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MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H)MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H)Posted Oct 10, 2012 21:26 UTC (Wed) by shmerl (guest, #65921)In reply to: MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) by Cyberax Parent article: MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H)
> You'll probably be missing video acceleration (because of closed-source
> video drivers) and have very shitty battery life (no suspend blockers in >'superior' desktop Linux). External firmware for WiFi drivers might also be > required.
This translates to unusable system. Q.E.D.
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MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 21:36 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
And that is different from desktop Linux exactly how?
Do you remember the time when 'desktop' Linux was present on a multitude of cheap and small computers? You know, so called "netbooks"? Do you remember that most of them shipped with the crappy Poulsbo graphics? Android is no different from desktop Linux, it has exactly the same problems.
So your argument is basically: "My imaginary desktop-Linux-on-mobile is superior to Android because it would have all open-source drivers developed by community. Also, unicorns and world peace."
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 21:51 UTC (Wed) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
> And that is different from desktop Linux exactly how?
Linux on the desktop is very easy to install on the wide variety of hardware to get a fully functional computer. It's nowhere that hard to how it's on the mobile devices (where options are almost non existent). If you don't see the difference - there is nothing really more to explain (it would be pointless).
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 22:00 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
to be fair, Linux on the desktop used to be as hard as Linux on mobile currently is. We've (mostly) won the battle about drivers in the desktop/server space, but we're in the "bad old days" in the mobile space.
People are working on it, but it's got a long way to go.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 22:10 UTC (Wed) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
I didn't deny that Linux used to be hard on the desktop as well. I was pointing out, that Android's "diversion" in the mobile sphere naturally makes that progress there much slower.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 22:27 UTC (Wed) by swetland (subscriber, #63414) [Link]
I still disagree. I believe that without a high-volume Linux based platform in mobile, gaining attention from OEMs, silicon vendors, users, hackers, Linux developers, etc, things would be moving much, much more slowly.
Based on my observations of how the SoC vendors and OEMs operate, I find it unlikely that a "more desktop linux like" mobile Linux, if it were successful, would result in things (regarding Linux kernel support for ARM SoCs and mobile devices) moving forward any faster than with Android.
The obstacles toward full GPLv2 kernel drivers for problematic components (like GPU) are not made easier to resolve by changing the userspace software stack.
Android, I feel, has gone further in some areas here -- we've worked with most all of the mobile GPU vendors and see GPLv2 drivers shipping for the memory/resource/queue management, even if userspace opengl libraries are closed -- ensuring that the critical bits touching hardware and system resources at least are open source and accessible. Desktop Linux has taken an all-or-nothing approach regarding open GPU drivers and we see things like entirely closed binary blobs linked into the kernel if you want decent hw 3d accel on the modern/popular video cards...
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 22:37 UTC (Wed) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
Yes, there are positive aspects in it as well. But overall, I think the competing path slowed things down for regular Linux simply by dispersing resources and distracting manufacturers on Android exclusively. May be at some point it'll play out to the better, but not yet at least. Open drivers (like Lima and etc.) are coming slowly, so there is some hope.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 11, 2012 14:12 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
I don't think Android took away any resources from desktop Linux, it's a strictly parallel development. It has already added many resources to kernel development. We should be happy and try to leverage the added effort for maximum positive, open source, effect.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 11, 2012 15:35 UTC (Thu) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
I meant it took resources away from mobile (regular, non Android) Linux development.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 22:01 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
Jolla's going to be shipping with open graphics drivers? I certainly look forward to that.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 22:17 UTC (Wed) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
I doubt it. I don't even expect such thing with the Vivaldi release. As Aaron Seigo pointed out, there are several milestones before that:
- milestone 0 is a "regular Linux" (read: not Android) device that works WELL.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 22:22 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
So... even "real" Linux gives you an unusable device?
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 22:32 UTC (Wed) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
It's usable since drivers can be shared by many distros (even closed). Not too different from how closed drivers (let's say Nvidia's) are shared on the desktop now. In Android's case, close drivers are usually useless.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 22:37 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
That's not true at all. You've got a framebuffer and a GLES driver, which is what's always been the traditional graphics environment on embedded Linux.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 22:42 UTC (Wed) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
I mean useless out of the box (as in the KWin example above). I.e. with some serious work it can get better, but this work is not yet done, so end user can't simply take the existing mobile hardware and use it with non Android Linux distro. That was the point of the discussion above - i.e. splitting/duplication of effort (instead of sharing it).
