
Mobile NixOS: The Present and the Future - buovjaga
https://samuel.dionne-riel.com/blog/2019/08/21/mobile-nixos-the-present-and-future.html
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k__
Nice!

I think Nix and NixOS is the best thing that happened to the Linux ecosystem
in the last ten years. Good that it spreads to mobile.

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lame-robot-hoax
I'd like to try it but to be honest I'm a bit too lazy to go through with the
current install process. If they were to adopt the calamares installer though,
or develop their own graphical install, I'd love to give it a try. Same with
Void.

~~~
adamtulinius
In my opinion that would only be useful to help with creating partitions and
file systems. The rest of the install process is basically creating your
system configuration (and there's a helper tool for that), and a single
command to perform the install.

What do you think a graphical installer should do for the user?

~~~
k__
I think maybe a wizard would help?

Like, you choose the type of the PC and then it takes you through some steps
to get the right config and packages going.

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ImNotTheNSA
> Any device not allowing that is, simply put, not respecting the intelligence
> of the user.

This is kind of a silly absolutist opinion. Sure, you should have an option to
have a completely open mobile OS... but to say that any OS with other
priorities than complete “openness” is disrespectful is to throw literally
every other consideration to the wind. I mean... really, what about security?

Ideologues tend to forget about reality, sometimes, it seems. Verified app
stores, for example, are about providing security to the end user, not about
disrespecting the end user.

I can’t help but feel like ideologically driven projects like often almost
immediately discredit themselves with crap like this. Their software comes off
as about making some statement, not providing something great, novel, and
beneficial to people.

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tathougies
Um.... he's not saying OSes with other priorities are disrespectful. He's
saying that devices that are designed to make it difficult for their _owners_
to install their own software on it (sometimes going so far as to attempt to
make it illegal) are being disrespectful to their purchasers.

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Tehchops
How do you reconcile that when it's very likely allowing even a small
population of "owners" to install unverified software ends up directly harming
the majority of the other "owners".

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chriswarbo
I'm not sure why you put scare quotes around the word "owner". Personally, I'd
like to know what "harm" you think is inflicted by, say, the presence of a
hardware jumper.

Also, in case you didn't know, there's been a lot of thought and effort
expended over the decades about the philosophy, morals and implementation of
ownership with regards to hardware and software. I recommend starting with a
resource like [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy)

~~~
freehunter
Let's put it this way then: what's the harm in the Raspberry Pi to allow SSH
right out of the box? That's up to the owner right? I shouldn't have to
configure it, it should just work. Except people who aren't Linux or security
experts leave it with the default config and the system quickly gets absorbed
into a botnet that negatively impacts everyone else on the Internet.

You can't think of anything connected to the Internet as completely "owned" by
any one person. The Internet is a hivemind of machines and humans, and every
single person has the ability to impact many other people. Even
unintentionally, even unknowingly.

If we want complete personal ownership of every device in our possession, I'm
all for it. But that would require every person who owns a device connected to
the Internet to take full personal responsibility for anything that happens
on/from their device that negatively impacts others. Would you be okay with me
suing you personally because one of your devices got infected with malware and
slowed down my home Internet connection? Would you be okay with me suing your
grandmother?

There is hardware and software out there for people who can handle that
responsibility. The majority of Internet users can't handle it, though. That's
why the majority of Internet-connected devices don't allow people to meddle
with things they can't understand.

The GNU philosophy is a great ideal to strive for, but like with most ideals
it doesn't handle reality very gracefully. With complete ownership comes
complete responsibility, and very few people are ready to take complete
responsibility for what their Internet-connected device does.

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simion314
You are very extremist in your possition, you can have extreme safe configs by
default, then give an escape from jail to power users like Crheombooks have
done or other devices that give you the option to install a different OS , Is
your grandma formatting her PC and installing Linux ? IF yes great but
probably she is not and she will also not flash her iOS device with a
different firmwere either.

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freehunter
Richard Stallman is very extreme in his position. I’m just stating the reason
why the status quo is a good thing. Agreeing with the way things currently
exist is not an extreme position.

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traverseda
>Would you be okay with me suing you personally because one of your devices
got infected with malware and slowed down my home Internet connection? Would
you be okay with me suing your grandmother?

That's definitely not the status quo, it's also a pretty extreme position.

