Seems @postmarketOS is now successful enough for some people to think it was the first community-run GNU-like/Linux distro for phones.
Let me remind you that SHR would turn 17yo this year, and it wasn't even the first one. I bet some #postmarketOS contributors are younger than that 😄
>GNU-like
lol, is this the same thing as Chromium putting "like Gecko" in their user agent
@ptrc @postmarketOS It's just because you'll either get "but Android is Linux" or "but Alpine isn't GNU" smartasses if you don't tiptoe enough with your words there 😂
@dos @postmarketOS 🤓👆 "by that logic, Android with Toybox classifies as GNU-like Linux as much as Alpine with Busybox"
but yeah, fair point :p
@dos @postmarketOS I haven't seen my old openmoko phone in many years. It's buried somewhere in my in-laws' basement. Thanks for the photo!
@dos @postmarketOS now that's an old device you don't see everyday. I remember well when it was first introduced, linux phone the future for open hardware. It didn't take off but paved the way for others
@dos
I have an OpenMoko device (unfortunately bought on ebay just 5 years ago, so I've missed the magic of those devices at their time). I assume there's nothing online that would work on it nowadays... I'm extremely time poor, and have too many projects, so I doubt I could dedicate any time to it anyway 😔
@postmarketOS @anjan
@deedend @postmarketOS @anjan I'm not aware of anything still maintained that would run on GTA02, but it you want to play with archeology then SHR 2012.07 images are actually preserved by the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20210417044718/http://build.shr-project.org/
@dos oh, thanks for the pointer: i still have my OpenMoko from back in the days.
@dos @postmarketOS "history of Linux on phone-ish devices" would be a great talk
@eloy @postmarketOS I'll be actually doing something like that next week at the local ILFS Day meetup 😁
@dos @postmarketOS will there be a recording? or just PDF of the slides, I'd love to see!
> I bet some #postmarketOS contributors are younger than that
You can be sure of that :) I had some folks mention this FOSDEM that it was surprising how young the people running the stand were. I take that as an incredible compliment for the project :D
@pabloyoyoista @postmarketOS I myself have started at 16yo - and holy cow, this stuff is now older than I was back then 😅
@dos @postmarketOS yes I presume OpenEZX might have been the first attempt at open source software for the application processor of a smartphone. At least I didnt know any other such project back then. It sadly never went very far, as several key contributors including I got "distracted" with doing #openmoko - but that was also a good thing, of course
@dos @postmarketOS I was confused but such claims as well. Not even true amongst the currently active ones, I think. If I looked it up correctly, Maemo Leste even beat postmarketOS by few months in 2017. There are so many better defendable (i.e. true 😉️) extremely impressive statements to be made about pmOS, so there's no need to double down on this. (Though, are first at repurposing old Android phones? 🤔️)
@camelCaseNick @postmarketOS I think it's just a matter of pmOS gaining some wider recognition these days, I don't think it's intentional. The only past project in this space that was similarly well-known was perhaps Openmoko, but its nature was a bit different.
SHR also targeted some Android phones, but it never really went far with them. Today's hardware ages much slower and is much more similar across brands than it used to 15 years ago, so it's easier for community efforts to progress.
@dos @postmarketOS oh shit now i remember that way back in the day as a smol kid i really really wanted an openmoko 
@postmarketOS Actually, which project could be considered the first one? 🤔 Let's ignore PDAs as their history is longer.
The earliest one I'm personally aware of is @LaF0rge's OpenEZX from 2005, targeting Motorola's Linux phones.
https://web.archive.org/web/20051029042914/http://www.openezx.org/