Just a few short hours ago, XDA announced that they will be marketing their own phone complete with LineageOS out of the box. Oh and it’ll support Ubuntu touch and according to their marketing material, HDMI out to a monitor for a converged Linux desktop experience. All that with expandable storage, slide out backlit keyboard and a lot of other goodies. This may be the most promising mobile phone for us Linux loving folks yet.
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I have high hopes . Would be really neat if postmarketOS and the sxmo user interface could be ported over.
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Checking the commits on Github for Ubuntu Touch, I’m surprised they are still alive and active.
I remember trying it on my Nexus 5 way back when. I might dig it up and play with it again
Oh yeah it got picked up by the community into the ubports project and its really surprising how much progress they are making. Good times ahead I think. An XDA released device are you kidding me? Phone junkies, mobile devs, and a lot of tech enthusiasts are going to eat this up. I don’t think there is a better time to start develop mobile applications.
Off the wall idea! Using a phone capable of Linux or *BSD as an advanced telephony server for your home or small business? The capabilities are debatable but the possibilities are endless!
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I’m interested
It will be riddled by binary blobs. Hard pass.
Why so negative Batman. If it is running mainline, then that is a step in the right direction. Look at the RPi saga. Cause other vendors to start beating them to the punch.
I don’t think the chances of this having a mainline kernel are very good. Also, at that price I doubt it will attract a large tinkering community.
The overall premise seems to be like that of a modern Oneplus One, except it’s way too expensive and uses outdated hardware.
Sliding keyboard…? That’s a big no for me… Unfortunately.
It’s still basically an f(x)tech pro1 that Wendell had on order for centuries. Not sure if he got his or he cancelled the order because it was taking too long. I would’ve considered either of the devices if they didn’t have a SD835, which is quite frankly a downgrade from my OnePlus 6 (SD845)
Qualcomm has been writing and supporting mainline drivers since the 800 series. So minus the binary blob for the adreno (which that has had opensource support as well), while not performant without binary blobs, I don’t see why this would not have mainline kernel support.
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He got his and reviewed it:
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https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
Looking at some of the devices that support mainline I think the chances are very good. You would be surprised just how obsessed the hacker community was with the N900 and the infinite amount of “replacements”. These are the people that will develop and optimize a turd into gold if challenged. If the UBports team is dedicating enough time to the device where XDA is including support in the official announcement and the indiegogo campaign then mainline kernel support is a matter of “when?” than “if”? There is not a rom developer in the world who won’t be willing to save a little to get this compared to the more expensive option.
I can’t stand even needing to use my pinephone but I hope the project is successful if only to encourage devices that support an OS that will receive support for longer than five years and mobile phones that won’t be synonymous with “expensive tracking device” or “tech waste”.
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If anyone is interested. They did a little Q&A session with Linux For Everyone on Youtube.
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If you actually think that this phone is going to run a mainline kernel with UBPorts and not just your typical Android vendor kernel and libhybris, you should take a look at this page: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon_835_(MSM8998)
If that works out that’s going to be hype af.