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0 pointsimmibis1y ago0 comments

A lot of these kinds of problems go away with vertical integration and limited scope. E.g. if you only want to make phone calls and send SMS (or the internet application of your choice) so you can call it a phone, it's not terrible. You can write that. When you want to run a massive black box like Firefox on top of another massive black box like a proprietary GPU, it is terrible.

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jancsika1y ago· 1 in thread

> E.g. if you only want to make phone calls and send SMS

What Linux device works with a modern baseband OS out-of-the-box with, say, Verizon or AT&T?

I think it's just as terrible as Firefox/Mesa/Proprietary GPU-- e.g., jumping on forums, pentesting magic messages to the Baseband OS, etc.

immibisOP1y ago

None, but the point is that trying to make a dumbphone, using Linux as an ingredient, allows each part of the product to be very specific about the other parts, whereas trying to add general phone support to Linux (say, if you plug in a USB modem) will require either a lowest common denominator or an inconsistent experience, and will have abstraction layers in the middle making the software much harder to develop. Consider that the SMS app for My Linux Dumbphone can open /dev/ttyUSB5 and send AT commands, and the experience as a whole is tested and edited by one person until it works well, while the one for KDE has to use some KDE API which either adapts to KDE Connect (which has to follow an already-designed protocol) or to a Linux kernel API which is implemented by a lowest-effort driver.

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