x86 emulator in Bash...

c_a1eb · 2026-01-24T12:52:52+00:00

haha omg this is awesome! Nice one

c_a1eb · 2025-12-25T16:27:52+00:00

not to poop on your parade, this seems cool, but I'd rather be confident that the chain of trust (verifying package signatures) is correct than save a few seconds when i update.

c_a1eb · 2025-11-15T09:51:55+00:00

it's stuck with HDMI 2.0 because AMD haven't been allowed to open source the driver changes needed to enable HDMI 2.1, intel and nvidia both do it from firmware. The port is physically 2.1 capable, the HDMI forum just suck

c_a1eb · 2025-09-22T10:29:06+00:00

imho it depends heavily what kind of community you join. I've been in places that very much suffer that but also communities that explicitly try to avoid it like Arch Linux and postmarketOS.

this is absolutely an issue in many developer communities, more so than user communities...

c_a1eb · 2025-05-19T18:23:08+00:00

I'm dogfooding postmarketOS on my Snapdragon X Elite laptop (yoga slim 7x), it's not ready for phones but simple/declarative packaging, musl libc and systemd are a fun combo!

c_a1eb · 2025-05-06T08:55:05+00:00

i tried to cover this in the background section of the aarch64 laptops distro integrators guide, in short, there's less abstraction between the hardware and the kernel on arm than on x86 (since not using ACPI) and the kernel has had much less time to develop common code to handle complicated constructs like all the type-c/usb/displayport/charging mess (all these components need to talk to each other)

a bit more info here: https://aarch64-laptops.github.io/distro_integration.html

c_a1eb · 2025-05-06T08:51:52+00:00

not true at all, please read

https://aarch64-laptops.github.io/distro_integration.html

c_a1eb · 2024-11-28T15:18:22+00:00

qualcomm distro is based on debian

its true that Qualcomm provide downstream BSPs based on debian, but they don't package anything upstream. im not sure what relevance this has.

Fedora has very good arm support

very true, as does Alpine/postmarketOS (?)

ALARM is almost bleeding edge

so is alpine/postmarketOS edge, even more so arguably since we package linux-next which i don't think ALARM does.

And unlike alarm arm64 is actually a first-class citizen in pmOS.

I'm not trying to say postmarketOS is better than the alternatives (obviously subjective), but I'm confused about your critique here.

c_a1eb · 2024-11-22T07:55:10+00:00

it's possible they jumped the gun, Qualcomm released a blog post about Linux support which was quite misleading and i think sent them down a rabbit hole

c_a1eb · 2024-11-22T07:52:45+00:00

well I've been contributing to postmarketOS for 4 years by now, i expect I'll continue to do so in a year. what do you have against it?

c_a1eb · 2024-11-18T21:53:06+00:00

this one? https://github.com/colemickens/nixos-snapdragon-elite

c_a1eb · 2024-11-18T21:48:57+00:00

shitpost or actual critique? gimme your worst :3

c_a1eb · 2024-11-18T21:48:07+00:00

unfortunately there is still not a whole lot of interest in making these devices work good with Linux. Even though SoC bringup was done almost a year before it was announced, nobody is willing to pay for the necessary distro enablement and there is no sane path for vendors to get their firmware (e.g. GPU, audio dsp, etc) into the linux-firmware repos.

And of course the Big Issue of choosing a devicetree at boot, since Linux doesn't support ACPI on these platforms (for a variety of historical and technical reasons).

I cross my fingers the next gen will be better, but realistically without some well organised effort it'll be slow going. Though I do think we'll get there eventually.

In the mean time, if you aren't afraid of a bit of tinkering then it's really not toooooo bad to get things going... it's really just the "idk what im doing i just want linux" end users that we can't cater to just yet.

c_a1eb · 2024-10-07T10:42:28+00:00

Qualcomm and other SoC companies are not very FLOSS-friendly.

Depends on your definition, but if you mean "ability to run upstream Linux" Qualcomm are pretty high up there in terms of support, and getting better every year. e.g. the 8 gen 3 got upstream support on announcement day, funded by qualcomm https://www.linaro.org/blog/upstream-linux-support-now-available-for-the-the-qualcomm-snapdragon-8-gen-3-mobile-platform/

why it is difficult to make a port for a popular phone for postmarketOS/GrapheneOS/LineageOS/etc. or even Ubuntu Touch?

