I have OnePlus 6T with Droidian and must say it is this close to daily drive for me.
Everything works and there are apps for almost everything I need. As someone who uses only FOSS social media and things, there is Mastodon and Matrix client, I just lack maps with navigation (can use Organic Maps via Waydroid). Beyond that what is left is polish and tiny things, like for the performance or support for controlling media via buttons on bluetooth speaker.
I also tried PostmarketOS, that is adapting real Linux to phones (when Droidian is taking Linux kernel and drivers from Android and building on that). It is great if someone can get around lack of camera support etc., but for me now it can act like a second device or RPi alternative.
The ability to… you know, just use normal SSH and all the commands, Flatpak apps, all Pipewire tools, not fiddling with Android Studio and it’s stupid SDK or customizing my UI with just CSS is magical.
Seriously, fuck Google and Qualcomm for creating such hostile drivers ecosystem. There are brands like Fairphone that I think would happly support Linux but can’t because of Qualcomm only releasing their own vendor kernel prepared only for Android.
Okey, I understand this is fundamental and when not working can cause the service to stop working. But I don’t yet know how does it break or is not easy to troubleshoot?
Haven’t hosted anything big yet, so I always just had to check the records via “dig” command if they are served correctly.
You can do an alias for the shell you use or make a symlink to /usr/local/bin/ for the entire system.
There are importany reasons why this is not the default, but you can do it as long as you are away you have done it. Like when programs installed via package manager and flatpak starts conflicting, you’ll know why.
And this is a huge barrier for a lot of users, a massive roadblock. But the article talk about houndres of millions of computers, my point was just about that even if millions like you cannot switch, still in this statistics are millions that can especially non-professional that do not make audio or video, but that are going to throw away a working machine.
I feel like you might feel being personally directed by my comment, because of your respond with “YOU’re not compatible”. Maybe it was bad wording, sorry. What I ment was that it can be frustrating to see “Linux doesn’t support …” when actually it has everything needed to support this software and the burden to make it available is on the software developer. Like saying that USB-C doesn’t support iPhone 13. Lack of it still hurts the Linux side anyway, but I just don’t want misconsaptions about which side should make a port happen.
For 240 million devices I think there would be some Linux can “cut it”. And second, no? My computer is 13+ years old and I am using it with basically no lagging, developing a couple of apps. Truth is all medium-tier computers made today and in recent years have reached the point where for normal use (that is daily tasks like communication, content consumption and calculations) only limiting factor for daily driver is software optimization.
Use whatever is popular and has a cool logo. Distro is basically a software library, preinstalled programs and default settings. You can transform any distro to behave like the other one.
KDE, Gnome, XFCE…? Which is looking better for you or which one was default. Init system? Which was the default. X11/Wayland? Wayland. Go with X11 only if Wayland is having problems with your graphics card.
There are many many outdated patterns how to do things in Windows that are cemented in public knowledge. Running random executable installers from the web giving them superuser permissions is I thing the most popular one.
How to share all user settings between system installations? How to change the logo in the desktop bar? How to add a directory to an applications bar? How to change system build-in keyboard shortcut? How to reinstall just the system keeping the programs? How to make a file run on a shortcut? Those are things I use daily, that are impossible or need some hacky programs to work on anything other than Linux, I would die if I had to switch back now.
Marketing is monopolized with Google and Facebook. Manufacturers and Microsoft won’t make one-click installs happen. Tech support would be chicken and egg problem. Ugh…
But a ton of people can open a PDF and will be able to select an USB stick from menu and click next, next, next… It’s not completely different, you still use a mouse, a keyboard, you click on things, you get some feedback from it… When a new kind of mobile app arrive, I can see someone using no more than 5 apps in life having problems, but this doesn’t mean only them exists, we do not talk about switching everyone here. People change houses, how are they figuring out where is the toilet if doors have different color and are in different positions?
Also a reason why any software like Microsoft Windows or Office should be banned from public education, especially primary schools.