The project, developed in partnership with veteran free software developer Rob Savoye, aims to create a fully free and open mobile platform, from the firmware to the operating system.
For all of those following, I emailed Rob and he confirmed that the focus of the project to start is reverse engineering binary blobs on existing android devices, but he is currently only at the discovery phase of picking which phones to start with. He is first checking LineageOS compatible phones using his toolset here: https://codeberg.org/rsavoye/librephone/src/branch/main/doc/index.md
I swear they unveiled the libre phone 10 years ago.
I have a Purism Librem 5 phone which is fully FOSS Linux phone.
The name keeps throwing me off lol
I mean when I was looking up there have been people that have been using the term libre phone for somewhere around a decade or so. Hell I found an old Reddit post from 8 years ago that talked about asking if it’d be possible to make a pure libre phone. And then of course it came across the Lebrim 5 that you mentioned there so I’m sure they originally used that term as well.
Incidentally what do you think of the phone do you have just the standard one or do you have that premium one?
I salute the early adopters who will suffer all the inconveniences of startups so the wider public can enjoy a non-corporate phone in the future. o7
As soon as my current phone is paid off I am going to get this. No more fucking Spyware up the ass.
The project just launched and is a software-first project. We won’t see a Libre Phone available for a while yet.
Then I will make do until then.
And if Hurd is any indication I wouldn’t hold my breath.
That said, didn’t hird basically die because Linux gained critical mass faster and peeled off the core developers? It would be nice to imagine another bottom-up mobile OS emerging and stealing the thunder of this one, but it seems like the hope here is that Libre Phone will gravitate in some of the devs from the existing top-down open phone projects. Who knows if that will work.
One thing I wouldn’t count out right now though: China is very much in favor of getting software and hardware monopolies out from the control of US companies. Free/open(ish) LLMs are the big example, maybe they will jump on this to try and break Google’s stranglehold on the mobile market.
It isn’t encouraging that they “launched” the initiative bit have no dedicated webpage or git for it yet. Seems like going off half-cocked
Unless they can get this working with Android Auto or Carplay I don;t see it going anywhere.
Not everyone has a car y’know. Actually I don’t even know anyone who does.
I won’t hold my breath, but it’s sorely needed, so, we can hope.
That’s funny. I can’t hold my width.
Some people can hold their length, but only in private.
I hope they can pull this off because we really need this.
Heard of Hurd, I don’t think they can.
Maybe Hurd never went anywhere but they are responsible for as much of what constitutes “Linux” as the Linux kernel is. Linux never would have amounted to much without GCC, the GNU tools, and the GPL.
This is the original article
https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-turns-forty-with-a-new-president-and-a-new-campaign
Linux mobile phones are the fusion power of the FOSS world, always “right around the corner.”
All the pieces are there, but none of them work together smoothly enough to be functional for anybody except the most hardcore FOSS enthusiasts.
When Proton started, it was kind of a joke, killed the Steam Machine idea in large part because the game compatibility was so limited. A decade later, we have a multi billion dollar handheld PC market lead by the Steam Deck, a Linux handheld that can play tens of thousands of Windows games without issue, in some cases with better performance than their native platform.
So it’s certainly possible for things to completely change, but we need a big player or consortium of players to unite with a shared goal of getting a Linux Phone to the state where it’s genuinely able to replace a traditional Android or Apple phone.
I’m very cautiously optimistic, I think it would come together much faster than Proton did for Linux gaming, but again, there needs to be a really heavy push into a singular device to start off. Like how the Steam Deck was, it allowed devs to have a singular platform to target for compatibility. Then, as the platform matures, competitors & innovators can enter the market and expand options, like how now there are multiple distros with builds for handhelds, like Bazzite, Nobara, and CachyOS.
When Proton started, it was kind of a joke, killed the Steam Machine idea in large part because the game compatibility was so limited. A decade later, we have a multi billion dollar handheld PC market lead by the Steam Deck, a Linux handheld that can play tens of thousands of Windows games without issue, in some cases with better performance than their native platform.
Proton’s existence did not overlap the existence of the Steam Machine program, like at all. Proton’s initial release was on the 21st of August 2018. Steam Machines were first released in 2015 and had been delisted from Steam entirely by April 2018.
Wine existed back then, sure, but Steam Machines didn’t benefit from DXVK, VKD3D, or any of the myriad per-game and gaming-oriented tweaks that Valve and Codeweavers have made to Wine in the version bundled with Proton. For most people, the prospect of using Wine on a Steam Machine was a huge pain at best. Valve’s official position at the time was that they were helping pay for Linux ports of games.
Fair point, I thought Proton went back farther than that.
I think my overall point is right still though, Linux gaming (native or otherwise) has become not just viable, but in some cases objectively superior to gaming on Windows in terms of raw performance. Pretty amazing, and in even less time than I originally thought lol.
