I have one phone from 2012. Wow ... so easy to do everything.
- no swipe first to unlock the screen: directly to pattern
- input method switching easy and convenient
- settings buried less deeply
- ...
For all the reasons you said, it would take so long to get something usable, let alone security....
A: It shut down in 2014, after China refused to pay 40 million yuan to keep it going.
Limited driver support? Android devices are typically highly integrated: they use custom SoC's (that you've never heard of) with drivers developed specifically for those SoC's and their blocks.
(Oh, your amazingly rare phone has a PCI slot, and your graphics card is not supported, bummer!)
Getting a hisilicon soc up and running is a joy compared to working on a qcom or Samsung soc. Upstream Linux often works out of the box.
Downloading from: https://mirrors.huaweicloud.com/
Download cancelled.
If the do use Linux, I wonder that.
Not being snarky. Linux is unusable for "the average worker".
The problems are mainly unsupported hardware and lack of software support. But if you stick with open alternatives then you can do just fine.
I recently tested Kubuntu 19.04 on a 20 year old desktop, it works perfectly and even had third-party drivers for the video card.
It's just a matter of familiarity. She just want to check her mail et watch videos, after all.
Not to pick on you, but why when the question of Linux as a Windows substitute comes up, do people always have to offer anecdotes about their mother. I'm no SJW or radical feminist, but honestly, let's move on from that.
My comment is about "the average worker", not friends and family / personal use. For which, in my highly uber technical group of friends and family, (where mothers are C++ programmers), maybe 1 out of 20 (generously) find a Linux desktop usable.
Only in this forum, where people recognize the horrid low contrast, gratuitous whitespace, excessive bloat of the latest javascript "framework", know the difference between modeless and modal dialogs, understand why the gmail UI keeps moving in the wrong direction -- only in this forum, where UX is understood as a real "science" that needs attention, will people actually also claim that the Linux desktop is usable. It boggles the mind.
Sorry to go off on a rant, forgive me.
It took her an afternoon with me to figure it out.
Stop spreading this nonsense.
I'm nitpicking, I know, but do Google Docs/Sheets/Slides count? They're clearly inferior to MS Office, but they do exist.
If North Korea can pull that off, you can be sure China is well on the way. I would be quite amazed if that wasn't in the works all along already.
I think Ubuntu founder is still barred from entering US so he probably doesn't care...
I mean, Android took a decade to be usable, was built by one of the most talented and rich company on earth. Yet it is still limited in what it allows you to do: no office suite, limited driver support, weak multi-monitor, can use few FS formats, no RAID, etc. And that is despite Android actually wrapping a Linux Kernel.
Not to mentions they'll need to get so many basic tools ported.
No matter the high competence of the Chinese tech scene, their ability to brutally push an agenda and the number they can throw at it, I can't imagine a scenario where those resources wouldn't be better spent validating and customizing an existing distro.
However, I can imagine many reasons they would choose the harder road. And as a geek, I find it sane to remind myself that technical efficiency is not the goal of all entities.