I have a question how did you deal with device trees, was that public available
Yes: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/linux/-/tree/pureos/latest/arch/arm64/boot/dts/freescale
Purism are cool people and they have indeed built a smartphone that’s as open as possible. The problem is that it’s slow :( Not really their fault.
all you did was hammer out configs
Yeah, that’s my point, all the software is there already, with a little bit of persuasion and glue it runs fairly well together. I’m not claiming I wrote actual drivers or whatever. What I did was figured out how to adapt the existing software to work on NixOS, so you can just take your desktop NixOS config, add a couple lines to it, and run it on the phone.
Now you have a phone where half the hardware doesn’t work
All hardware on Librem 5 worked with NixOS as I expected. The reason I’m not dailying it anymore is because the hardware kinda sucks, it’s outdated and slow. If I could get the same software stack running on more modern hardware I’d gladly use it. Perhaps the battery life could be improved if the power management was better, but that’s about my only complaint software-wise.
Without a solid BASE, and a DRIVER LAYER, you won’t have a successful project to push a UI of anything
I’m not sure what you mean by “solid BASE”. Do you want to rewrite all of the existing software that implements the “desktop Linux” userspace? Who would be doing this and why, when existing stuff mostly works?
“DRIVER LAYER” in the FOSS world is just Linux. Drivers can live in the Linux tree or as small patches on top of it, with common open interfaces allowing compatibility between software and hardware. Just like they have been doing on the desktop for the past 30 years. The problem is plain: there are no open-source drivers or documentation for most phone hardware. Vendors don’t have this issue because they have access to private documentation and the sources of proprietary drivers. Writing FOSS drivers requires reverse-engineering the proprietary drivers, which is very resource-intensive. The proprietary drivers that are there lock you into a particular Linux version (usually a very particular Linux version, and there’s no way to solve this with any driver layer, at least without sacrificing performance and resource usage) and sometimes have proprietary interfaces with the userspace as well, which aren’t easy to write a compat layer for (if that’s what you’re proposing). And in any case, if you are fine with proprietary stuff running in EL1, why not just run Android?
All this is completely orthogonal to making a DE on top of open standards, which is the point of open standards. For hardware that works with (mostly) mainline Linux, desktop userspace with plasma-mobile/phosh on top work well enough already. For hardware that doesn’t, adding support is a lot of work, not because of any issues with the DE or userspace, but because hardware manufacturers don’t publish the driver sources.
I’ve built and run Mobile NixOS on my OnePlus 6 (without modem, fingerprint or GPU accel support but meh) before it became officially supported (this was relatively easy, compared to most other vendors, but did require a bunch of hacking to get the Linux fork OnePlus provides to work with the Nix kernel compilation machinery and the NixOS userspace).
I have also implemented initial support for running NixOS proper on Librem 5, packaged/fixed some stuff 1 2 3 (and more which didn’t make it to nixpkgs) to make it semi-daily-usable with Plasma Mobile, and daily-used it for a couple of weeks and then on and off for a couple of months.
I know how mobile Linux works, from the bootloader to the kernel to the userspace to the DE to apps that run on it. I also have a cursory understanding of how Android works, enough to know that it’s not feasible to build “a base that replaces AOSP”, let alone make it work with vendor-provided driver blobs and proprietary Android apps (which is what you’re proposing?). What manufacturers actually do is take AOSP, patch it to fit their needs/work with their shitty drivers, and ship it on the device as a bunch of blobs because it’s Apache-licensed.
Elon’s companies are the epitome of the hype-cycle-based stock market manipulation. Take something somewhat useful (EVs, self-driving cars, reusable rockets, …), spend a bunch of VC cash on building an MVP and advertising, make that advertising overpromise every feature by 300% and just send it. People will buy the stock because of the hype, then buy the product (if applicable) because they own the stock, then be forced to “still like the truck tho”/“COLONIZE MARS” for years, regardless of the actual quality (or lack thereof) of the product, because otherwise their stocks might go down.
And abstracting the hardware is what you do when you make drivers
Yes, what I’m saying is that Mobile Linux people are typically doing just that, sometimes also trying to upstream it as well. I don’t see how else they could be “working on abstracting the hardware”.
That is AOSP, which is comparable to your distro
AOSP is more than your distro, it’s like the combination of all the gubbins that make your desktop computer work - rendering layer, compositor, unified device interfaces (like bluetooth or the battery), network management, audio, etc; whereas a typical Linux distro is simply a combination of all these already existing things.
