple of wireless charging docks that I spread around the places I frequently spend my time, so if it needs a boost I can charge her up just by plonking it on the dock. Most of the time, though, she makes it through the day from (maximum charge for battery longevity reasons) 80% down to 30%, maybe 25% or 20% if there's lots of interesting news in a day.

But I'm not a particularly heavy user and I don't game on it.

Not rich but is there a way to contribute specifically to this project? The donate button on the website does not work.

Genuinely curious: why can't you use GrapheneOS in Ukraine? Most Android apps work perfectly. In my case, the only ones that don't are the ones made by lazy developers who rely on location data that I deny. They claim to work without it, but obviously never tested.

If it's a government app, you can pressure the government in many more way than you can let's say a bank - and FSF has experience in that kind of pressure. I hope their technical initiative also comes with a parallel legal/policy initiative that tries to get governments to stop using things like attestation.

> As an EU citizen the biggest issue for me is that even if I bought a fairphone with grapheneOS, it might as well be a "dumb" phone. This is because all the apps to make our daily lives non-annoying require the Google Play or the Apple App store.

This is a common misconception I see around here, probably because people think Graphene is yet another custom rom like LineageOS, and haven't actually tried it for themselves.

GrapheneOS supports Google Play (it ships with an app that lets you install it in one click), it does NOT give you root access, and it goes through the extra effort of implementing the obscure security features that banking apps require. I won't say 100%, but maybe 99% of apps on Google Play will work on Graphene, including banking apps. This compatibility, along with the added security and privacy features are why it's such a big deal. It's not just hype around the latest shiny custom ROM.

You make it sound like the Redpine card ended up being shitty because of RYF efforts. The Redpine card was chosen because of its internal flash, but the fact that the vendor failed to properly support the advertised features (and even removed some that worked before), abandoned its mainline driver and pretty much halted the firmware development after SiLabs acquisition is orthogonal to that and could have happened with a different card as well. So nice it was a replaceable M.2 card, isn't it? ;)

> Why? There's no Android port for that device and they keep mentioning LineageOS.

The LineageOS folks are working on supporting their OS on Linux-first devices running a close-to-mainline (not AOSP) kernel. So it could go either way. Of course if they do choose an Android-first device, their efforts would ultimately also make it easier to run a mainline kernel on it as shown by projects like pmOS.

> That said, I'd expect a different device, and, assuming LineageOS supports one, and I would not be suprised to see a device that's not powered by a Qualcomm, Mediatek or Samsung SoC.

Is there any actually relevant alternative to this oligopoly? Apple doesn't sell to third parties, NVDA lacks a baseband and so does (to my knowledge) Broadcom, and it's been ages since I saw anything from Intel in the mobile space.

I just noticed the part about FSF Librephone being based on LineageOS (therefore, Android).

Has anyone told the FSF that it isn't "GNU/Linux"?

I suspect that Purism has the better idea for a sustainable starting point for an FSF-ish phone.

I'd be curious why FSF is barking up the Android tree again (the massive, intractable Android source code tree).

That's their US made patriot phone, the regular less than half of that. Also, please read up on the concept of economies of scale.

If you go with postmarketOS (good!), and don't want to touch anything that touched Purism, better avoid anything GTK (Phosh, GNOME Mobile and related apps). While Purism did not make a competitive phone, their investments into libre software went great and keep paying off.

I've kinda migrated to the worst-case scenario already and it's really not that bad - for my use case.

I have an old phone (actually running LineageOS rather than stock) that works as you perfectly describe as a glorified digital token. This device doesn't come with me. There's no banking I need to do, on a day-to-day basis, requiring said token, that has to be done right now or the world will end. It can wait until I get home (and I usually use the bank's web interface from a desktop). This device has minimal other apps installed, which limits bank app accessibility of other app data, and other app accessibility of bank data.

Then my GrapheneOS daily driver serves my day-to-day needs with minimal data leakage, tracking, ads, other general paranoia-inducing modern-life shit.

