I want to donate to a linux phone. I believe in linux and I want a linux phone. Maybe we can use one in very few years as a normal daily driver. It’s getting closer and closer every month.

I want to donate that we get there sooner. But which project? I’m following postmarket but I’m not sure if they are the most promising. What’s your stance on this? To which project would you give your money to accellerate it?

Edit: I don’t want to buy a phone. I want to support the phone os devs. Sorry for the bad wording.

  • smileyhead
    2·
    9 months ago

    You can’t even compile any of those FOSS apps without running propietary build of Android SDK. No one managed to build current versions of Android SDK from the source code yet.

    Android is like one big blob and changing anything in it require giant effort. Meanwhile making new feature for a Linux phone with common Linux tech stack is super easy and any mid-tier developer can change something in Phosh for example.

      • smileyhead
        1·
        9 months ago

        Which one? Android SDK source is under Apache licence, but binaries are under EULA. There were some efforts to properly package it under free licencje, but currently no one do it.

        As for Android being giant blob, maybe not the best word but it really is barely available to change. If I want to add a new feature to the UI, I need to build whole ROM again and deal with Google’s developing platforms. While on Linux you can get the code for a component from some GitHub/Codeberg and modify/reinstall just that component.