- cross-posted to:
- opensource@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- opensource@programming.dev
The project, developed in partnership with veteran free software developer Rob Savoye, aims to create a fully free and open mobile platform, from the firmware to the operating system.
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Tell me more about the phone! This has taken so long and I am ready to migrate to an open phone even if it’s only for texting at this point.
Screw this OS monopoly by Apple and Alphabet.
Open to simple solutions here. I have a Pixel 4a 5g and iPhone 15 Pro* atm.
your pixel probably runs graphene, degoogle it.
you could probably run linux on it today too.
GrapheneOS for Pixel 4a 5G is deprecated.
What’s keeping me from doing this is that i won’t be able to run my banking apps anymore then. And I can’t be arsed to carry two phones
Graphene is actually better than most custom ROMs in that it can contain Play Services and a few other apps, effectively acting as 2 phones in one. Where I’m from, banking apps don’t need strong Play Integrity, just Play Services.
linux phones will never run banking apps either.
Perhaps there’s this magic app called a “web-browser” I could introduce you to…
banking doesn’t work on just web browsers anymore on most of the world’s banks. i WISH.
Huh, they still work for all my banks here in the US. Not sure how you’re supposed to access your bank account on your PC otherwise. Some banks you’ll have to use the “use Desktop version of the site” option in a mobile browser to get it to work, but it will still work.
access your bank account on your PC otherwise
we’re not. not without a phone.
Damn, that actually sucks.
Especially when virtualization options are expensive/unavailable on mobile CPUs.
atm i use the one bank that doesn’t enforce root for the 2fa portion of the app.
that will soon not be an option though, i guess i’m gonna need two phones now.
I mean, carrying two phones would defeat most of the purpose anyway if one isn’t degoogled in the first place, they’re still getting all that tracking and they’ll be able to associate it with all the online activity of your degoogled phone that’s conveniently always in the same location.
Install waydroid or something or use the browser. The more you put off switching the worse it’s going to get for everyone. You can also just keep another phone in your car on airplane mode and connect it to your hotspot when you need to check your account. There are ways I guess.
Well it might not even be a phone, maybe it’s only a software project that needs to partner with manufacturers that would include it in their phones. The article doesn’t really mention much.
Either way, I’m starting to get excited.
I’d love to try it, but I imagine it will take 20 years for something like this to come even close to usable as a daily driver.
This is the original article
https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-turns-forty-with-a-new-president-and-a-new-campaign
The only way to sucdeed here is to legally force all phones to have unlocked bootloader.
This isn’t even the worst problem. O think the biggest one is proprietary blob drivers, that kills the possibility of keep your phone updated and a general solution that works for most phones instead of an ad-hoc hack for each one.
I disagree - all of those are solvable if the core platform is free
Hopefully this will recruit projects that already have significant headstart, such as Pine64. Otherwise, it would merely be performative.
I’ve got a Google Pixel 3a with postmarketOS installed on it right now for testing, and it really is a two-pronged issue with both hardware and software. Because it’s an older phone the battery drains within a few hours, nowhere close to all-day use. Because most of the software is designed for the desktop certain things are just impossible to use (the big pain point for me is Anki, but on the other hand it’s impressive how many GTK apps conform very nicely to the screen). The keyboard still feels pretty rough.
Hopefully the FSF dipping their hat into the ring will help existing projects like this in a rising-tide-raises-all-ships sort of way. Would be a shame for them to put effort into a software stack that goes nowhere (GNU Hurd), and pour $$$ into a hardware project that doesn’t make it to market or doesn’t do its job better than a cracked smartphone from 5+ years ago.
I think it is possible to switch to it now and have things mostly work out for you, but it will make your life harder. I remember switching to Ubuntu around 2010 and it’s almost to that level of experience. You’ll be giving up a lot, apps you “need” won’t work, but it’s at the point where it is a complete usable experience. For those that are willing to suffer for FOSS, I mean.
For all of those following, I emailed Rob and he confirmed that the focus of the project to start is reverse engineering binary blobs on existing android devices, but he is currently only at the discovery phase of picking which phones to start with. He is first checking LineageOS compatible phones using his toolset here: https://codeberg.org/rsavoye/librephone/src/branch/main/doc/index.md
I swear they unveiled the libre phone 10 years ago.
I have a Purism Librem 5 phone which is fully FOSS Linux phone.
The name keeps throwing me off lol
I mean when I was looking up there have been people that have been using the term libre phone for somewhere around a decade or so. Hell I found an old Reddit post from 8 years ago that talked about asking if it’d be possible to make a pure libre phone. And then of course it came across the Lebrim 5 that you mentioned there so I’m sure they originally used that term as well.
Incidentally what do you think of the phone do you have just the standard one or do you have that premium one?
Damn. Software has existed 40 years now?
Not only that: it was big enough to get mad at 40 years ago already.
