[sf-lug] (forw) Re: [Surrey] (forw) Re: Android

[Rick Moen]

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen via Surrey <surrey at mailman.lug.org.uk> -----

Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2022 15:52:05 -0700
From: Rick Moen via Surrey <surrey at mailman.lug.org.uk>
To: surrey at mailman.lug.org.uk
Cc: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
Subject: Re: [Surrey] (forw) Re: [sf-lug] Android
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.
Reply-To: General Linux/Unix community List <surrey at mailman.lug.org.uk>

Quoting Tom Houghton via Surrey (surrey at mailman.lug.org.uk):

> I'm looking up this Postmarket thing now.

I'm intrigued by PostmarketOS, but (for historical reasons) a little
wary.  The strong foundation in Alpine Linux is promising, and also 
(especially) their commitment/goal to ensure that handsets they
hardware-support will have ten-year service lives.


The Pine community has in the recent past favoured an ARM port of
Manjaro Linux (like Alpine Linux, another strong technical community).
That has been the default load on PinePhones, for example.

Both the PinePhone and the (newer and more hardware-endowed) PinePhone
Pro house their main OS load on internal eMMC flash storage, but _also_ 
has a MicroSD slot that can house SDHC or SDXC[1] (or prior regular
MicroSD) flash cards (as large as 2TB), which are a logical place 
to put alternate boots, for OSes one is trying out.  So, e.g., if I buy a
PinePhone Pro, I could carry around in my pocket an SD card to run
conventional Android, and onto which I could install pesky "apps" from
the Google Play Store that somehow become expedient, while having one or
more separate SD card with my choice of real Linux(es) for my preferred
mode of operation.


Some commentary out of the Pine community suggests a sizeable faction 
favour "Maemo Leste", a modern open source update of Nokia's
much-admired "Maemo" embedded Linux distribution from bygone days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo#Maemo_Leste

As you'll see at the Wikipedia link, there's been some institutional
maneouvering where Nokia bailed out of Maemo (as its fortunes ebbed), 
around 2011.  Just before that happened, Nokia attempted to merge Maemo
with now-discontinued embedded Linux distro Moblin, supposedly resulting
in the Linux Foundation-sponsored mobile platform MeeGo.  Ever-fickle
and unreliable Linux Foundation, however, almost immediately abandoned
MeeGo in 2012 in favour of Tizen (because Tizen has corporate money
behind it from Intel and Samsung, and Linux Foundation cares only about
big-money corporate interests, and not at all about the open source
community).  

Meanwhile, the Maemo community developers who inherited _actual_
governance of the project when Nokia walked away from it wisely decided
to ignore what Nokia (and Linux Foundation) had done and said, and 
have continued Maemo development (with some proprietary components left
over from the Nokia days).  Maemo Leste is an offshoot project, fully
open source, and based on Devuan.

How robust any of these communities are is an important question, and I
can only say, I'd love to know.


[1] https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmagic/sdhc-vs-sdxc.html


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