Seems like many companies product quality has plummeted over the last few years. For example, Google (despite its flaws), used to have good products and services. Now they are virtually unusable.
My doctor sent me forms to my Gmail and I never got them. I looked it up and apparently Gmail has the document provider blocked so you literally cannot get medical forms. Stuff like this happens all the time now! Their search engine is nothing but sponsored ads now.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. I just think it’s funny that capitalism ends up making much much worse products over time.
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Or you can use a PinePhone Pro and run an OS that’s actually good, with more customizability than Android can dream of.
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It is. Mainline GNU/Linux is far better than Android. It is faster, has more features, provides much more freedom, is more open, has more customizability, etc.
You’re right about that, but they’re getting better. The PinePhone Pro is finally getting hardware accelerated android apps via Waydroid, so pretty soon, you’ll be able to get the best of both worlds. Also, the cameras are working now.
I totally get it, but I still think android is the future OS (and it already is the most used OS on the planet).
Google’s decision to keep the majority of android open source (AOSP) was a business decision, because it valued international growth and spread, and they knowingly allowed int’l carriers to add what they want (whereas apple told them to take it or leave it, and iOS is staying closed source). If the goal though was to eventually pull a microsoft and force you to use their proprietary addons software, that ship has long since sailed, since there are too many variants and people to keep happy all over the world now. I genuinely do think that google as a company is smarter than the US government, they’re an international company and care more about not alienating int’l carriers than they do pleasing the US gov.
Don’t get me wrong, I 100% think google is spying, and collaborating with the US government, but they’re doing through google services and gmail, not through AOSP and all the android variants.
Even the chinese made variants like MIUI and Huawei’s harmonyOS are just android variants based on AOSP.
If google tries some fuckery, or tries to close source AOSP, which is entirely possible, then a coalition of Chinese, Indian, and possibly European countries would pick up where google left off and fork AOSP and create their own standard.
There are more problems with Android than just spying. One of the main ones being the fact that it is based on Java. Java runs on the JVM, which adds a lot of overhead. This means that older hardware will always struggle to run it, especially as newer apps appear, whereas Linux can run easily on anything from a 2.5cm by 2.5cm square with a CPU on it to a supercomputer.
Also, all OSes have to use different application code due to differences in the OS internals. Because of this, modern apps are absolutely massive because they bundle everything they need to run, so they get to insane sizes. These differences exist because the different OSes are optimized for the device they run on. Windows/macOS on computers, Android/iOS on mobile, etc., whereas Linux has the ability to adapt to whatever device it runs on, and swap out entire components of the OS to accommodate the hardware and form factor of said device easily (as in with just a few simple commands).
I think that ultimately, if Android wasn’t already so commonly-used, mainline Linux would be a better option. The only reason Linux devices can’t compete currently with other options is that no one puts time into writing code for them except for hobbyists like me who have the motivation to do so because it’s interesting and we want to contribute to the community. If more time was invested into it, it could go way beyond what current OSes offer.
Proprietary drivers and firmware are also a HUGE problem. A lot of the drivers that chip makers push out are made for a specific version of the Android Kernel. Not only that, but many driver and firmware blobs are badly programmed and because of that have bugs and/or vulnerabilities. Most of the time these bugs/vulnerabilities will never get addressed because the company that made the chip has already moved on to the next thing.
Chip makers rarely ever give up “their” source code or publish much documentation if any at all. So the only option is to reverse engineer the binaries enough to write an equivalent driver that works for mainline Linux and then get that mainlined. That’s exactly what a lot of people are doing already, and that is exactly why it always takes such a long time until Linux can use some piece of hardware to its full potential.
One example I can give is the wireless chip in my Pinebook Pro. At very random times the non-free Kernel driver brcmfmac just has a panic and the WiFi and Bluetooth interfaces just disappear. On rare occasions the Kernel may also crash completely when this happens. It has happened enough that I’ve lost some open unsaved work multiple times. Reloading the kernel module sometimes works, but usually not. The only thing that does work is a reboot.
Yeah, this is an issue I have too. Specifically, with the well-known example of Nvidia. First of all, their driver sucks. It’s just horrible. It never works properly and relies on Xorg settings to set GPU parameters, which is really stupid because how are Wayland users supposed to set their GPU clock speeds and enable gsync?
Also, their compute stack, CUDA, is such an immense pain to install. It breaks essentially every week, and when it breaks, no one can fix it because it’s proprietary. Up until very recently, it required a proprietary fork of docker if you wanted to use it in docker, and the fork itself broke constantly, so essentially, Nvidia is the only option for high-performance compute on Linux currently, but good luck using it with their drivers. The open-source driver is reverse-engineered, so it can only get so good, and it’s not great. It works, but performance with it is horrible, and CUDA is unavailable when using it.
Then, we have chromebooks. Now, chromebooks actually run GNU/Linux. Specifically, Gentoo with the package manager removed. Of course, they’ve decided to lock it down completely for “security”. The system files are stored in a readonly partition, and if you manage to change them, the chromebook doesn’t boot and clears all your data instead. In order to be able to edit those and even just get a proper shell, you have to enable developer mode, which destroys all your data. There is no way to get out of that. It will destroy your data if you try to alter anything.
Chromebooks are full of proprietary drivers. I have tried to run mainline Linux on mine, and succeeded, but only after spending weeks developing a specialized process for extracting all the proprietary stuff from the chromeos restore image, compiling a custom kernel, patching the audio topology files, etc.
It’s just sad because the only reason Linux has all these problems is that capitalism incentivizes corporations to keep as much as possible proprietary. If just a bit more time and money was spent on Linux, it could achieve so much more than it already has (and it’s achieved a lot).
Edit: forgot to mention, Nvidia also decided to ignore Linux devs and create a completely nonstandard feature to solve a problem that the devs had already solved another way. This means 2 implementations had to be supported. The most common Wayland compositor,
wlroots, intentionally refuses to support Nvidia’s version (and I believe they’re justified in doing so), so Nvidia users have to go through lots of trouble to even have a chance at getting their GPUs to work with wayland, and often have major graphics issues like flickering.