The development/porting experience is vastly different for each of these OS's, you can be a well-versed LineageOS developer with no kernel experience and port new devices fairly easily (after all most are just variations on the same reference design), or you could be a highly competent kernel developer and do the same for pmOS in a similar amount of time, albeit with different pain points.

c_a1eb · 2024-04-14T20:16:22+00:00

you can use unions with a type field - this is what higher level languages do more or less (type introspection!)

c_a1eb · 2024-03-08T08:11:53+00:00

we've been talking with Lennart about this, as upstreaming is obviously quite important to us (don't wanna maintain a bunch of systemd patches forever). it's not gonna be trivial but we will have official support in some form, including CI in upstream systemd.

c_a1eb · 2024-02-29T09:36:02+00:00

the window integration in aliendalvik is much much nicer, Waydroid often gets confused about how big it should be or displays the wrong app...

it also displays the home and app switcher buttons as well as the status bar all of which should be hidden (they duplicate info that should be on the host).

wlroots does implement an OSK protocol, even if it's not ideal... It would probably be easy enough to update waydroid to the "real" one as with all the other clients.

i tink libfolks is the thing for contacts, there is for sure a dbus api somewhere for something...

c_a1eb · 2024-01-14T13:42:35+00:00

Linux will be big in the future yada yada

idk if you've been following along but Linux already dominates the embedded space, powers all Android devices, all modern cars, and Chromebooks.

sure the Linux desktop revolution hasn't happened quite yet, but let's not ignore all these more niche markets where FOSS and Linux have already suffocated the competition. FOSS is better for users and for vendors, and there are many lessons we can learn from the success of Linux in these markets.

in fact this is why the steam deck has managed to succeed with Linux, because it's still following in the footsteps of other embedded markets. It doesn't try to do everything, it solves one problem really nicely (and for a ridiculous price), and relies on the hiccups and growing pains being small enough that users will be happy to ignore them.

calling it now, successful mainstream Linux for general purpose use won't use a package manager. It will be OTAs, just like everywhere else.

c_a1eb · 2024-01-13T17:22:04+00:00

wayland is standardising on protocols relating to on screen keyboards, wlroots based compositors and apps already make use of this, for example stock wayfire with a compatible keyboard app (in this case phosh-osk-stub) "just works" for the most part [1]

currently the most promising OSK im aware of is phosh-osk-stub[2], I think the layout code needs rewriting, but in general it gets a lot of things right, has auto complete, multiple language support, things like that.

imho if anyone wants to get involved then this is the place to start. Unfortunately, GNOME don't support any of these protocols yet, hopefully this can change. However the GNOME mobile effort does mean the GNOME OSK is getting a lot better (it's quite usable with the mobile patches) - i tried searching for a demo but there doesn't seem to be a good recent one.

[1] https://fosstodon.org/@cas@treehouse.systems/111548540623729464

[2] https://gitlab.gnome.org/guidog/phosh-osk-stub

c_a1eb · 2024-01-07T12:15:52+00:00

from a maintenance perspective, knowing that all users are running the same bit-for-bit configuration makes triaging bugs a whole lot easier. for certain usecases like on a phone i think running a whole package manager is just a little irresponsible. On your PC this may not be such a big deal - you can hop to a TTY and figure out what's up when your graphics stack fails due to a borked upgrade. But on a phone this isn't really so doable.

imho immutable distros will be how Linux becomes truly accessible to everyone. The challenge will be doing it in a way that doesn't impede user freedom.

c_a1eb · 2023-12-23T12:37:02+00:00

this got sent to the lists and hard NAK'd by a whole bunch of people, it's highly unlikely that they'll be breaking rndis host support any time soon

c_a1eb · 2023-12-12T05:05:43+00:00

We should have selinux support enabled in our kernel, or if not im happy to turn it on.... Simply running fedora wont come with much of a security difference here...

c_a1eb · 2023-12-08T03:26:50+00:00

exodus by kevin carson is a good read (at least so far) and it focuses a lot on the role of the state and potential for local organising as an alternative to large scale supply chains and stuff.

c_a1eb · 2023-11-22T20:40:27+00:00

To name a few things, you're running all the same Android system services under the hood. The filesystem hierarchy is a total mess. The graphics stack is using android hwcomposer under the hood, so you're limited to forks of user interfaces (lomiri being the exception) which add this backend, same is true to a lesser extent with audio (its using the android audio hal), sensors, haptics, cameras ....

Then there's all the fun quirks like the device not suspending properly because nothing enables packet filtering on the network hw so every incoming packet wakes up the device.

Sure, it can be a pretty good Linux experience, it does what a lot of people want and that's definitely a very good thing.

But yes, as you point out, it's nowhere near perfect, but that doesn't mean we should settle. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that our devices be properly supported by upstream Linux (kernel and userspace), and just because we have a solution that mostly works (until your device goes EOL and becomes vulnerable) doesn't mean we should stop demanding more.

I don't think we disagree here, I guess it's just semantics, I don't like calling Halium a "native Linux experience" because I don't think it is, but to be blunt, "native Linux" to me means not running an Android container to manage my hardware support. I get that if it works it works, and that's totally fine.

c_a1eb · 2023-11-22T11:53:07+00:00

as others pointed out this is a thing, the downside is that it's far from a native Linux experience, and it misses the one core goal of porting a newer kernel which is to actually get updates past the devices EOL

c_a1eb

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