the way things are going Europeans are gonna have to start fleeing to China to get a semblance of free speech 🤣

What I’m saying is that you could make an architecture similar to M1 which would have the same benefits of being fast and energy efficient, and slap a tailored Linux distro on top of it that just work out of the box. As a dev, I’d buy a decently built laptop like that in a second.

I’m really amazed that it’s been half a decade now and nobody has made a comparable SoC using ARM or RISCV tailored to Linux.

Completely agree, MacOS is turning into a dumpster fire. They keep adding features nobody asked for, and making the whole thing more bloated and flaky in the process.

MS ended support for it, so it won’t get security updates or fixes going forward.

the only brainrot here is your own

I always thought that Minix was a superior architecture to be honest.

Yeah, the foundation exists and it’s just going to be a question of building out on top of it. It’s also worth noting that the app ecosystem outside google is starting to become fairly complete as well. I find that in practice I only use a handful of apps such as email client, messenger, music player, weather app, a browser, a maps app, and a calendar. That accounts for most of what I do on my phone day to day, and there are mature open source options for all of these apps.

I imagine building on existing AOSP project like GrapheneOS or LineageOS would be the easiest path forward. There is already a decent ecosystem of open source apps available. You’d still need to figure out what to do with proprietary apps like Slack that regular people might need for day to day use.

Ultimately, the problem lies in lack of a hardware vendor willing to take make open phones that are geared towards running a custom OS on without having to jailbreak them. I really think the only way this can happen is if there was a vendor that focuses on providing a full stack open source system for mobile. Maybe a company like Liberux or even Framework will succeed at doing something like that at some point.

Liberux is using waydroid to add compatibility from what I’ve seen, so that may be the way forward where you have a base Linux system, and then a layer for running Android apps on top of it.

I’m incredibly excited about Asahi Linux, and it’s amazing to see just how much progress they’ve made with it. M series architecture is strictly superior to anything else that’s currently available, and being able to run Linux on it is really great. The only thing that I miss with it is hibernation, but that’s really not that big of a deal when it comes to day to day usage.

One huge impact mass FOSS adoption would have is that there would be a lot less software and hardware churn. Commercial nature of proprietary technology is the main driver for constant upgrade cycles we see. Companies need to constantly sell products to stay in business, and this means you have to deprecate old software and hardware in order to sell new versions of the product.

Windows 11 roll out is a perfect example. Vast majority of Windows 10 users are perfectly happy with the way their computer works currently, they’re not demanding any new features, they just want their computer to continue to work the way it does currently. However, Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 and now they’re forced to buy a new computer to keep doing what they’ve been doing.

This problem goes away entirely with open source because there is no commercial incentive at play. If a piece of software works, and there is a community of users using it, then it can keep working the way it does indefinitely. Furthermore, in cases where a software project goes in a directions some users don’t like, such as the case with Gnome, then software can be forked by users who want to go in a different direction or preserve original functionality. This is how Cinnamon and Mate projects came about.

Another aspect of the open source dynamic is that there’s an incentive to optimize software. So, you can get continuous performance improvements without having to constantly upgrade your hardware. For most commercial software, there’s little incentive to do that since that costs company money. It’s easier to just expect users to upgrade their hardware if they want better performance.

I would argue that non technical software users would be far better off if they had the option to fund open source software instead of buying commercial versions. Even having to pay equal amounts, the availability of the source puts more power in the hands of the users. For example, building on the example of Gnome, users of an existing software project could also pull funds together to pay developers to add features to the software or change functionality in a particular way.

This is precisely what makes licenses like GPL so valuable in my opinion. It’s a license that ensure the source stays open, and in this way inherently gives more power to the users.

Yup, it’s frustrating that there’s still no process that’s easy enough for a non techie to go through easily.

Yeah basically, a turn key solution where your machine gets wiped and imaged with a Linux distro that does all the basic stuff most people need would be an ideal solution. A good way to look at it would be making sort of a Linux based console for non technical users as opposed to a general purpose computer. Tech people want the latter, but non technical users just want a reliable tool that can reliably handle a few tasks.

Indeed, it kills me how much perfectly hardware is constantly thrown out because Windows refuses to run on it.

I think the trick has to be that somebody who has a bit of technical skill sets the laptop up initially. I did this for my mom a while back, and once I set it up once, it just worked from there on. Non technical users tend to have a fairly small set of things they need to do like check email, browser the web, and play media. Once that’s working, they never need to change anything. In fact, they don’t want to change anything because they get used to the workflow, and they’re comfortable.

It would be great if people set up community centres where people can bring their old laptops, and somebody switches them over to Linux for them.

:)

Yeah, pi3 isn’t quite there yet to drive a laptop. I expect RISCV to mature rapidly as well. There’s going to be a ton of money poured into it, and it’s always easier to do things the second time around. Apple has done a lot of the hard work designing the architecture o M series chips, and I imagine a lot of it will inspire RISCV designs now. This project in particular seems pretty promising as it specifically aims to deliver high performance designs https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan

wonder if they use riscv chips