Phones tend to have more specialized and proprietary hardware, so you can’t just take the standard Linux kernel, use it there, and call it a day.
Eh, you sort of can on some phones, e.g. OnePlus 5 and 6; on some others it’s just a couple dozen patches away from working.
But I’d be surprised if the people working on this weren’t aware of that fact, and I hope they are working on abstracting the hardware layers more so that every mobile Linux project doesn’t have to start from scratch every time.
The problem with other phones isn’t “abstracting the hardware” (this is done by the Linux kernel), it’s reverse-engineering the drivers so that they run on whatever kernel you want and use the open standards required by the “desktop linux” userspace. In fact, if you look at the “supported devices” list for all those mobile Linux distros you’ll find a fairly similar set; that’s simply all devices for which manufacturer’s (or reverse-engineered) drivers are available. It’s not like FOSS people are writing drivers specifically for their distro, which wouldn’t work with any other - only corporate Android vendors do that!
solid base
GNU+Linux
driver layer
Linux
and then UI layer.
Plasma mobile
The split is already there, the problem is that most Android phone manufacturers never publish the drivers (let alone make them open-source) and the only way to get anything but stock image running is to just rip parts out of the stock image, which significantly limits what you can put below it (i.e. Linux version) and on top of it (i.e Android Java gubbins). And you can’t “just replace AOSP”, as it’s a huge complicated thing (kind of by design) which allows vendors to tightly couple the drivers to the system image. The idea of all these “mobile Linux-es” is to get rid of AOSP entirely, replacing it with “desktop Linux userspace” (systemd, musl, D-BUS, NetworkManager, pipewire, upower, mpris, libnotify, Qt/GTK, Plasma/Gnome, etc etc etc). A DE is an integral part of this; you can’t build and run Nova launcher just with Wayland and Pipewire but without Dalvik and Android SDK/NDK, and remaking all of that from scratch would be an insanely hard undertaking.
To put it another way,
Get a good base that is removed from Google, THEN do this project.
This project is required if you want to make a “good base”, otherwise that “good base” would just be an empty TTY that you can’t interact with because there’s no on-screen keyboard; besides, that “base” is already there and has been for 20 years, what’s missing is the drivers.
Next time a consumer get stuck with a practically irreplaceable battery because it’s too expensive from a company, they will look at other companies selling equivalent products, AND how much they are charging for batteries.
No. Just look at the current phone market. The average consumer doesn’t care enough about repairs down the road, or at least it doesn’t affect their purchasing decisions, they are mostly driven by convenience and familiarity. If what you’re saying was true, everyone would be buying fairphones.
I also imagine a business of spare parts because just having to give the right data, e.g. specifications like cell, module, pack, C-rate, E-rate, SOC, DOD, voltage, capacity, energy, cycle life, but also connectors and just size, will probably open up dedicated spare part vendors.
Those specs are already widely available for many phones and in fact you can buy aftermarket 3rd-party batteries for most of them. The problem is that battery replacements are painful, require specialized equipment (at least a hotplate, suction cup, spudger for most phones) and skills (not breaking the screen/glass back, unglueing the battery without exploding it, then carefully glueing everything back together etc). This is what the law should be addressing first; if it were easy to replace batteries (like a 1-minute job instead of 30-minute job), you would see a lot more DYI replacements and probably way longer lasting phones on average.
Cool!
However,
While 3D geometry is more difficult for me than 2D, I could almost immediately tell that the answer is no, there are infinitely many points H that satisfy this. The reason it’s unintuitive is that our intuition about what “perpendicular” means comes from 2D and poorly translates to 3D.
The most intuitive explanation I can muster is this: imagine all possible planes that pass through both A and P. It should be obvious that there are infinitely many of them (I visualize it as a plane “rotating” around the AP axis). Each of these planes intersects the given plane since it passes through A. Think of the intersection line. It never passes through P (unless P is on the plane), so it is always possible to draw a perpendicular line from P to that intersection line. With one exception (when the perpendicular line falls on the A point), the point where the perpendicular falls satisfies the conditions for H. (I think all such points actually form a circle with AP’ as the diameter, where P’ is the parallel projection of P to the given plane, but I’m not 100% sure)
Eh, honestly it’s, like, functional (you can recognize it and draw a facsimile of it in 3 minutes with two pens). I wouldn’t call “it pretty good”.
