Meet Divine, a GNU/Linux Phone powered by Rockchip’s RK3588S. Divine D. will be our first variant, completely open for development, testing and debugging. It will bring interesting features on-board, from local AI to multi-standard connectivity. We also develop DawnOS, a mobian-based distribution tailored for our hardware, including custom Kernel and device tree.
Check our documentation base for more:
https://docs.dawndrums.tn
@dawndrums why do people keep making the same mistake that Purism did, basing an phone OS that needs to move fast onto Debian, the slowest non-enterprise distro that exists? We surely must be doing something wrong at postmarketOS, when people are not building these systems on top of us despite the tech stack being a lot more fit to it 😅 Feedback on this would be welcomed, but regardless, it's so cool more people keep trying to build Linux phones!
@pabloyoyoista @dawndrums Disclaimer: @mobian developer here, so I'm obviously (heavily) biased!
Debian has been around forever & has a proven track record of reliability and robustness. It uses glibc (offering better compatibility) and switched to systemd long ago.
Those are all arguments that, *as a company*, would make me choose Debian over pmOS.
Don't get me wrong, @postmarketOS is an awesome project, but it's still "young" and IMHO not popular enough in the "embedded systems" world.
@pabloyoyoista @mobian @dawndrums @awai @postmarketOS yeah pmos is still very far away from being what i would call "production ready", i'm hoping the continued pmbootstrap refactoring and general tooling modernisation is going to continue bringing us closer... (and ofc systemd stability) but we also really need to improve the edge stability in Alpine imo (though stable is pretty awesome)
@cas @mobian @dawndrums @awai @postmarketOS thanks a lot for your input, I think having others point of view is generally helpful.
The problem I see with phones is that you need it stable... But fastly moving because most of the stack is highly immature. Like Purism has not yet managed to release based on Debian 12, which was released 2 years ago 😅 I would not be able to imagine that happening on top of pmOS, that, yes, comes with a different set of tradeoffs. The amazing thing is that DawnDrums have been extremely nice and will share their rationale with us, so we can also learn and adapt. I hope our problems are solvable medium-term :D
@pabloyoyoista @cas @mobian @dawndrums @postmarketOS Regarding Purism, IMHO their "mistake" is that they forked Debian entirely, rebuilding every single package on their own infrastructure. That's a lot of work for such a small team, hence the lag...
OTOH Mobian only provides overlays on top of Debian stable & testing, and we have no trouble keeping up ;) IOW, it's more the *how* that counts, rather than the base distro itself.
@awai @pabloyoyoista @cas @mobian @dawndrums @postmarketOS The root problem (from my PoV) is that they dropped development to almost zero. 2h/week maintaining the distro packaging would have been more than enough to keep a working image tracking Debian Testing but if you don't do that for many, many months you'll lag a quit a bit and that shows now. It's not a technical but a social problem. (but it's still doable to catch up to Trixie without too much effor).
@agx @awai @pabloyoyoista @cas @mobian @dawndrums @postmarketOS Also, getting to PureOS dawn (based on trixie) after crimson (based on bookworm) shouldn't take that long either. I've been trying to take care of them both at once when catching up whenever it was possible, so the remaining work is mostly going to be about rebasing patches rather than distro maintenance (and that's all that's left in crimson now as well).