40 years ago was 1985.
The first version of Microsoft Windows was released at that time, as an GUI overlay of MS-DOS.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_WindowsMS-DOS was released in 1981 as a corporate locked down OS, that he was aggressively pushing to lock down the PC market.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOSAt the same time HP, IBM, and other early computing megacorps were pushing their own locked down OS’s that were partially built off the free software work of the universities.
One example is HP-UX, which was released in 1984 and was a proprietary implementation of Unix System V, which itself was a commercial product from AT&T. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_V
Things were extremely expensive and locked down back then, and we were just getting to the point where computers were becoming common in people’s homes. Most decently funded schools had dedicated computer labs at this point.
What a nice thing to do
This is absolutely hilarious, a fully libre phone? What processor are they going to use thats 100% libre? Then what OS will it use? Android-libre? What a joke
I’d personally start by actually reading the announcement before complaining about it’s content but you do you I guess
from the firmware to the operating system
I won’t hold my breath, but it’s sorely needed, so, we can hope.
That’s funny. I can’t hold my width.
Sometimes I can’t hold my
heigdthdepth.You are all out of line
You mean outside the box
Some people can hold their length, but only in private.
Just ask your mom
You can hold my girth
And my axe!
As long as y’all maintain your altitude.
And avoid getting raptured. Otherwise we’ll hear no end of your Arch installs.
I salute the early adopters who will suffer all the inconveniences of startups so the wider public can enjoy a non-corporate phone in the future. o7
Unless they can get this working with Android Auto or Carplay I don;t see it going anywhere.
Fuck cars
Nah, fuck that.
I’d rather see Linux on the head unit, too.
I’d still want an Android Auto and Apple Carplay equivalent.
I want my 2030 car to still be able to get the latest and greatest hardware and software in 2040 via me upgrading my phone.
Nah many people don’t live in their cars. I have 2 cars and never use Android Auto even when I could. I’m usually busy with driving instead of fooling with phone bullshit when I’m in the car anyway.
Not everyone has a car y’know. Actually I don’t even know anyone who does.
I’m looking forward to get one of these just to play around with it, and maybe making some custom stuff for it.
I’m looking forward to actually seeing how my fucking works and what it’s doing.
how my fucking works and what it’s doing.
I think only you can answer that one, friend
As soon as my current phone is paid off I am going to get this. No more fucking Spyware up the ass.
The project just launched and is a software-first project. We won’t see a Libre Phone available for a while yet.
And if Hurd is any indication I wouldn’t hold my breath.
That said, didn’t hird basically die because Linux gained critical mass faster and peeled off the core developers? It would be nice to imagine another bottom-up mobile OS emerging and stealing the thunder of this one, but it seems like the hope here is that Libre Phone will gravitate in some of the devs from the existing top-down open phone projects. Who knows if that will work.
One thing I wouldn’t count out right now though: China is very much in favor of getting software and hardware monopolies out from the control of US companies. Free/open(ish) LLMs are the big example, maybe they will jump on this to try and break Google’s stranglehold on the mobile market.
It isn’t encouraging that they “launched” the initiative bit have no dedicated webpage or git for it yet. Seems like going off half-cocked
Then I will make do until then.
I want a Linux phone so bad that I refuse to think about what it would be like because i’d be upset afterwards.
I have an original PinePhone. The phone itself is horribly outdated and slow, but the software itself (Phosh+Gnome) is suprisingly okay. Given a good enough phone (as in hardware) I can see myself actually using it and not being annoyed more than I was with early Androids.
Unfortunately what I understand is that FSFE doesn’t intend to do hardware, only software platform, so I wonder whether they’ll come up with anything interesting.
Running PostmarketOS on hardware such as the Oneplus 6T (which is 8 years old now) shows that you could truly have dog shit cheap hardware for this. As long as you have decent driver support for it.
I’m just over here, mad that I have a Oneplus 7 pro lying around and there’s no port for that. For none of the 3 distros I could find that support the 6T. So I’m suspecting there’s some reason why it’s just not feasible.
It’s an epic phone and it could be so good with a lighter weight OS than Android.
I’m making this comment with a OnePlus 6T I got 8 years ago when it was new and it has never needed repairs, so I wouldn’t exactly call it dogshit. Even the battery still lasts a couple days of heavy use before needing a charge, though that may have more to do with my efforts in reducing software overhead over the years. (Also making sure almost everything I ever view on it has an AMOLED dark background)
No I love the one plus 6t, but I’m more pointing out that the hardware requirements are extremely low at this point. Didn’t mean to offend
I hope they can pull this off because we really need this.
Heard of Hurd, I don’t think they can.
Maybe Hurd never went anywhere but they are responsible for as much of what constitutes “Linux” as the Linux kernel is. Linux never would have amounted to much without GCC, the GNU tools, and the GPL.
gimme gimme