It means they can find out where it was purchased and by whom.
How? Do the e-waste centers keep track of the shit you take from there? Not where I live, they can sometimes give you stuff for free. Or you can just pick it up on ebay/craigslist/garage sale, that works too. Good luck tracking that.
All of them. Again, this is required by Android ToS.
I strongly doubt that because on my two last phones (OnePlus 5 & POCO M5) I didn’t have to log in to a Google account with the default ROM, there was an obvious “Skip” button in the lower left corner when prompted to log in. Can you point me towards that ToS or a screenshot of an unskippable “Sign in to Google” screen on a consumer smartphone?
That burner phone can still be traced back to you.
Depending on what that means, sure. Most likely scenario is that you get apprehended, can’t discard the phone for whatever reason, and the cops search it. In that case yeah sure it can be traced back to you.
If you are careful and only use it for (careful) photography and maps (as OP requested), then I feel like it can’t really be traced back to you if you discard it or give it to someone else etc, except maybe fingerprints and DNA (but cops likely won’t have the resources to do that for everyone in the entire protest). And for situations like this it a digital camera or a paper map could be traced all the same.
All “feature phones” are running some form of Android
I’m not talking about “feature phones”. Just a regular old midrange smartphone. E.g. the original Samsung Galaxy A-series.
That burner phone is likely going to require you to sign into a Google account with a phone number before it will do absolutely anything
Some of them will, sure. Check before buying (or just make a new Google account without linking it to a phone number - might require a VPN to somewhere else but doable). I’ve had plenty of smartphones where you can just skip it. You won’t have access to Google Play and such but that might be a bonus :)
Android requires this in their ToS
I’m too lazy to check but I highly doubt it - Google is not available in China at all and yet there are plenty of Android smartphones sold there. Also Android is mostly open-source and different vendors can and do build different versions of it.
As others said, you can reuse burner phones, and they can be really really cheap. You can get a 10-year-old midrange phone from an e-waste place for free or close to that, replace the battery (which tends to be much easier on old phones), and it will do everything you need just fine. I think it’s the sweet-spot between convenience (e.g. navigation is really useful if the crowd carries you to part of the city you don’t know, taking photos/videos, etc) and safety (even if you get caught, and are forced to unlock the phone, there’s virtually nothing on it that cops can rummage through). Just make sure to pre-download maps and other resources you may need (for maps on a cheap old device I would recommend this: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/app.comaps.fdroid), but don’t log in to any accounts. Unless you really need to communicate with others over the phone, keep the airplane mode on. If you’re savvy enough, while replacing the battery you can also physically disconnect the antennae from the modem too for extra peace of mind.
Oh, also, I don’t know about your country but in some places you can still get “anonymous” pre-paid SIMs from sellers in shady underpasses for cash. If you really must communicate with others via cellular/need mobile internet, that’s also an option to put in your burner phone. But once again, avoid logging in to any accounts or calling anyone you know unless absolutely necessary.
Yeah there’s an ICC warrant on his head, isn’t there? Although
When asked if Greece would still follow its obligations as per the Rome Statute and implement the warrants if the subjects should enter the country, Marinakis refrained from giving a direct answer ¹
Don’t forget the cop and the brown-children-bomber. Although maybe austerity cuts will make that one job as well.
Whenever I need to provide an estimate, I ask everyone on the team for their gut feeling, take the second-largest estimate and multiply by 1.5. Seems to work pretty well. (if you can’t tell I don’t know what I’m doing with management)
Not in the field, but I think it depends. It’s for sure more dangerous on average if we consider the entire world, but I feel like that’s mostly because of certain areas (US w/ toothless FAA and ATC shortage, Russia with the war&part shortages etc, …) and new Boeing aircraft.
Flying is still the safest mode of travel per km, and if you’re flying Airbus/Embraer/COMAC/pre-2010 Boeing it’s likely as safe as it was a decade ago. However it kinda sucks due to all the greenhouse gas emissions.
True enlightenment is realizing that variables don’t exist, it’s all just a sequence of bits in RAM that we assign meaning to as desired.
Ascension is realizing that bits don’t exist, it’s all just trapped electrons in transistors which we imagine to be bits.
Transcendence is realizing that transistors or code doesn’t exist, and it’s just some quarks and electrons attracted and repulsed by weird forces, vibrating and convulsing in a soup with entropy constantly rising until the heat death of the universe, of which we make futile attempts to make sense or purpose.