I pay for things on a day-to-day basis with a physical debit card due to an existing habit of not wanting to depending on a single device for "all the things", so GrapeheneOS wasn't a downgrade, but it should be noted to others that whilst Google Wallet can run on GrapheneOS, NFC payments through the Google Wallet will not work due to Full SafetyNet requirements that GrapheneOS can not pass. Non-NFC items such as tickets and boarding passes have been reported to work (and I'm pretty sure I've used it for that, although Google Wallet is no longer installed on my device).

Having a separate phone as a "glorified digital token" is probably within the top 3 things you want to do anyway if you are serious about digital security.

See the recent discussion about pixnapping: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45574613

Also, if your bank uses SMS for verification then the phone should have its own phone number which you keep secret. Otherwise it's one data leak and one sim swap attack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_swap_scam) from breaking your SMS verification.

> A free OS will empower developers to implement technical workarounds that could trick these apps into working there.

Not if they require something like hardware-backed remote attestation, and only accept such attestation from Google or Apple.

I'd love a practical Linux phone, and being able to run a deblobbed close-to-mainline kernel on a new-ish phone would help with that, but that doesn't really solve the most user-facing problem of mobile phones, the ecosystem lockdown.

And FSF has a history of creating important OS level software.

Like they have been doing for Desktop Linux?

And I feel like it undermines any effort to make free, featureful applications if the hardware itself can't be trusted.

You are mixed up 3 different tech stacks: 1. React Native has nothing in common with web apps except JS runtime. It uses "native" widgets for Android and iOS. You need to add a new "native" runtime for your free OS. There are some third-party attempts to add mac/win/linux support, but they are not feature complete as officially supported platforms. Again, your free OS will be step behind. 2. Yes, you can write PWA with React (Web), but PWA still have many missing features which offered by platform APIs of Android and iOS. Your app will not be in "feature parity" with "native" app. Especially banking app. 3. Electron apps are integrated with desktop platform APIs, you cannot easily port Electron app to mobile. Every time big company with big investments wins.

This won't help if Google/Apple/Microsoft roll out integrity checks for browsers, something which they have already suggested they want to do.

...and packaging my app as a PWA is going to help with cantankerous bank/ditigal-id apps, how, exactly?

I agree, but unfortunately I think the chances of that are just about zero. The reality is that the vast, vast majority of people don't care about software freedom. They care about the flashy marketing features in the newest iPhone (and competitors). I wish it were otherwise, but alas. Heck, you can't even get people to care about their physical freedom most of the time, let alone their digital life. It's hard to see this effort taking off as a result.

Do you really NEED to be forced to attest if you can make your phone look like any damn PC using a browser?

>Stallman had a good idea for free (as in freedom) software, but then "missed the forest for the trees" by focusing on the source code.

RMS is afraid of trees!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28419139

Safe hardware is super difficult

The only project I know of that really actively addressing the end to end problem is Bunnie Huang's precursor.

Work seems to be going on low-key: https://github.com/betrusted-io/xous-core

> What does it matter if you can use any OS you want if your phone is filled with SoCs which are bugged and backdoored by the state and/or who knows who else?

Perhaps. But how does this effort from the FSF do anything to solve that? They are (as far as I can tell) producing firmware, not hardware. If the hardware manufacturers are working with the government or whomever to spy on you, they will just not use the FSF firmware in that case.

> so just having a free OS isn't enough to prevent it

They have a free kernel not a free OS. Them not having a free OS is precisely what is the issue here.

For people without a viable alternative such as transferring their funds to a bank that does not require Google/Apple certified devices, this seems to be the way. The second phone does not even need to have a SIM card in it, except perhaps during set up. That phone does not leave home and is ideally be powered off with its battery removed when not in use. Everything else can be done on a free device, ideally using FOSS apps. Ideally again, this means no Facebook, no Whatsapp, no IoT crapware.

