Expectation mismatch

Posted Jan 28, 2026 19:37 UTC (Wed) by calvin (subscriber, #168398)
Parent article: Open source for phones: postmarketOS

I think people talk a lot about a GNU/Linux freedesktop.org-type phone and proclaim postmarketOS to be its coming, but I doubt it. pmOS is for people to get mainline kernels booting on some random phone, show some proof of working, and abandon it and move onto the next thing rather than do the (very hard, it's understandable why people don't do this!) 10% needed to make it usable. It sounds pejorative, but I don't think that's a bad thing, people do what they like to do. It just means it's a toy for kernel hackers than it is something interesting for anyone else.

Expectation mismatch

Posted Jan 29, 2026 0:54 UTC (Thu) by florianfainelli (subscriber, #61952) [Link]

It's a thankless job and the return on investment is close to zero, it has a great cool and open source factor though. These consumer devices evolve so quickly that you really need to have a special need for keeping a phone around in tip top shape with all peripherals working. One would argue that vendors should be doing that job, but we know how well that goes.

Expectation mismatch

Posted Jan 29, 2026 13:24 UTC (Thu) by dos (guest, #103671) [Link]

Yeah, but it's not a pmOS-specific phenomenon. That's exactly what was happening some ~15 years ago when SHR (a distro with Openmoko roots) was being ported to other devices, such as HTC Dream or Google Nexus - and once the ports started to form some shape, there wasn't really an audience anymore as people have already moved to the next generations of phones.

That said, there is a handful of devices that have a chance to actually become daily-driveable smartphones for some people. Still, arguably the best supported one had most of the work on it done by its vendor (Librem 5) - supporting a device well is a full-time job for a team of diverse people for a good while, especially when you can't stand on a giant's shoulders and have to do plenty of groundwork by yourself.

Meanwhile, a hundreds of devices can boot into a reasonable userspace and maybe not exactly be a phone, but provide a chance to perform some playful cleverness to technologically curious people. This has tremendous value too.