Re:Will Linux phones stay around this time?
by jchw on Saturday May 01, 2021 @08:34PM
(#27011279)
I’m not very concerned with it competing per se; they managed to put out a fairly compelling package and sell through 30k units. Yeah, they won’t be fabbing custom ARM cores any time soon, but it ain’t nothing.
Open source software is a slow burn. It takes time, but projects can grow for a very long time even when things seem dormant, and then suddenly seemingly out of nowhere things are actually pretty good. I certainly was impressed with how well they were able to bring GNOME onto phones so far.
It’ll always work best if people don’t consider them to be on the same level as commercial software; it has a different appeal, but one that should not be discounted. Just as there have been so many “year of the Linux desktops,” so to have there been many incorrect calls about the death of it.
Open source software is a slow burn. It takes time, but projects can grow for a very long time even when things seem dormant, and then suddenly seemingly out of nowhere things are actually pretty good. I certainly was impressed with how well they were able to bring GNOME onto phones so far.
It’ll always work best if people don’t consider them to be on the same level as commercial software; it has a different appeal, but one that should not be discounted. Just as there have been so many “year of the Linux desktops,” so to have there been many incorrect calls about the death of it.