Yeah. It’s improved by leaps and bounds since DXVK and VKD3D came into existence. Wine was already incredibly robust and powerful with like 20 years of development on it, so Proton combining Wine with those other 2 projects for better DirectX support and then also managing Wine prefixes and tweaks automatically brought us from “if you’re persistent and tweak a lot of settings a good chunk of games work” to “most games just work”, and now even “if a game doesn’t work on Linux now it’s because the devs are blocking it actively”
And of course, Valve’s active financial support and direct contributions to all of the projects involved has improved the reliability and performance of all of the tech involved by leaps and bounds.
I would love if Valve shipped and contributed to Plasma Mobile and Plasma Bigscreen alongside the existing Plasma Desktop. Or even if more Steam Deck users installed it so that it would get more interest.
Hopefully this will recruit projects that already have significant headstart, such as Pine64. Otherwise, it would merely be performative.
Oooh, I wonder if they’re going to pursue a free phone based on Risc-V. It’s a longshot but if they pull that off, it’d be like feeding two birds with one scone.
I’m celebrating!
As a linux phone guy this is good news. Any more pushing towards a more solid linux phone environment is a big plus.
I’m not holding my breath either hence “Hurd” project be amazing if this will be faster than 20 years. I’m hopeful at least.
Removed by mod
Why do you troll like Trump tweets?
Because Our Lord and Savior will spare me in the upcoming months.
I really hope this is super based
I’ve got a Google Pixel 3a with postmarketOS installed on it right now for testing, and it really is a two-pronged issue with both hardware and software. Because it’s an older phone the battery drains within a few hours, nowhere close to all-day use. Because most of the software is designed for the desktop certain things are just impossible to use (the big pain point for me is Anki, but on the other hand it’s impressive how many GTK apps conform very nicely to the screen). The keyboard still feels pretty rough.
Hopefully the FSF dipping their hat into the ring will help existing projects like this in a rising-tide-raises-all-ships sort of way. Would be a shame for them to put effort into a software stack that goes nowhere (GNU Hurd), and pour $$$ into a hardware project that doesn’t make it to market or doesn’t do its job better than a cracked smartphone from 5+ years ago.
I think it is possible to switch to it now and have things mostly work out for you, but it will make your life harder. I remember switching to Ubuntu around 2010 and it’s almost to that level of experience. You’ll be giving up a lot, apps you “need” won’t work, but it’s at the point where it is a complete usable experience. For those that are willing to suffer for FOSS, I mean.
Honestly as long as they can fucking get something moderately priced that supports VOLTE and a decent camera I’ll buy it
Just because it’s a libre phone, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a linux phone. Or at least any more so than Android is a linux phone because it uses a heavily modified (almost unrecognizable) linux kernel.
There’s nothing in the article that says they’re just going to use a mainline linux kernel and throw a touch optimized version of some existing desktop on it (ubuntu touch, etc…)
Heck, they could be meaning that they’re planning on making their own heavily modified kernel for their very own OS so as to skip all of the trouble that trying to make mainline linux into a handheld device has been so far. (similar to I believe how SailfishOS is doing it)
Finally, a GNU/Hurd phone! /s
Just because it’s a libre phone, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a linux phone.
Likewise, a so-called “Linux phone” isn’t necessarily a libre phone, either. But, I don’t care about Linux, I care about freedom, so a LibrePhone is important regardless of what Linux fans think of it, and if it is truly worthy of the word libre, it will be able to run your so-called “real Linux.”
Why couldn’t they just use usual Linux for that? Why a modified kernel? Is Linux as is not suitable for a phone?
Can’t they just, idk, make a distro? Maybe from scratch? Pop!_OS is working on COSMIC. Can’t they have their Linux-based OS, perhaps with its own things as needed, such as a phone-optimised DE? Or whatever the phone equivalent of a DESKTOP environment would be. A Mobile Environment, perhaps
If my laptop had touch screen with no other method of input built in, and were way smaller, could it not run Linux? Or is that different altogether?
Linux by design gives the user enough rope to hang themselves with.
And that’s certainly not a problem when dealing with tech enthusiasts who know what, when and where to touch to avoid messing things up. But when you’re dealing with getting a phone into the hands of ordinary people, that isn’t going to fly because all of those people will at some point start mucking around inside and then expect tech support when they mess up.
For mainstream adoption, the linux kernel must and the desktop environment must be at least somewhat locked down.
We have immutable distributions already, that is something that isn’t a problem. It’s replacing those pesky proprietary blobs used to talk to the hardware that is a headache.
Between capabilities, namespaces, control groups, mandatory access control (AppArmor etc) and other mechanisms, I think there are plenty of ways to reduce user access to any part of the system.
Does anyone claim so? And does it matter much outside of (potentially) app support?
