Android 12 could be released with Windows, NuttX, BSD, Fuchsia kernel and hardly anyone that has kept using Java or NDK official APIs would hardly notice other than OEMs.
Anyone looking at it as Linux is only fooling themselves.
GNU/Linux has lost its mobile OS/desktop opportunity. Every major company will just pick the Linux kernel, tailor it at their own will and place their beloved userland on top.
And on the servers I give it like 10 years more for it to be made mostly irrelevant for managed runtimes being deployed on cloud environments running on type 1 hypervisors.
Agreed. However this whole conversation concerns Termux, an app that made it possible to run some "desktop-grade" GNU/Linux tools on Android. This is despite the fact that the kernel itself is far from mainline, which however is rather unfortunate.
> GNU/Linux has lost its mobile OS/desktop opportunity.
People keep saying this, but depending on how you look at things, it both never had it and never lost it.
never had it.) because OEMs were only ever preinstalling PCs with Windows and thus Linux was always at a massive, massive disadvantage. Changing the OS is for the majority of users an unthinkable obstacle and am not even sure the majority of them are aware it is something that could be done.
Keeping the above it mind,
it never lost it.) because for the users that were willing/able to overcome the first obstacle, Linux was and remains a feasible desktop OS for at least 15 years. I know, I've been Linux-only everywhere for longer than that. It's never going to be #1 on the desktop, but it doesn't need to be. If we were to measure everything that way, all music genres besides Pop and Hip-Hop are basically useless because they never reach the top of radio music charts.
GNU/Linux had its opportunity with OpenMoko, Maemo, netbooks, Steam machines.
Termux can provide a similar experience via Java/Kotlin, ISO C and ISO C++ implementations instead of relying in Linux specific calls.
Hardly true. It's just they don't have the massive marketing machine of radio mainstream behind them, so they tend to have their dedicated fanbase and that's that.
> GNU/Linux had its opportunity with OpenMoko, Maemo, netbooks, Steam machines.
> OpenMoko & Maemo were fine Linux phones and many still swear by them to this day, but you seem to discount the power of marketing. Is not that your casual users knew about Maemo and just didn't like it. They don't even know it exists. Technical merit only gets you so far.
Also, given the above, there's nothing that is different about the current situation that is preventing the PinePhone/Librem 5 to claim that niche. I don't know why you have a hard cutoff for the opportunity there as being 'missed' and now nothing can be done.
> Termux can provide a similar experience via Java/Kotlin, ISO C and ISO C++ implementations instead of relying in Linux specific calls.
That's a metric ton of more work than I imagine the team has time for. Termux can do a lot of things. but with a hostile upstream venodor it's going to take a lot more effort than it would take to switch to a Linux phone for a better experience, at least in this regard.
I guess, because after all these years GPL seems to have lost steam, with GCC and the Linux kernel being the only GPL relevant pieces that are still around.
With efforts like Fuchsia, ARM mbed, Linux Foundation's own Zephyr OS, Amazon's RTOS, BSD adoption as basis for game console's OSes showing the direction where this will be going.
So most efforts to have a pure GNU/Linux device are bound to not survive long enough to keep a sustainable business.
I don't see how. The non-GPL efforts you mention are all in places where it hardly was GPL before or if it was, it was packaged in such a way that it hardly mattered.
Game consoles always used BSD because game companies are notoriously proprietary and don't care about free software, but they never did, so hardly any change there.
Android's kernel is GPL which does help as there's an ongoing effort to mainline more and more Android patches, but from an end-user perspective, because the userland is not GNU and Google never actually cared about Android as FLOSS a kernel change for Android doesn't mean much unless Android's current patches are mainlined and hardware OEMs start producing mainline-linux HW, at which point a differnt kernel would indeed be a loss for Linux, but as of now, nothing would fundamentally change, because it never meant much to began with.
> So most efforts to have a pure GNU/Linux device are bound to not survive long enough to keep a sustainable business.
If so, this has nothing to do with the GPL. Say the Librem 5 ran a BSD kernel. How would it suddenly become mainstream without Samsung's marketing budget?
If anything, the GPL is doing better than ever precisely because the issues around privacy are becoming more mainstream. I have family members asking about alternatives to iOS/Android that were not asking these in the OpenMonoko days, which gives me hope.
On the desktop, we now have Microsoft contributing GPL'ed code, which is something. Companies like NVidia do too nowdays.
I suspect what you may be perceiving is that unicorn SV startup libraries on GitHub tend to not be GPL and that's true, but I don't think they'd be releasing any code otherwise, since they don't care about free software in the first place, so in that sense it's at least a compromise.
This topic is about Termux, an app that aims to provide a Linux environment on Android.
I can treat it as a "Java-based OS", but then I don't get the benefits of real Linux so am not sure what the advantage is.
My dumb phone was also "a Java based OS", iOS is just an "ObjC/Swift based OS" etc. The only thing this mindset does is to ignore the restrictions by giving into them and am honestly not sure why would one do that.
> Just because one cannot use GNU/Linux command line it doesn't make it less usable.
Sure it does, this very topic is about an app that does precisely that. If one doesn't need that, they didn't need Termux and thus of course this whole topic does not apply to them.