3w ago

Why postmarketOS and not Android forks?

Sorry for the blatant n00b question. I searched online, the FAQ etc. and didn't see what to me is an obvious question. Supporting old devices is great. In the PC world we have general linux, but on Android and some other consumer devices, solutions have been limited. There are Android forks(?) or implementations like LineageOS that run great. I've used non-Google Android since 2018.

So what is the motivation for yet another OS solution? There must be a reason for this project to go on and have so much enthusiasm.

We think computers should act in the interest of their users. For example, they should not participate in the privacy nightmare of targeted advertising, as it is directly built into the operating systems from Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft, as well as the apps and services recommended by them.

This is kinda FUD, right? Google-Android has a lot of privacy invasion. But there are all kinds of Android versions that are de-Googled.

My best guess right now is that it is attempting to provide a "full featured" distro for devices that run phone and tablet OSs now. So if you want a server or full coding environment on a phone, pmOS may be better suited for that than an Android "fork".

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This is kinda FUD, right? Google-Android has a lot of privacy invasion. But there are all kinds of Android versions that are de-Googled.
Well, for one that quote does also say "as well as the apps and services recommended by them". Most Android apps come with ads and tracking built-in, because Google makes it very easy to set that up in the standard Android development toolkit. Similarily, lots of Android apps require the Google Play Services.
But the open-source part of Android (AOSP) still has design decisions which work in favor of advertising. There's no internet permission for apps, for example, even though this could resolve many security concerns.
Which kind of brings me to more of a personal opinion: Android is also just bad.
Its filesystem is pretty much completely broken, because Google would prefer you put your data into their services rather than keep it offline.
Hardly anything can be scripted.
Getting admin permissions on your own device is an ordeal.
In many ways, I like the Plasma Mobile UI already better than the Android UI. And going back to my first point: The whole ecosystem is hostile.
In particular, I also like to tinker with and improve the ecosystems that I use. I do still use LineageOS, and I just set it up so it's acceptable to use, then I leave it alone, because I'd rather invest my time into ecosystems that I actually like.
- I think this is maybe best expressed as pmOS development being controlled by the community, rather than a single organisation. I'd much rather use an OS where I have confidence that the developers are acting in the users best interest, rather than their employers best interest.
  My opinion is that forks/downstreams of giant codebases like AOSP are largely going to have to accept choices made by the upstream. They can maybe pick and chose a few points where they maintain local patches, but that takes a lot of effort.
  As an example, I think most chromium-based browsers will end up dropping support for uBlock Origin because Google dropped it upstream. That's the kind of choice they [edit: i.e. google] can make in their own self-interest by virtue of controlling the project, and the reason I'd prefer to use community-developed software.
- So it's better to spend resources developing a brand new OS for Android devices, than it is to address the flaws in the Android model? I guess that makes sense.
  
  Well, it's also not really a brand new OS. In many ways, postmarketOS picks up where desktop Linux stands. There's some general integration tasks to solve, like how you can talk to the modem to make phone calls or how to deal with touch inputs, and then you may need to either update or rewrite desktop applications to make them responsive, so that they fit onto a phone screen, but then you end up with a pretty good OS relatively quickly. That is why I like the Plasma Mobile UI so much, because it's just KDE Plasma from desktop Linux with some different configurations.
  There will still be certain drawbacks, for example some people rely on proprietary apps on their Android phone to interact with their banking or whatever, which are unlikely to become available for postmarketOS. But personally, I wouldn't use these apps anyways, because they are so user hostile, so I won't miss them anyways.

Another benefit to postmarketOS is that it runs (close to) mainline linux.
In the android world, vendors fork linux, put their own (often badly written) patches on top to make the device work, and then stop maintaining this fork after a few years.
postmarketOS carries as minimal patches as possible and actively works to mainline what remains. This makes the "10 year support" goal very achievable, as once a device has mainline support, it will get updates as long as the linux kernel itself is maintained.
By making everything standard and relying on the upstream kernel and linux stack as a whole, any improvements made to phones also benefit laptop and PC users, and vice versa. So, we have one big platform that can support any kind of device, sharing resources so everyone benefits.

What ephera@lemmy.ml said, 100%
I'm still an Android user, and likely will be for while, but the amount of junk Google has built into it all designed to make their ad sales what they are is just absurd. If I had total freedom of hardware, I'd degooogle as much as android allows on non Google hardware and wait for a fully daily driver ready linux phone, but I don't currently, so I'm kinda stuck.
Besides, options are always a good thing. There's not really a downside to more OS options for people with the ability and willingness to change OS in the first place.

PostmarketOS is already better than Android in every other aspect other than camera, battery life and overall speed. It is so convenient to use QT and GTK frameworks on mobile, since they are already familiar from desktop.
I've always hated Android aspect, where every single app works differently. Settings are a mess, since each app handles them on their own way. In PostmarketOS, every app has the same UI structure in their settings. Some apps aren't updated as fast as others following the newest framework version, but that's just a minor problem.
After 14 months of daily driving pmos, I'm very satisfied with the development. From hourly reboots to daily reboots and now, never rebooting because of bugs.

8 comments