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Comment by hiphopyo | Hacker News Reader

Wish it could be based on OpenBSD instead of Linux.

From what I see, it looks like this still uses the same kernel that's running on the phone. Thus you can't do anything but a Linux system, since that's what Android runs.

From the article:

"Android Open Source Project-based Maru provides you Android Lollipop for your smartphone and includes a Debian Linux within an LXC Linux Container for the desktop environment"

The author of the article is clearly confusing the Android version of the Linux kernel with the Debian userspace that is running under that kernel.

Why out of curiosity? Just personal preference?

Yeah, I don't understand this either. I know that for certain cases FreeBSD has better performance, OpenBSD is possibly more secure, NetBSD more portable, but hasn't Linux proven itself enough at this point that these debates are mostly irrelevant? It's a decent UNIX like kernel, it's already used in Android and then obviously a lot of servers.

But what features or cabalities are you missing with Linux?

OpenBSD is simply a lot better designed than Linux, free from fancy bells and whistles. As the the world's simplest and most secure Unix-like OS, any mobile OS choosing it over Linux would have a significant advantage.

Android has bits and pieces of it, but not nearly enough.

Creator of the world's most used SSH implementation OpenSSH, the world's most elegant firewall PF, the world's most elegant mail server OpenSMTPD, the OpenSSL rewrite LibreSSL, and the NTP rewrite OpenNTPD. OpenBSD -- the cleanest kernel, the cleanest userland and the cleanest configuration syntax.

Those are some serious claims that are not at all objective. I can tell you that I have found OpenSMTPD to be at least as inelegant as just about everything else that touches mail, and PF is a good design but has always had serious competition from the commerical world.

I mean, I love OpenBSD too, but you can't drink the Kool-Aid like that. It's got just as many design tradeoffs built in as any other competent OS.

Do you have a mobile phone OS based on OpenBSD to share?

Some possibilities in these links:

http://openmoko.kd85.com/ http://www.defora.org/ http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1393496 http://tuxmobil.org/mobile_bsd.html http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/OpenBSD https://www.monkey.org/openbsd-mobile/

https://copperhead.co/android/ too apparently -- a hardened open-source operating system based on Android.

I don't think even a phone as common as the Nexus 5 has drivers in OpenBSD.

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