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We need phones with standard Linux. Without strange "Java only mediator" or something. Just a normal OS.
Android is a pain in the ass.
We need phones with standard Linux.
Already exists. Several iterations are active and work as a daily driver: phone, sms and mobile networking works reliably, apps exist. Just not as many as on Android, and some features are not part of the OS. This is enough for many to declare them "a failure". That and limited hardware support.
Google has coddled us for way too long, and at what price.
Exact! And please no bloatware!!
Oh wait, before anything else : NO, and I really mean NO AI and/or VR shit. Just none. None A T A L L
So you exclusively want ai. Got it.
-Microsoft, probably
Clippie coming right up!
I don't believe that they're likely to do GNU/Linux. I bet that they're going to do a fork of Android off AOSP or something like that.
Android's had a huge amount of work put into it to make it suitable to be a consumer mobile phone OS, and the companies here aren't doing this because they want stuff that GNU/Linux does, but rather because they're Chinese companies worried about a US-China industrial decoupling and its risks for them. Like, they were okay with the technical status; what changed was that they started to worry about having the rug pulled out from them.
That being said, I can at least imagine that helping GNU/Linux phone adoption. So, think about what happened with video games. There were some major platforms out there -- MacOS, iOS, Windows, various consoles, Android, GNU/Linux. That fragmented the market. Trying to port software to all platforms became a huge pain. What a lot of game developers did was to target a more-or-less platform-agnostic engine and let the engine handle the platform abstraction.
If the mobile OS space fragments further -- like, Android splits into "Google Android" and "China Android"
my guess is that that'll help drive demand for platform-agnostic engines to help improve portability, and porting one engine to GNU/Linux is a lot easier than every individual program.
Is this the year of the Ubuntu Touch Smartphone?
Probably not, but it should be.
How easy is it to degoogle Android? Don't currently use Android or iOS but dumb phone options are getting pretty limited these days.
If I got an Android phone I would probably be looking at something second hand because fuck paying 3 figures on a phone. I know I wouldn't use data at all, call/SMS SIM only. I guess another option is not needing to degoogle it as it will never talk to google once I have finished downloading maps of the country for OSMand and a few other apps. Then it can be on Wi-Fi to allow communication with my PC over LAN but don't allow it access to the internet.
If it never touches the internet after setup I guess outdated OS doesn't matter too much.
If you have a phone with custom ROM support, pretty easy. I've been running LineageOS without GAPPS for like 5 years now. Most stuff just works, but to be fair, I am not using any of the cool kids apps like google pay or android auto.
I just got my Pixel 9a and put GrapheneOS on it. The only thing that seems to not work right now is KDE Connect, but I'm unsure if it might be me doing something wrong rather than being impossible.
It runs just fine for me, huh. Certainly not because of lack of google services.
Maybe graphene is doing some firewall things? KDE Connect needs some ports open (to the local lan) to talk
It depends on your definition of 'deGoogle'. You can disable the Google apps on most Android phones. They'll take up storage space, but won't run.
If you're getting a second-hand phone and want to completely deGoogle it, you can check if (1) the bootloader is unlockable and (2) custom ROMs are available online (e.g. Lineage OS compatible devices). In general, Xiaomi, Motorola and Pixel devices have unlockable bootloaders, but not all their models have custom ROMs.
Google meet Zune!
You probably should've led with the fact that this is Chinese phones, not like Samsung and shit.
It makes sense for Chinese smartphone OEMs to move away from the Google version of Android. In the medium to long term you are setting up yourself for failure if you are reliant on an American company.
Unfortunately, the United States cannot be trusted.
It’s not like China can be trusted either. This is a matter of not relying on your adversary.
Sure, but with China everyone more less knew this. The US has used up the last benefit of the doubt that they had in the past 5 months.
Please, do not post clickbait
