
PostmarketOS Project Direction 2020 - ajr0
https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/postmarketos/issues/11
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akvadrako
It would be great if PostmarketOS got serious about supporting at least one
recent phone completely.

The link above mentions Bluetooth and Camera as “nice to haves”. I would love
to get away from google but half the point in a phone is the camera.

~~~
xorcist
If the aim is to get away from Google, it is probably best to run something
more Android-like, such as LineageOS or GrapheneOS. Stick to well supported
hardware and it will just work. PostmarketOS is more like a generic embedded
system.

~~~
skykooler
How is that "getting away from google" if they're both based on Android, which
is a Google-developed operating system?

~~~
sandov
Yeah, but they don't include proprietary Google apps such as Google Play
services and all the crap that depends on it. Only open source stuff.

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Jonnax
I was wondering, the Nvidia Shield uses a Tegra X1 chip, which if I recall
correctly was nice in that it uses the full open GL rather than ES.

I remember seeing their have a Distro called Linux for Tegra:

[https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/linux-
tegra](https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/linux-tegra)

Shouldn't this make it an easy device to run something like Postmarket OS? Of
course it's non free drivers. But in terms of getting a device working, I'm
not sure why it isn't used more.

~~~
Fnoord
If one of the devs wants the device to port PostmarketOS to it, I got a spare
one (its a K1 ie. the remake of the orig. Nvidia Shield Tablet. Not that they
differ much).

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z0mbie42
I love this project!

What I would really love to see happen in 2020:

* Refocus and prioritize tasks according to available resources (people, time)

* Better communicate what is done and what need to be done (Roadmaps, using GitLab milestones for example) for people wanting to contribute.

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rijoja
Anyone using this having any recommendation of hardware?

~~~
z0mbie42
The PinePhone is the device which receive the most attention, but I'm not sure
of it's currently usable.

~~~
MisterTea
I have a PinePhone running PostMarketOS. Issues (remember its alpha software):
A bunch of programs did not open at all such as the image viewer, web browser
and some others. Camera program opened but couldn't connect to camera. No
cellular radio support means no calls, mobile data, or sms. Wifi works so you
can do all the fun admin and developer tasks. USB OTG also doesn't work so USB
things like keyboards, mice and USB sticks plugged in via a USB C->A adapter
didn't work. Sound didn't work for me But those are all solvable problems.

I haven't booted it in two weeks but I was able to get it to build and run
drawterm (plan 9 terminal emulator) without much effort save for downloading a
few libraries. No input as KDE Plasma uses a different input method than x11
so until a shim or patch, x11 programs probably won't work out of the box. In
the case of drawterm, it connected to my CPU server and displayed the login
prompt. But tapping the screen did not bring up the keyboard so I could not
log in.

Conclusion: Owning a modern open smartphone is liberating. It feels like a PC
in the sense you can just download distro images, write to SD, boot from said
SD and even install to mmc. Once things progress you can do all of that right
on the phone so you can test new mobile OS's on the go without plugging
anything in. KDE plasma feels like a real mobile OS and worked surprisingly
well. Updates for the entire OS are done from the alpine package manager.
Building software on the phone felt liberating. My phone has a compiler and
developer tools. I really hope the Pine Phone is my daily driver within a year
or so.

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rijoja
hm so one of the things least supported seems to be calls.. What can be done
to make this happen? Should it happen?

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ForHackernews
Pass legislation that requires manufacturers of modem chipsets to open-source
their firmware and driver blobs. That's the biggest obstacle.

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bluGill
We don't need open source blobs, we just need documentation on how to use
them.

Open source blobs would be good for other reasons, but it isn't required to
use them.

~~~
ForHackernews
If all you have is a binary blob, doesn't that prevent you from ever
recompiling it for use on a new OS or kernel?

~~~
bluGill
That is normally irrelevant where it is true.

Some binary blobs are just firmware, and so you just need to know how to load
it into the radio - this is generally trivial to port to something else.
However you still need to know how to access the blob and that is often
restricted.

Even where it needs to run in the local OS, it is physically soldered onto a
board - nobody is going to put it in a different phone so the CPU is already
know. As such it isn't hard to write an emulator for the parts of the host OS
it needs. *BSD can run linux apps as if on a native linux kernel (they are
generally a few years behind the latest linux kernel but that is typically
good enough), and Wine allows running windows apps: the same thing can apply
to blobs that need to run in your OS. However you need to know how to access
the functions in the blob which is often not known.

Of course it is possible for a blob read/write to random places in memory in a
way that works only for a specific kernel. If a blob does this it is very
difficult to port to anything else (you have to figure out where it might
write and ensure you never use that memory). This is rare and evil enough that
if a blob is caught doing this kernel developers will make changes such that
the blob won't run (blobs that do this tend to have bugs such that the entire
OS is unstable and users blame the OS not the blob)

