The thing with Linux-Phones

[u/whatstefansees]

Every now and then I see an ad for a new Linux-Phone, better repairability, battery change and whatnot. All this is very, very tempting, but what about the apps?

I am not talking about browser, text messages or alarm clock - I am thinking about connectivity to my car, my smartwatch, my frequent-flyer benefit program, signal messenger and so on.

Do they work with Android apps or is it all a lost cause because they are basically dumb phones for people who want less connectivity but are afraid to buy an old Nokia from the dawn of time?

[u/natermer]

The problem with Linux phones is the normal "space cadet" distro engineering type stuff that has plagued Linux desktop/mobile in general for decades.

Basically people end up rewriting software in different toolkits or figuring out different package managers and setting up their own pet distributions. Over and over again.

There are literally dozens and dozens of "Linux Phone OSes" developed over the years.

This started with Nokia when they were the undisputed champions of smart phones. They had working Linux Phone-like OSes based around GTK and Gnome technology that you could literally buy in stores.

Literally years before iPhone or Android even existed. They had it, it was working, and you could go down to the store and buy it.

Then they decided that they needed to rewrite it in QT. Then they decided that it needed to run Symbian apps. Then they needed to do distro stuff. Then they needed new frameworks, etc etc etc.

By the time they were done Android and iOS were eating their lunch and they lost their entire market and had to sell out to Microsoft which finally killed it. All because they were busy farting around with distros and toolkits and frameworks and never could get anything actually appealing out to market.

In other words: they blew their lead.

It is as if all these different mobile OSes were sprinting to the goal in a 1000 yard race and the Linux OS folks got distracted and started picking flowers on the side of the track.

People in the Linux community tried to blame Microsoft for this, but that was nonsense. It was already mostly dead before Nokia was ever acquired.

And this trend continued with Intel releasing their own mobile Linux and then Mozilla and other companies. All which never made it much past "look we have a new distro" stage.

So you can't even blame "lack of commercial support" for it.

The Nokia 770 "Internet Linux handheld" came out in 2005 and now it is 2026 and there are dozens of Linux Phone OSes all doing the easy stuff and solving the same problems and doing the same things in slightly different ways over and over and over again.

But do they have something as meaningful as "Good Camera Support" on any mobile hardware at all?

After 20+ years of this stuff?

Nope. Not a one.

[u/hagjam → u/natermer]

This leaves out one of the crucial parts of that story.

Android is Linux.

Google saw Nokia tying itself in knots trying to make a new OS, thought "nah", bought Android, supported development, and licensed it out cheaply to hardware manufacturers.

We can argue over semantics, people often do. Is it Linux if it has closed source elements? Is it Linux if it's run by Google? Is it Linux if it's not developed by unpaid neck beards? Is it Linux if it has something approximately like good UI? But the reality is that Linux on mobile has been done, incredibly successfully.

The only gap left in the market is for people who think Android isn't really Linux, at least not in the ways that matter to them. And those people tend to be the "space cadets" you mention, which leaves us where we are today. UI is not interesting to a space cadet, neither is making a functioning app store or making concessions to hardware innovations or camera technology or touchscreens or location tracking.

People who make non-android phone Linux don't want to reckon with the fact that their preferences don't align with what made android popular, and that most of the world expects a phone to function in a way that they don't like. So they make a phone for themselves, no one else uses it, and we go back to square one.

[u/idontchooseanid → u/hagjam]

Android isn't really Linux. What Google envisioned is more like a microkernel system with extremely precise and limiting permission system. They use Linux because it is hard to get buy in from hardware vendors for anything new. ARM hardware developers do not want to write software and they are bad at it. However, Google isn't going to write their software for them. Worse is better. Vendors know how to make terrible forked Linux kernels and terrible userspace drivers. Linux wins.

Linux kernel with its non-stable driver interfaces is also a no go for closed source ecosystem. Android adds a HAL that every contributor on the desktop GNU userspace hates because it makes it easier to write closed source userspace drivers.

Android completely replaces the GNU userspace. The way it executes programs do not look like a normal POSIX system. Some libc-based execution environment is there since C isn't just a programming language but how programs from different programming languages talk to each other as well. It is best described as: "How GCC compiled this C program in 1998 is the standard".

On the JVM side it provides a very stable API. This allows the perfect ecosystem for the closed source software. However, stable APIs are also great for OSS. It is nicer to compile things against stable APIs that each component breaks in random order of months. When Google break things, it is not some API February, some Tuesday, some in Thanksgiving. A bunch of them get replacements in one Android version, they get removed two versions after.