Interesting new entry into the smartphone-that-runs-desktop-Linux market. This one in particular appears to run Debian Trixie and uses Phosh as its desktop shell.

theregister.com/2024/06/26/fur

#LinuxPhone #phosh #debian

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@kyle It's Droidian. It runs Debian(ish) userspace on top of Android HAL. Very different to actually running Debian.

@dos @kyle The article cold have been more clear here but I still think another supported device could become a net positive for gnome, phosh and the LinuxMobile ecosystem.

"The Hong Kong-based company is working with a Chinese OEM to make sure that there are native Linux drivers for all the device's hardware." could be promising if native means "mainline".

@agx @dos @kyle It said based on Droidian... Which IIRC is based on the whole Hallium thing with Mobian on top, so Android kernel / drivers and no upstream kernel. *sigh*

@dperson @agx @dos @kyle is it much to ask for? Regardless of the expectation to always have freshest kernel versions? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on the choice for a device, whether Halium-based or mainline.

@agx @dos @kyle I work on this phone. you hit the nail on the head; it is our goal to share and upstream as many of our improvements as possible throughout our shared stack. you may have already seen me around GitLab now and again. :)

re: mainline, afraid it's not in our roadmap. getting the device in a halfway semi-usable state would be a decade-long project and the result would be ~the same to an end user. we prefer to focus our energy on improving the userspace (e.g. GTK perf, Firefox, etc)

@GranPC @dos @kyle Could you maybe dump out as many datasheets, technical documentation, source code samples from the supplier as possible for the components so interested people can look into mainlining things?

@agx @dos @kyle unfortunately there isn't much we have in that regard. couple examples: a) the kernel we got didn't even have a commit history; b) we couldn't get the datasheet for the display panel.

I'm aware this isn't optimal, but perfect is the enemy of good & we had to start somewhere. if this goes well, we'll probably have better leverage in the future for that sort of stuff.

@GranPC @dos @kyle I sure wish you luck with your endeavor ! Looking forward to see some of these in the wild.

@GranPC @agx @dos @kyle A big question is what is the outlook for long term support in the form of kernel updates, and does VoLT work?

@BrianA @agx @dos @kyle kernel updates are technically feasible (all modules are open source) -- they'll be looked into when and if they show a tangible user-facing benefit (i.e. beyond "number is bigger"), or whenever we have enough free time for them, whichever comes first.

VoLTE is a work in progress and a rather high priority one at that. chances are we'll have it working in the coming 2-3 weeks.

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