Luckily, here in the U.S. this is still possible. I run Graphene on a Pixel without Play Store compatibility layer and everything just works. Most of my apps come from F-Droid, with the notable exception of Whatsapp, for which a standalone APK is available. Unfortunately, it is proving difficult to get rid of Whatsapp entirely because of friends and family.

Yup. Right now that's something running graphene for me. I'd prefer full linux but the other options don't seem viable yet to me. When I tried the pine phone a few years ago its battery life was in the 3-5 hours range if I used the phone which is not sufficient.

Some banking apps require relatively new OS, so if you have an old phone with e.g. Android 8 and you can't upgrade (Android 9 removes certain important features), you are out of luck.

But then I would need to constantly charge two phones and keep two phones in my pocket all the time because I never know when I would need to do those things on the go.

If you're being serious, you're in for a rude awakening. POTS lines are dead and being replaced with VOIP and VoIP to pots modems on the premise. lots of cities have already started to grub the copper out and replaced it a long time ago with fiber.

Exactly. A simple phone that runs a browser I can trust that's also capable of running web-based apps is all I need. I already avoid running apps on my iphone whenever possible.

The phone I really want is as uncomplicated and open as possible and beholden to no corporate economic interests or privacy invasions.

Now that I'm retired I'm looking for a project to immerse myself in. This sounds like just the ticket.

Actually "open" is a misnomer, maybe it was a decade ago but it's clear that Big G has an effective monopoly over browser(s), the web "standards", and is gradually making them more user-hostile.

> There'll be little point to a free computer if it gets us denied service everywhere. At this point we're gonna end up marginalized, like second class citizens of society.

Given the apparent trajectory of the corporate/government model of organizing society, it seems like they're going to be the ones that will be second-class citizens.

Increasingly, browser-based online banking requires authentication with a proprietary smartphone app, where it used to accept other forms of 2FA

UBS bank mandates their "Secure Access" app as second factor even when logging in from a desktop. They used to allow the smart card reader for existing customers that had it as a work around for a few years but they disabled that.

Also many websites are making it remarkably hard to not use the app if they even remotely sense you're not on an actual PC. FB and LinkedIn aren't banks but prime examples.

To be clear I'm not saying that alternatives don't exist now. But it's a worrying trend that big businesses, and even governments in some cases, are moving away from such alternatives being available. Look for example at the proposed age verification scheme in the EU, where they don't plan to make a version you can use on a desktop (and even for mobile devices require you use a vendor-attested device). Sure, right now it's just for looking at porn. But it seems to me that once that settles, it won't be long (a decade or two) before you start to see government IDs require a similar mobile app. That's the kind of thing I fear happening soon.

Monzo bank in the UK doesn't have a web access (apart from very basic page where you can block your card and do nothing else, not even see your balance). They also retired support for older Android phones, so if you happen to use it on an old phone, you are out of banking. I, for security, refuse to install bank apps on my phone that I carry, but I have them on a separate phone that I have in safe place.

They more and more force you into 2FA through banking app

I'm starting to see banks retire their web sites and push the app. It's likely that in 5 years most banks will only offer apps.

In SE Asia, most banks I've used no longer offer any services other than through their app.

I agree, and I've done similar to this for mobile banking successfully. This is the way :)

However, I expect at some point they'll insist on biometric authentication.

That'd exclude people who can't use the biometrics. But one bank (Revolut) told me that they're dropping customers who don't have a passport or driving license in the UK, for KYC reasons that they said they were required to follow, despite there being a large number of people without either.

So I expect banks to have no problem excluding <x% of people in a discriminatory way, if they can find an excuse, eventually.

No, with some banks you can't.

I tried calling Starling Bank in the UK when my phone screen stopped working. I assumed they would have basic phone banking service.

They told me no. The only service they could provide over the phone was registering a new device to resume access to bank services via their mobile app.

