fiftydinar
commented
1 month ago Fedora Atomic KDE Mobile will become available when Fedora 41 gets released: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Fedora_KDE_Plasma_Mobile
I prefer to use Gnome Mobile or Phosh, but this is still a positive news.
Finally some officially supported mobile DE in Fedora Atomic fashion!
Intro
It's a preparation for the long future, where mobile devices with pure Linux OSes would evolve, to be usable enough as a daily-driver device. Which also includes Gidro-OS.
Context
I rooted + flashed Android devices with custom ROMs & I was active in xda-developers forum. Doing these operations allowed me to have some freedom & more respectful privacy with mobile devices, while still having a relatively good user experience. It was tough to choose custom ROM which suited my needs, since creating custom ROMs is a really tough task. Custom ROMs, which I carefully selected to use from other developers, had stock Android look, which I liked. Until Android 11. Since the release of Android 12, I started to observe consistency in significantly worse performance, fluidity, responsiveness & battery life, while looking much worse. I verified all of those things to be related to the Android 12+ itself & not to the hardware or bad custom ROM. This is when I stopped caring for new Android versions & devices. I still have fully working Poco X3 NFC, which I bought in October 2020, with Android 11 custom ROM. However, I can't use this device forever, so I'm looking forward for something better.
iPhones are not in my radar, since I want a phone which respects my privacy (not always possible of course, but custom ROM being open-source & without telemetry is a big "selling" point).
I am generally tired of Android & iOS devices & I want some change.
Current Linux mobile OSes, while having many other issues, have 1 major blocking issue, which I don't see as solved anytime soon.
That is the lack of the good system infrastructure, which would guarantee great system reliability in terms of:
Fedora Silverblue with rpm-ostree, btrfs filesystem & focus on flatpaks easily beats mobile Linux OSes in all of those areas, except factory reset, which is not yet implemented.
Android shines in all those areas (except where application & system updates are interruptible).
Solution?
Remember how I mentioned that custom ROMs are tough to make on Android devices? And how I mentioned how it's very tough to select good custom ROM out of dozens of bad ones? Well, with mobile Linux OSes evolving, one day, Gidro-OS can be the ideal custom ROM that I always wanted!
Making custom images on BlueBuild is much easier than making custom ROMs, while also being more reliable.
Let's say some Linux phones have full support in upstream Linux kernel. What does this mean? This means that I can install Gidro-OS on it without doing any tinkering & enjoying the great user experience!
I would love to have pure Linux phone some day, ideally with Gidro-OS, so this is just another motivation to do this.
Blockers
Desktop environment
Gnome doesn't support mobile devices well yet. Gnome Mobile is separately made as a testing ground for mobile devices, which intends to gradually merge things upstream in Gnome.
Hardware support
There are no mobile devices which have full hardware support inside the vanilla Linux kernel, which Fedora uses.
And some other minor blockers, which are not important now.