I had a trusty note as well around that generation, they were truly some of the best phones, eh? I upgraded to the Moto G Stylus to have a modern take on the form factor

Google has no incentive to walk back, especially given what they saw Apple has been able to get away with on their end. And as we’ve seen with AOSP publishing delays, device tree information restrictions, locked bootloaders, they are making it increasingly hard for Android to be an OS that can be forked and installed on devices.

The community ought to prepare for the realities of this, and put mitigation measures in place. GNU/Linux is the next best truly open/free-as-in-freedom experience. Waydroid/ATL can act as temporary bridges for both developers and users alike while native binaries are ported.

If you’re making new aapps, target to develop with qt/qml + rust so it can run on the only GNU/Linux equivalent of Android WearOS, AsteroidOS. This let’s you deploy one codebase on watches, phones, tablets, and computers screen sizes with a convergent design.

Nice, this looks like a good solution that could be solved with a script. The other solution I was thinking might work but would also require a script to get per channel url updates is from iptvcat.com

I tried thetvapp.to on a few devices recently and couldn’t get it working and previously found it struggled with big sport events, it was one of my go to’s. Is it working still on your end?

If it has a headphone jack, you can plug in a dummy aux port. I’m convinced that the removal of the headphone jack was to ensure the microphones are always reachable

Everytime I see stuff like this I’m thankful most of my devices (hopefully all one day) either have cameras/microphones that have hardware kill switches (HKS), or can be unplugged from the device

Israel & their Offence Forces have no respect for non-Israelite Canadians or our peacekeepers. Simple as that.

You could try installing Samsung’s Tizen GNU/Linux OS via Termux and let us know how it goes.

To my understanding, they have the same looking UI such that if Samsung ever wanted to move customers over from Android everything would look familar, without their customers knowing it’s a different OS under the hood.

I’m sure it’s possible, but you’d need a device specifically supported by the distro, you’d probably need a custom bootloader, among other things that make it not as easy as doing dual-boot on a less locked down device. It’s probably harder on purpose by Google.

Oh yes good point, forgot about those. I will update the post so more people know about these options

Dat shit cray. My grampa has no idea how to use a mobile phone so he just doesn’t have one. Thankfully no such requirements where we live

Fair enough 😆

If you have a SIP provider, this can be hooked up to the GNOME Calls app, and GNOME Chats lets you connect to XMPP and Matrix. Not everyone will have those, but it is one step above the native Android & iOS apps in that you can actually use them without telephony.

They have better wake mechanisms than something like Signal Desktop, Element Desktop etc do currently.

You’re right in that you will not be able to forward calls and texts from Android to your app-based Linux distro call and text apps, but internet-based apps should work.

This method is how the Nexphone provides a GNU/Linux environment

Run any Android specific apps in Waydroid (e.g. WhatsApp) and it appears as just another icon in your app drawer, or use a web app, again you can make it a dedicated icon in your app drawer.

Unfortunately Google Pixel 7 is not a device supported yet on any distros I’ve seen; PostmarketOS has the best support for Android devices. Across distros, Fairphone has the best support.

What people with Android devices can do though, is install Linux on top of Android. Opposite of Waydroid (not as good), but at least lets you play around with it to get familiar without needing root:

• Andronix

• UserLAnd

• Termux (install distro via command line)

As some other people mentioned the Waydroid app or their website can work. If you do Waydroid, you can install Gapps, and other banking app isn’t happy with that, they typically offer decent mobile websites.

GNOME Web and Mozilla Firefox via this PWA extension let you have a dedicated app icon for any web service you want into your app drawer. The Firefox one works best, and I believe does a better job isolating stuff from the main browser.

What’s cool is you can run an entire Monero wallet (or other cryptocurrency) on device for full mobile financial experience, though don’t store more in it than you would a regular wallet.

I have a GNU/Linux phone I carry in my other pocket. Here are the biggest issues I can see:

1. Driver support for components in the mainline kernel (lets you install any distro and things like camera, Bluetooth just work)
2. Power management; turns out it is a hard technical problem to have your phone suspend to save energy, while being awake enough to know what and when to turn back on to receive chats/calls, playback music, etc
3. Cameras have a lot of stuff beyond drivers happening behind the scenes these days in software that would need to be developed, especially given it is a big reason people choose their phones for
4. Phone certification is tough, this has stopped even companies like Fairphone from shipping their devices worldwide, I imagine even harder for a device like the Purism Librem 5 where you can literally upgrade Wi-Fi, BT, and cellular generations like a gameboy cartridge
5. App ecosystems take a while to build up, it is a chicken/egg scenario. I think things are in a useable state for all the default apps an iPhone has, but if you want Uber, Uber Eats, you either have to draw even more power essentially running Android via Waydroid, or use a typically more janky web app that may be missing some features

Try Cinny

Matrix can bridge to IRC

They’re called Spaces on matrix clients. Server instances are the sites that they are hosted on. AFAIK you need to be logged in to bring up this cross-sever space search shown below: https://matrix.org/docs/chat_basics/public-rooms/#browsing-the-public-directory

Should’ve put the Canadian AI godfathers on the job