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 22:42 UTC (Wed) by swetland (subscriber, #63414) [Link]
The biggest headache here is probably that the opengl library is linked against bionic instead of glibc, but there are a number of ways you could shim that (with some creative linker trickery), since the actual OpenGL API/ABI is not dependent on libc's data structures. That's assuming you can't convince your SoC/GPU vendor to provide a version linked against glibc or staticly.
I can see that being annoying, but it's certainly not insurmountable.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 22:48 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
So you're saying that classic desktop Linux is no better than Android?
Great, that's what we were talking all about.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 22:50 UTC (Wed) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
> So you're saying that classic desktop Linux is no better than Android?
Much better, since distros are interchangeable, sharing the lower stack (even closed parts). They aren't interchangeable with Android in the mobile case.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 23:40 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
So we're talking about replacibility now? Then Android simply slaughters classic desktop Linux - there's only ONE version of Android (at a given time) that is API and ABI compatible across all devices.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 23:43 UTC (Wed) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
> So we're talking about replacibility now
Did you follow the discussion really? We were talking about sharing the effort vs being selfish. Replaceability is part of the former. Incompatibility is part of the later.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 23:50 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
I've tried to follow you, but your line of reasoning meanders more than Romney's opinions.
We're now back at your purely subjective opinion of Android somehow "not sharing" and being "selfish".
Have you thought that the same could be said about KDE and Plasma Active? They could have helped GNOME developers instead of working on a competing system!
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 23:59 UTC (Wed) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
KDE and Gnome do collaborate if you didn't know. And they both rely on the same shared lower architectures, unlike Android again.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 11, 2012 0:00 UTC (Thu) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
Also, Gnome came later. If something it was early Gnome critique about diverging resources from KDE. However it pales in comparison to split on hardware level which is way more drastic.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 11, 2012 0:03 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Excuses, excuses. KDE developers should have dropped everything and switched to GNOME the moment it become available.
Also: Fedora should have switched to DEB, Debian should have switched to RPM and dogs should have become cats.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 11, 2012 0:07 UTC (Thu) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
> Excuses, excuses.
I don't think Android designers thought about excuses much. They designed a commercial system, without much community interests in mind. No point to deny it, since it was originally proprietary and closed. It got opened only later.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 11, 2012 0:11 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Android was designed to be a mobile system from start. Of course, it was designed behind closed doors - that's a good strategy. And it was initially designed without input from community (and it turned out to be a good thing).
But that was 5 years ago. Since then Android developers work with kernel community to integrate Android features and fix ARM shortcomings (by using device trees, for example).
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 11, 2012 2:53 UTC (Thu) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
> Of course, it was designed behind closed doors - that's a good strategy.
> And it was initially designed without input from community (and it turned > out to be a good thing).
Very arguable. Open systems can rely on open development and community involvement. The model you described is a strong characteristic of proprietary systems. Not because it's better - because they are proprietary. And Android was designed in such way not because it was a good thing to do, but because it has no relation to any open development - it wasn't an open system. And I don't consider it a good thing, as it created a much bigger rift than it could, if the system would be developed with community interests in mind (and community input).
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 11, 2012 3:25 UTC (Thu) by swetland (subscriber, #63414) [Link]
What community? Good for whom?
In the 5-6 years since Android has been public knowledge, I've heard a lot about how we should throw out what we've done in favor of working with "the community", all throughout the stack. I am unconvinced that this would have been a good idea at any point.
Android's goal has been to provide a competitive open source platform for mobile, as an alternative to closed platforms (Symbian and WinCE in the early days, iOS later on, etc) where there is a level playing field for application development, and OEMs have sufficient control over their destiny, and users have more choice, etc. I think it's been pretty successful at this by most measures.
It's not perfect, and not everyone is happy with everything about it, but I'm unconvinced that a more-like-desktop-linux approach would have been massively better at anything other than being more like desktop Linux. And don't get me wrong, I like desktop Linux -- use it at work and home and write a lot of code on it -- but I'm not convinced that it's the right thing for my phone.