Although they have a web banking service, which can he used on a desktop, that requires authentication via the mobile app too. It's not TOTP, it's their own thing.

As I needed to make a transaction, I had no choice but to buy a new phone in a hurry.to do it.

Several people suggest switching banks and credit card services, but I've found that not so easy. I have accounts with several banks (some for business), and 3 of them require use of their mobile app. Most credit card services I use also require use of their app. Some have websites that hand you over to the app at some point in the flow.

The next step will be for them to prevent you connecting to the cellular network.

Sorry, but no. Device attestation is another mechanism to track and ultimately exercise control over the user. It fundamentally goes against the freedom of choice. You want me to authenticate with multiple factors? Cool.. let me tell you which method I'm already using on all my other accounts and then tell me how to register that with your service. You want to "measure" my device? Okay, I'll take my business elsewhere..

this is the same thing with wifi. There are different channels and transmission power rules depending on country. Something you cannot change even if you are root or build your own kernel, as it's built in to the wifi hardware (eg. raspberry pi)

You can open source it. Unfortunately, "open source" doesn't mean "user is allowed to run his own code" nowadays.

theoretically, there is lte cbrs where spectrum not licensed.

Hopefully open mesh wifi will supplant cell phone networks anyway.

Yeah, and it's the Hexagon mDSP that's the issue. It's basically THE modem. It has its own RTOS and runs the entire RF stack and whispers to all the other RF parts. The cores that run the Linux distro are just... there. For you to run Android on, normally.

PostmarketOS can run on some devices with almost no blobs - but there's no escaping the modem curse.

But are you enough of a madman to port that onto an undocumented magic modem?

It’s a fine thread, but the links from FreeBSD to Darwin are real, and Darwin is behind macOS and iOS. Not just as a kernel, but a lot of the runtime and many of the auxiliary pieces of software too.

Or FirefoxOS circa 2013.

> i would rather see this get mainlined into Gnome

This is exactly the plan of Purism, https://puri.sm/posts/how-to-be-upstream-first/

I'm rooting for the web because it's all plain text technologies. And UIs live high up in the stack that one benefits from quick feedback, and also isn't forced to use a low-level language to develop them. But I suppose there can be language bindings from Python etc.

waydroid

> It's an incredible waste

Funny, I would have used those exact words had they chosen anything BUT Android as their base.

All the other "freedom" Linux phones are failures (yes I'm sure fsflover will now chime in to but akshually). I know because I bought them all. They all have one thing in common: the software sucks.

And I don't even need apps. Just basic phone functionality (several Linux phones still can't do MMS), a web browser, and no crashes. Unfortunately no Linux phone has been able to give the to me yet. Whereas Android has been delivering for over a decade.

I think that supporting Android as a free platform is a sensible choice. Android has benefited from more than a decade of development by Google, Samsung, and others and provides a polished experience and thousands of apps people actually want to use (and many excellent FOSS options too). AOSP is already "free software" and starting from scratch with Linux would make very little sense at this point. The FSF is right to focus on what matters here, which is hardware on which to run free Android.

A fully degunked kernel that supports LineageOS with full hardware support is one that will also run PostmarketOS or similar.

I feel that free software sometimes obsesses over the 1% when the 99% of their objective is achieved.

I make a parallel with politics and transparency, a software lead once told me that a completely transparent government was tried in the french revolution and it kind of didn't work. For example, we all would agree that there's some functions of government related to war and security that should not be transparent. I feel that free software would obsess over that private fraction because for all you know it might hold all of the secrets and evil that you imagine.

That said, it is possible that under the guise of reasonable need for private blobs/three-letter-agencies, a lot of other 'evil' things may be hidden. Maybe they say it's due to security or IP concerns, to provide protection against device tampering, to avoid pollution of radiofrequency spectrums, but it's possible that in reality they are hiding spying software in the wifi firmware and hardware keystores?