~~~
freehunter
Of course not, that's the bleak alternate reality. The status quo is "you
don't actually _own_ your device". Apple or Google finds malware in an app and
they remove it from your device automatically. That's the status quo. The
status quo is if you get malware on your PC and it negatively impacts other
people on the Internet, nothing happens and you're not punished for it so
others suffer from your lack of ownership. That's the status quo.

The statement you quoted is what would happen if everyone were to actually
completely own their own Internet-connected devices and took full
responsibility for them. It's not a comforting idea. People like to throw
around words like "ownership" but shy away when related words like
"responsibility" show up.

I'm personally liable for the damage my car causes, because I own my car. I'm
not personally liable for the damage my computer causes. Do people actually
want to be? That's what ownership means.

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traverseda
Cars are required to implement safety standards. You're not taking full
responsibility for your car, the company you bought it from is responsible for
selling a product that's safe.

If you modify your car to be unsafe, then you're responsible.

People can own their phones/computers, they can be allowed to disable safety
features, while still holding companies responsible for implementing a safe
product.

It should be entirely possible to completely own your car/phone/whatever while
still largely holding the company responsible for the users safety.

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c-smile
Interesting.

I am thinking of making Sciter Engine as a chrome for mobile devices. So
mobile UI can be defined in terms of HTML/CSS with code-behind-UI written in
C/C++ or script.

Conceptually that would be close to FirefoxOS but more inclined into native
side. Or at least will have more flexibility in this respect.

Is it interesting at all?

~~~
ptrott2017
Definitely of interest. Also of interest would be using Sciter for embedded
(but not mobile) apps. Its a natural fit for certain markets.

Are you still considering open sourcing Sciter? I personally hope so - but
also know how much is involved in going down that path.

~~~
c-smile
"would be using Sciter for embedded apps" that is not a problem already. E.g.
it runs on ARMs like Raspberry Pi. SDK contains binaries that use GTK but it
is possible to run it without any window manager. Access to FB or video memory
is enough.

As of OpenSource, yes I have plans for that. The only problem is that OS is a
great responsibility, at least for me. It is going to be a significant effort
to document source code, etc. I am actively looking for sponsors for the
effort.

~~~
ptrott2017
re: embedded - I thought as much - I think it likely just needs some use cases
and marketing to drive adoptions.

Regarding Open source / sponsorship / support: - Andrew I will follow up
directly via email over weekend.

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Fnoord
I would love to have deduplication on OS on mobile; it is a horror to go back
to previous state.

Do you plan on allowing other projects such as AOSP forks, UT, Sailfish,
postmarketOS to work on top if Mobile NixOS? So a project like Mer was?

[Edit: To answer my own question: GitHub page says its heavily based on
postmarketOS]

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kstenerud
I'm just waiting for them to solve the problem of the package manager taking
multiple gigabytes of memory to run. My last experience with it involved a lot
of "unable to fork: Cannot allocate memory". It's insane that a package
manager would even exceed even 100mb of memory usage, let alone run into
multiple gigabytes. No way there's that much information to manage.

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taktoa
That's actually just a command line infelicity; the advice to use `nix-env -i
foobar` is really misguided, and you can avoid excessive memory usage by doing
`nix-env -iA nixos.foobar` (or `nixpkgs.foobar` if you are using it on a non-
NixOS machine). The difference is that in the former case, `foobar` is a
regular expression that is being matched against the `name` field of every
package in nixpkgs, whereas in the latter case, `foobar` is an attribute path
that is used to traverse the nested Nix objects that make up nixpkgs. Since
Nix is lazy, the former results in evaluating a LOT of stuff, whereas the
latter does not.

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kstenerud
Even if it were evaluating the entire library of Congress, there's no valid
reason for it to consume gigabytes of memory. I really can't understand why
this is so...

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ingenieroariel
Are you thinking regular NixOS with kde or more like notOS + sway?

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eterps
What's 'notOS'?

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Ericson2314
[https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os](https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os)

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fsiefken
It would be nice if I could use NixOS through Termux on Android.

~~~
manveru
There is [https://github.com/t184256/nix-in-
termux](https://github.com/t184256/nix-in-termux)

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Ericson2314
Very excited to use this and buy a librem 5 for it.