What I hear is "you should have done it the way we want it done because that way is superior to the way that you did it", which forces me to wonder why the superior way isn't out there being superior and winning mindshare. Unless it's not actually *done* in which case I'm not sure why I, as someone building a mobile platform, should go work on your platform under your direction, instead of building my own... what do *I* gain out of this, other than a bunch of people telling me how to do my job?
Meanwhile, the code that's been written for Android, is out there, and under an incredibly permissive license, and you're welcome to take it and build anything you'd like with it -- which a number of folks have done.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 11, 2012 4:27 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
I wouldn't go quite that far - there are some cases where earlier involvement with the community would have resulted in a reduction of Google's maintenance load, and there are cases where Google's implementation is demonstrably technically inferior to existing Linux solutions. But the real question is whether any of this matters, and I think it's difficult to argue that any shortcomings in Android's adoption are down to the choice of C library. So we might quibble over "massively better", but you're probably right.
There's no real way to argue that Android is bad. It's the most successful smartphone platform, and the dominant user-visible Linux. Perhaps adopting some of the existing technologies would have made it *better*, but at this stage it's pretty clear that the people arguing that (such as me) should actually do the work and stop expecting that purely theoretical arguments will win out against a shipping product.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 11, 2012 6:46 UTC (Thu) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
The point is that Jolla is not intimidated by the existing products or their dominance. Let Android be, if it wants to go on a different unrelated road - so be it. But regular Linux will enter the mobile scene for the benefit which Android failed to provide. Jolla is doing something important.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 11, 2012 11:48 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
How does Jolla's proprietary user interface compare to Android in terms of community interaction? Jolla's approach sounds like a warming over of Nokia's Maemo strategy with company spokespeople wagging their finger and lecturing the community about not asking for too much (only this time also mimicking the "parent" by making vague patent threats), and contributing back to upstream projects because not doing so would either be a licence violation or involve an unaffordable maintenance burden.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 11, 2012 15:26 UTC (Thu) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
As I explained already, the UI is the most upper level. Android's rift goes much deeper, up to hardware. Jolla takes the community openly governed core (Mer) for the whole lower stack and middleware. So their closed layer is a rather thin addition on top. It's better than Nokia approach which didn't use community governed core, and way better than Android which doesn't have open development at all and caused a huge split with a regular Linux stack.
Plus, there are fully open options like Nemo and Plasma Active, based on the same Mer core, which one will be able to use on the same devices. So Jolla is doing a very good thing, their closed UI part regardless.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 12, 2012 14:35 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
We'll have to see how thin that UI layer is, but I don't think the importance of the UI layer can be emphasized enough. At the very least, proprietary user interfaces and applications still carry all the risks of planned obsolescence, lack of user control/insight, and all the accompanying privacy and maintenance concerns.
Linux can be made to run acceptably on lots of devices, and there's plenty of unfunded community activity already going on that can deliver quite a bit of the stack - you just have to see how QtMoko (the community-maintained variant of Qtopia) still manages to roll along, regardless of whether anyone thinks it is blazing new trails - but cultivating a community around applications is something that the likes of Nokia only did in order to get access to the bits they needed. As a result of all this, people pin a lot of hope on Plasma Mobile (or whatever it's called this week) because it at least gives them the possibility to define their own platform.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's a similar level of enthusiasm for Jolla's "open core" as there was for Nokia's efforts, where contributors merely get the satisfaction that their code is being used from the outside of a tamper-proof glass case. The difference between then and now is hopefully that more people are wise to the game being played.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 12, 2012 16:58 UTC (Fri) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
"Plasma Mobile (or whatever it's called this week)"
Plasma Active, and no, it has never been called anything else, so why the sneer?
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 11, 2012 3:39 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Almost all successful projects begin behind closed doors or developed by a small tight-knit community.
Attempting to start a large project usually results in lots of bike-shedding and very little of actual work. There are exceptions, of course, but they are rare.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 10, 2012 23:44 UTC (Wed) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
> Android simply slaughters classic desktop Linux
You said it. Why are you surprised that it's not considered friendly then? Something that doesn't respect the community (if you put it as above) won't be respected in return.
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