I feel that if the FSF recognizes that there's some areas that are ok to have closed source, then they could be taken seriously, otherwise they will just be ignored and leave room for precisely the kind of misuse of closed source that they fear. This is especially noticeable when they fight against projects that precisely do a lot for open source, like github (See GitLab/Savannah), or Android, they are 99% of the way there, give them a break.

Extremism begets extremism, if the jails are too full (or too empty), advocating for the other extreme will get you nowhere, the Overton Window doesn't quite apply, in fact it can be harmful as you are providing a real threat to the other extreme.

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There aren't even any arm or x86 desktops that are completely blob free. There is some ridiculously expensive amd power hungry power9 thing that nothing will run on, and some of sifive's newer boards might qualify. Every arm at least has some soc blobs. And every x86 has something like ime. Going straight for a blob free phone seems like getting ahead of ourselves. How about we shoot for a completely free rpi usable on the desktop first?

> Postmarket or Lineage or any other mobile operating system will be able to make use of this project.

Any OS "is able" to use anything from any other OS - in theory and given infinite resources. In practice though, it makes a huge difference when something works by default.

That's not entirely true.

Most PostmarketOS devices start out using LineageOS kernels, and many are atill using those.

Why not use PostmarketOS kernels on LineageOS?

The ultimate goals are different, but cooperation on upstreaming kernel work would benefit both.

> Mobile software is unfortunately not really a lego that can always be combined at will.

If we're talking about the mainline Linux, then it this looks exactly like a Lego to me. I hope that FSF will concentrate their efforts on that.

> tearing down the proprietary software barriers that prevent the vast majority of smartphone users

Are you aware that all those millions of devices require each model a dedicated reverse-engineering effort? You don't gain the coverage you're implying by concentrating on Android at all.

This type of semi-whataboutist comment appears at the top of most open source project announcements.

Once we live in a centrally planned utopia these projects will all be merged with each other and produce the perfect phone/operating system/smart watch.

The listed distributions have already been created. The OP didn't suggest to create a distribution but to collaborate with existing ones not relying on the Google's OS.

as someone who has followed this phone for a long time, it has had an image problem - fairly old hardware, early software/buggy, and bad customer service experiences.

i'm still pretty tempted to play with one.

We know that you will post something about Librem 5 so there is no need for anyone else to do it.

Librem?

> It was exactly "Open source" that enabled Google to dominate the smartphone landscape.

The financial interest may have preferred a licensing model, but either way, it was the financial interest that actually built a ton of this software. Linux isn't unpopular with businesses because of its license model. It is healthy because it found ways to plug into financial interest.

The FSF will always push licensing models while ignoring financial interest, basically abandoning users and businesses. There are how many billion smartphone users on Earth, and the FSF expects volunteer programmers and volunteer donations recruited on one of the worst websites I have ever seen to carry the load? Give me a break.

PREACH. Sorry. I felt heard and seen!

/e/ has extraordinarily poor privacy and security. Extremely delayed privacy and security patches including years of delays for kernel, driver and firmware updates or complete AOSP patches is not compatible with privacy.

/e/ rolls back privacy and security far more than LineageOS and /e/ includes their own invasive services. Murena services even send data to OpenAI without user consent.

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand... is a detailed post covering the lack of privacy and security of /e/ with a bunch of linked sources including other detailed posts by third party privacy and security researchers. It also touches on the lack of security of Fairphone hardware including end-of-life Linux kernel branches not getting LTS updates and delays for driver/firmware patches, but it's much worse with /e/.

You may have missed this, it's only been ~11 days since the post but they've got a solution now, with the first release having happened:

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/27068-grapheneos-security-p...

A lot of functionality of newer Android releases (Android/AOSP 13 and later) rely on eBPF [1] for both interception of process insights and sandboxing of processes. eBPF in a nutshell is a way to build kernel hooks, so that you can also disallow or intercept syscalls or kernel API calls that the Apps are executing behind the scenes.

eBPF was introduced with Kernel 4.14 officially (but partly long before that). Most LineageOS supported devices still rely on older kernels, the most range being around the Kernel 4.4 or 4.9 branches, which lack that eBPF functionality. The LineageOS maintainers were backporting a lot of things already, but that's the "hardcut of now unsupported legacy devices" that people are experiencing with their old phones.

