This is more exciting to me than the other hardware announcements. Linux on a phone that can have both a desktop mode and gaming right in my pocket? It’s the dream.
Desktop Linux on phone (or even better, tablet) hardware would be very interesting to me. But with how locked down bootloaders are in those devices? I don’t have much hope for them currently.
Big kinda. Ubuntu touch is a thing. There are only a handful of phones for which it fully works on. I have one of them (a Fairphone 5). It’s pretty bare bones, but it seems fairly responsive with good battery life. The most recent version of the OS even has snapd baked into the OS, so you would think that it would mean I’m spoiled for choice in terms of applications but you run into an issue when trying to install the first of my only two deal breaker applications Bitwarden.
Bitwarden can be installed with snapd, but an arm64 version doesn’t exist and the install fails. That’s pretty indicative of what a Linux mobile phone effort is up against. Valve bridging the gap between ARM and Linux gives me a sliver of hope that we see a little more support from more applications for ARM more generally.
This is more exciting to me than the other hardware announcements. Linux on a phone that can have both a desktop mode and gaming right in my pocket? It’s the dream.
Desktop Linux on phone (or even better, tablet) hardware would be very interesting to me. But with how locked down bootloaders are in those devices? I don’t have much hope for them currently.
Yeah that’s downside.
Big kinda. Ubuntu touch is a thing. There are only a handful of phones for which it fully works on. I have one of them (a Fairphone 5). It’s pretty bare bones, but it seems fairly responsive with good battery life. The most recent version of the OS even has snapd baked into the OS, so you would think that it would mean I’m spoiled for choice in terms of applications but you run into an issue when trying to install the first of my only two deal breaker applications Bitwarden.
Bitwarden can be installed with snapd, but an arm64 version doesn’t exist and the install fails. That’s pretty indicative of what a Linux mobile phone effort is up against. Valve bridging the gap between ARM and Linux gives me a sliver of hope that we see a little more support from more applications for ARM more generally.