• Arthur BesseA
      link
      22 years ago

      you don’t get it? really? in my opinion pmOS does a better job of explaining their excellent motivations than most software projects do. they are quite simply aiming for a 10 year life-cycle for smartphones using modern free/libre software, because they believe that Few Years Old Devices Should Not Be Electronic Waste - a problem android has clearly failed to solve (because it has a different purpose).

      To complain that this volunteer effort has only managed to get calling working on a mere 13 of the plethora of devices they can boot on is bizarre to me.

      Fwiw, many people are actually using it as a daily driver and making phone calls nowadays.

    • @ITmodulo
      link
      12 years ago

      I daily drive postmarketOS and I know its upsides and downsides. And I’m also a developer.

      You pointed out really important issue. What is the point of additional features if most important do not work?

      I agree that there should be some priorities but the amount of time of people at the postmarketOS community are not unlimited.

      This is not really pmOS fault. That is how life and community work. Unfortunately, there’s lack of interest from the manufactures that develops their devices or components like modems without documentation or against known standards.

      This is understandable because they are making business, so this is obvious conflict of interests. They needs to be faster than the other competitors. And they don’t care how it is done but how fast it is done.

      On the other hand, Pine64 and Pursim decided to collaborate with community, and their products has the best support as you can see on the wiki. (Hopefully guys from SHIFT may join?)

      That was background.

      The motivation of the pmOS creators are mentioned on their website, I won’t repeat them.

      As I daily drive it since 1yr I can say that the begging was reeeealy hard, yes, making calls was problem for mobile phone, which was also funny for me. Also, there was huge problem with apps availability.

      Nowadays, many effort has been put into making it stable and the goal was reached. Now I make calls without any obstacles. I replaced 100% android apps to Linux ones, I don’t even need to install waydroid (android emulator, that allows to run android apps on linux phone).

      I see that the app development is really fast compared to Android that time. This is not sth. like - this app is made instead of the other that more people will benefit, because we don’t know priorities. Many things are just low level and is not mentioned so extensively no to bore end-users.

      pmOS is not a company. Yes, there are goals, that are realized in the extent of members free time. But there are also independent people who want to spend their time on their needs but only Linux on mobile allow to do it. Nothing constrains them. They don’t care if somebody will use it. They publish their work for free for others to benefit. On android one would probably make it paid or put a lot of ads.

      Android is stupidly constrained when it comes to apps. They are specific programming languages enforced for developers (Mostly Java and Kotlin with some constrained bindings mad in Golang or C++). This makes apps development process slower and sometimes impossible. On Linux you write in whatever language you want.