Web Excursions 2021-05-03
🌟 [Post of The Day] Will Linux phones stay around this time?
a short list of main reasons of failure per effort
Openmoko: Financial issues,
Nokia (Maemo/Meego): Change in corporate strategy (new CEO),
HPÂ (webOS): Change in corporate strategy (new CEO),
Mozilla (FirefoxOS): Change in "Corporate" strategy (shifting focus to IOT),
Canonical (Ubuntu Touch): Change in Corporate strategy (shifting focus to cloud and profitability).
now, we have a quite different situation: The year over year improvement in smartphone technology is arguably decreasing and the market can be assumed saturated.
Purism
develop their own software in house,
taking a clever, minimalist, community-enabling approach which is working quite well.
Taking as much as possible from and working with upstream projects and developing the little things they need to do:
not good at shipping phones: They recently have announced further delays and price increses
PINE64
PINE64 has been better at shipping their PinePhone.
Openmoko supposedly had 10,000 phones shipped in 2009, PINE64 have already shipped more than 3 times that amount.
it means that there's a relatively large community of both developers
Even if we were to remain limited in hardware to PinePhone and Librem 5,
postmarketOS and other efforts like Droidian are bringing all that newer Linux Phone software goodness to more devices.
projects like Ubuntu Touch and Jolla's Sailfish OS have been churning on all the time and seem to keep going.
What's needed though is that there's a good collaboration and care.
Will Linux phones stay around this time? | Hacker News
j-james, disputing: I don't understand the desire for a Linux phone as so described in the article as a daily driver.
The Android platform represents an enormous amount of work that encompasses
a more secure base kernel,
an unparalleled selection of applications designed for mobile usage and written in a memory-safe language,
fantastic sandboxing and user privacy features leagues ahead of any desktop operating system,
and great diversity in the hardware market.
significant downsides are problems that can be solved. It doesn't make sense to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Closed-source applications are more a moral problem than a security one thanks to Android's sandboxing, and a vibrant ecosystem of high-quality free-and-open-source Android applications makes them all but optional.
AussieWog93, commenting: I'd be shocked if it took off. The FOSS development paradigm seems to be allergic to good UI design, and this is far more important for people on mobile than desktop.
drums8787, corroborating: I suspect a lot of FOSS developers are CLI first type users
they are mostly not working in environments where GUI UX designers are part of the process.
good UX design doesn’t happen by committee.
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A Tech Company Tried to Limit What Employees Talk About at Work. It Didn’t Go Well.
In March, the company [Harmon Brothers LLC, a Provo, Utah-based digital marketing startup of 50] made a new rule: employees who want to post a link to the company Slack must first make a video explaining their thoughts about the link; anyone who wants to respond must record a video of their own.
Last September, the [Facebook] made it so employees could opt in or out of seeing such content in their work feed.