The issue here is that upstream vendors (e.g. Fairphone, actually meaning upstream Qualcomm IoT) only maintain their outdated kernel versions, and never maintain them in the sense of updating their driver code into newer kernel releases. The drivers are always stuck in an outdated state of a feature frozen kernel.

I'm just making this specific example with the Fairphone because "5 to 8 years support" isn't what most people would think it is. It means "only the really critical security patches of old stuff gets backported" and does not mean "hey we migrated our old code to a new kernel and Android version".

For example, Fairphone 1, 2, 3, 3+ are all stuck in old kernels right now (4.9 being the latest backport for the FP3+) and are essentially not updatable because of this.

I don't try to blame Fairphone here, because other manufacturers are much much worse in this regard. Fairphone and Pixel are already the "as good as it can get" for third-party ROMs case.

I mentioned postmarketOS specifically, because they're trying to fix that by upstreaming the kernel drivers, so that Linux support of those devices will stay updated with newer kernel releases (hopefully).

[1] https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel/bpf

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Your statement is wrong in two distinct ways:

- Fundamentalists never hijacked the FSF, they founded it: Stallman is about as fundamentalist as possible about free software.

- In the case of the FSF, the fundamentalists are absolutely walking the walk, both in terms of contributing software, and in terms of going out of their way to not use proprietary software.

Probably that Google is dragging their feet releasing Pixel kernel and other source code. LineageOS has many years of experience getting a working system on top of bad or incomplete sources, including getting kernel source out of vendors in the first place.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45208925

I will never use GOS as long as it requires me to buy a Pixel, on principle, because it's made by Google. It's like having to buy a Microsoft Surface in order to use Linux.

Doesn't this count? https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Purism_Librem5_(purism-li...

Could you elaborate on why? This type of comment doesn't add any value.

We bought two FP5 with e/OS/ from Murena (for spouse and myself), and would buy again. Why wouldn't you?

I considered purchasing it, but ultimately turned it down due to its size. What's the reason you're not liking it?

I got a FP4, will definitely buy again.

Can you elaborate?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45589873

> The FSF is now under the leadership of a "Bachelor of Arts degree in Media and Culture and a Master of Arts in the Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image" who probably hasn't written a line of code.

This is an exceptionally poor argument.

1. Coders are biased and often not aligned with users whose rights FSF is there to protect. Just look at any OSS vs FS discussion on this site to see examples.

2. Your "probably" here is too big of an assumption and of not much consequence. I have a degree in humanities, do not work in IT and have contributed code to Free Software.

3. You somehow imply that formal education affects _leadership_ in a _rights_ organization and a technical one would be preferable. That's a long shot.

Good initiatives require strong argumentative basis to have a strong wide following, you're providing a counterexample.

This take is gatekeeping and sexist. Coding is not the job description for FSF leadership; policy, licensing, and funding are. The previous, highly effective former FSF executive director was a poet, not a programmer.

Focus on outcomes: mainline kernels, modem firmware, reproducible builds, verified boot, power management, app ecosystems, and sustained funding. Credit the projects pushing those fronts and press FSF to support them: attack decisions, not résumés or gender.

This post was fine up until you decided to be sexist for no reason. If you're using "feminine" as an insult, professing "obvious" connotations, you need to reflect on why you have these associations.

Librephone is reverse engineering project that attempts to remove remaining proprietary binary modules, not a competing project.

> Librephone will serve existing developers and projects who aim to build a fully functioning and free (as in freedom) Android-compatible OS.

