Re:Apple's best product is now privacy
by danieldk on Friday September 14, 2018 @02:07PM
(#17989413)
I can't wait for, and would love to support, the Debian of phone architectures. In past HN threads, it has been suggested to me that the real blocker for a good open phone OS is at the hardware/kernel level. That was the state of the hardware environment in the late nineties and early 2000s.
I would like to be that optimistic, but I am not. The PC has always been a fundamentally open platform and hardware has been supported by many OSes for a long time. When I was young, we would run MS-DOS, DR-DOS, OS/2 and Windows 3.x (which was strictly spoken not an OS). After 1994 I also ran Linux and BSD and I never had any real problems hardware-wise. There was a difficult time around the turn of the century with WinModems and printers that only supported Windows. But that was more of a temporary regression.
I remember working hard for good graphics-card support and perpetually rolling my own kernels to support even year-old motherboards.
The biggest blocker in our experimental labs for open-source software was always hardware drivers. These days, linux is extremely common and generally well-supported.
Modern windowing systems are also very similar. A Windows 3.1 or early MacOS user would have no trouble using a computer today.
Touch and phone interfaces will get there, too, as both software and culture evolve together.
I can't wait for, and would love to support, the Debian of phone architectures. In past HN threads, it has been suggested to me that the real blocker for a good open phone OS is at the hardware/kernel level. That was the state of the hardware environment in the late nineties and early 2000s.
Give it time, effort, and support, and a great and open OS will emerge.