I am a big fan of PostmarketOS, but that being said, you still need to patch the Mesa libraries to get hardware acceleration working on an old Nexus 7. They want to do a lot more work, but it's difficult with all these garbage/trash ARM devices out there.

If Google gave a shit about e-waste, they'd mandate UEFI+ARM like Microsoft did with their phones (except without the locked bootloader). Trying to get drivers to load an work on every ARM variant is a nightmare compared to x86.

I am still surprised Google gets almost no flack for this. Chromebooks are particularly bad offenders. They're basically disposable laptops with an incredibly short lifecycle, where even browser security updates end when Google decides a laptop has left support. It's ironic Chrome is supported many years longer on any given Windows PC than any given Chromebook.

Google loves claiming to be environmentally friendly, but disposable computing is practically their default mode now.

Not sure what's "bad" about Chromebooks, seeing as you can unlock them and install standard firmware. Then your only obstacle to using them as you would any other laptop is OEM hardware that's sometimes not supported by the mainline kernel, and a mildly non-standard keyboard. Android is a lot worse than that, many devices are not even OEM unlockable in the first place.

They might be unlockable, but at that point they're disposable to a business or school environment.

A PC shipped with Windows 7 in 2009 can run Windows 10 for free and the latest release of Chrome, supported officially by Google. If you upgraded from XP or Vista, many of those PCs can still run current Chrome just fine. The max life of a Chromebook as a Chromebook is like six years.

You would unlock them after they've reached EOL w/ their supported OS, for the sake of resale value and thus reuse. It's not much of course, but it's better than a lot of mobile hardware.

> they'd mandate UEFI+ARM like Microsoft did with their phones (except without the locked bootloader)

I approve, but is that sufficient? UEFI gives you a better booting situation, but I thought you still needed device tree or something to handle device enumeration? Or does UEFI do that?

EDIT: In an attempt to answer my own question, I dug up https://elinux.org/Device_Tree_What_It_Is#UEFI which implies that UEFI can replace device tree and give you an actual uniform platform. If I'm getting that right, then that does look like the best possible solution.

> but that being said, you still need to patch the Mesa libraries to get hardware acceleration working on an old Nexus 7.

Why are these patches needed? If the issue is that graphics has to rely on a proprietary binary, then that's sad but not something that Mesa can do much about. If no non-free code is required, it should be possible to push these patches upstream and make the support official.

Also worth noting that one of Google's long-term goals is to make Android bootable on mainline. They've been slowly upstreaming the patches they built into Android's base kernel, and their Treble roadmap involves further isolating the hardware drivers, to enable running a generic kernel across devices.

Yes and AIUI, libhybris is working on supporting those userspace hardware drivers on a non-AOSP install. The postmarketOS folks would rather do without using downstream code/drivers/firmware at all and keep everything upstream based, but some devices will need this and it might also be useful for quick bring up on new devices.