Feminine? What on earth? How can an NGO have a gender? And more importantly, why does it need one? I like your comment, but the word "feminine" is really sexist, as if everything female was of less value.

people followed Stallman because the GNU stuff was interesting and good, then we got decades of endless dick-measuring about whose freedom is more free, GPL2 or GPL3 or MIT or AGPL or ...

and while the differences have consequences in the grand scheme of things what mattered is what the trillion dollar corporations wanted, because the FSF didn't manage to do shit, not even the feminine coordination (nor the masculine rallying cry to arms!)

It is how the times are nowadays. You don't get the CEO throne of any org without chest-thumping your social justice initiatives. The FSF is merely following fully up2date standard operational procedures of Western civilization. How can you blame them for following the de-facto standards ?

Praise the Heavens that at-least 3/10 staff are coders. That is a far better ratio than most NGOs.

> the FSF is at least 15 years late to really launch something in that space

Not really. https://replicant.us is an FSF-supported project. But it kind of died due to the lack of contributors.

IMHO, postmarketOS is better than Replicant or any other Android Rom, because it doesn't depend on Android.

FSF could finally take a look at webOS / Open WebOS and release it for devices.

Apps built in HTML/JS/CSS, straight from 2009.

The feminine vibe doesn't really land, and seems to kind of undermine the rest of what you're trying to say.

There's no shortages of OSS floating around with individuals butting heads about splitting hairs to their preferred interpretation, forking away into oblivion or to a standstill alone.

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The FOSS world is primarily about freedom. You don’t have to align with someone else’s vision, you don’t need to be profitable, you don’t need to care about other projects

Why do we need so many car models and manufacturers?

So what exactly is the problem? To many options?

> The OS layer is where all previous Linux phone efforts have failed

The OS layer is where the existing projects are thriving, with various distros and shells to choose from to match one's needs and tastes. It's the appropriate hardware that's in undersupply. I'm using a Librem 5, a 2019 design, and if I wanted to switch to something newer I can't because there's no viable upgrade path on the market. No other hardware vendor has invested significant resources into mobile GNU/Linux since then, everything else is either purely community-based or uses Halium.

They work fine for data and SMS, but it gets complicated once you need audio routing (it's rare for a modem to expose audio over USB) or waking up from low power mode to answer the incoming call. Could be done with M.2 USB modules and some dedicated controller in-between though.

To me:

Open Source Firmware signed by OS > Firmware blob signed by device manufacturer > Firmware blob hardcoded by device Manufacturer

The FSF treats hardcoded firmware blobs as "free" and updatable firmware blobs as nonfree despite there not being a big difference between them in practice. And practical differences like being able to fix security issues benefits users.

I initially made the same misread that you did...

The OP's point is, having the firmware permanently burnt-in on a ROM chip vs loaded as a binary blob via a driver doesn't change the "non-free"-ness of the firmware itself.

So opting for hardware which has a "fully-open-source" driver, but runs a binary blob encoded into the hardware, doesn't make the system fully open.

It's a take for a more Free system, not for accepting binary blobs.

(Or I guess for acknowledging that if you're willing to allow binary blobs stored in hardware, then dynamically-loaded binary blobs doesn't change the "free"-ness.)

That's not even close to what they said.

They're saying approval of any who-knows-what code shouldn't be decided based on how it's loaded.

I think that day arrived Jan. 6th 2025. If the message doesn't land now it never will.

I use reader mode too. When I do it triggers a "imperfect lay-out" alarm.

The FSF has never been a solid act.

For years they have studiously ignored the fact that the mobile phone is the place where many people engage with IT and have been faffing about in the desktop and server space.

Instead of leading they have always trailed behind. What they should have been doing was focusing on the software vision which they will most definitely screw up.

Focus on the software vision and wait for the deblobblable hardware to emerge or commission their own hardware from scratch.

I'm sorry but these guys have and will always be useless, much like the Wayland project.

How many years has that crew taken to create something fully capable of replacing X11?

These guys want to build on the Android foundation. I'm sorry but this will not work.