Lup Yuen Lee 李立源 @lupyuen@qoto.org

@thisisthebreath @carbonatedcaffeine @lupyuen I used to have an N800 too, and even an ancient N770, but those two devices already failed badly a couple of years ago because of inexplicable hardware issues. So far the N900 has really stood the test of time though.

@thisisthebreath @carbonatedcaffeine @lupyuen my #N900 with #PostmarketOS is still doing a decent job as a pocket-sized SSH client - especially useful to control media on my Raspberry Pis when I'm around the house, or for small system administration tasks.

Besides that, and occasionally showing it off to some geek friends (or maybe use it as a small in-house server), I struggled to find many practical uses - I may have really stretched its lifetime more than the NASA team did with the Voyager probes.

Another problem I have is with PostmarketOS. It's built around Busybox and OpenRC instead of the GNU environment + systemd. It means that most of my existing configuration files, services etc. won't work without modifications. This is something I hoped Ubuntu Touch could fix, but Ubuntu Touch eventually preferred to follow the path of the locked+containerized school that made the tinkering experience worse. Since I loved Maemo a decade ago, I could give Leste a try, but I also have my concerns about a project still based on Debian oldstable that is likely to ship software that is at least a couple of years old...

@blacklight @takloufer @lupyuen Its rough, of course, but I daily drive the PinePhonePro and enjoy it immensely. Arch linux has been solid, easy to setup, and both calls and bluetooth work, though things crash occasionally.

@takloufer @lupyuen I also don't mind using old hardware, but it depends on the purpose. I have plenty of RPi0 around my house doing a lot of heavy duty, but when it comes to my primary phone I'd like to have something that I can use with recent software without having to wait several seconds for the screen to refresh or for an app to start.

And of course the price (or, better, the price/performance ratio) is another factor. The #Pinephone Pro is $600 at retail price for a phone that ships two ARM Cortex A72 cores. Sure, they're faster than the ancient A53, but you're still spending $600 in 2022 on a device that ships a chipset that was released in 2016. This is a problem that also plagues other libre-friendly phone makers though - the prices of #Fairphone and #Librem are also comparable to those of several mid-to-high range phones today, while shipping less than half of their performance.

This is a kind of negative feedback loop that has plagued the whole field of libre devices. You can't use the newest flashy hardware if you want your devices to only include open hardware. And you can't produce devices at a competitive price until you do it at scale and your supply chains are well oiled. But you can't produce devices at scale until you have built a decent user base. And you can't build a decent user base if the price of your devices is higher than what they can deliver when compared to the rest of the market. And even the most enthusiastic FLOSS developers (a category that probably includes myself) would not invest their money and time in something that is overpriced and underperforming.

@thisisthebreath @lupyuen
Yeah, there's a QT webbrowser on Maemo Leste and theres a good few light ones on PostmarketOS too.

@thisisthebreath @lupyuen
Maemo leste is super cool, since it's still Maemo but it has newer software like the linux kernel.

@thisisthebreath @lupyuen
Yeah of course! You can run PostmarketOS on it with the i3 window manager as well as Maemo Leste.
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/index.php?title=Nokia_N900_(nokia-n900)&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop
https://leste.maemo.org/Getting_Started

@thisisthebreath @lupyuen
Hi, I'm the person who wrote this article!
Yes it's still very much alive and well!! A new community maintains the system, which now includes support for a lot of new devices such as the Motorola Droid 3/4 (with calls working) and the PinePhone.

@lupyuen This is why I was skeptical about the #Pinephone and I keep being skeptical.

The Pinephone is an amazing idea, free and open Linux phones are what everybody needs.

But they released a product that ships hardware that is a decade old, something that nobody would use as their primary device, with even basic features like calls and Bluetooth often requiring extra tweaking.

They said "it's mostly to allow developers to build something against the ecosystem" (a sensible point), but then added "oh, btw, almost none of the modern software can run on it without glitches or sluggish performance".

And now we're like "oh, cool, actually this device can run quite well this Linux distro that was last released for a phone released 13 years ago!" - and I mean, I used to love #Maemo, I had it both on my Nokia 770 and Nokia N900, I used to build stuff on it, but I wouldn't invest my time today building software for a distro that hasn't been maintained in years and doesn't even ship systemd or at least OpenRC.

I fail to see the point of all this. It's not a product, it's not even an MVP, it's barely a PoC. It's more something that people would show off on their geek timelines when they receive it, maybe some would even embark the challenge of installing Arch or Manjaro on it, and then they'd just leave it in a drawer when they realize that it can't do that much for today's standards.

As a developer, I'd love to have a Linux device in my pocket and build lots of cool software on it, but if all I get is a device that can't even run a modern desktop environment then I won't even invest my development time on it.

@lupyuen wow maemo is still around? i had that on my nokia N900