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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

Much as I admire the goal and the scrappiness, doesn't it make way more sense to start with an AOSP foundation (without Google Services) and invest one's energy improving (or even forking) that experience instead of reinventing such an enormous wheel?

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There's already LineageOS and Replicant who work on Android-based OSes if you want an experience like that. This is a bit more sustainable and flexible as those OSes have to constantly maintain feature parity with Google's releases rather than prioritise other aspects.

If using Android kernel eliminating rest of Android OS is the goal, Ubuntu Touch is being developed & run by ubports community[1] after canonical discontinued it.

I recently tried it on Nexus 4 & it is certainly capable for daily use. It is running on 16.04. It will provide regular Ubuntu OS updates but the kernel remains the same as the android version.

Since the android kernel is dependent on the manufacturer, once the updates are stopped, the device is at higher risk even if it runs Ubuntu Touch, LineageOS or other 3rd party ROMS though they release regular updates.

I believe, postmarketOS aims to address this in long term by using mainline kernel & at present uses android kernel for drivers without the user space? I'm not sure whether this offers any particular advantage over UBPorts Ubuntu Touch at its present state, but I really appreciate what they are doing & looking forward to use/contribute to it soon.

[1]: https://ubports.com/

They give pretty good reasons for what they're doing on their website: https://postmarketos.org/blog/2017/05/26/intro/

The reasons don't really seem to address why Android has the issues it has -- device manufacturers don't upstream their code changes to the mainline Linux kernel, Linux doesn't have the same level of abstraction around hardware as eg Windows does, and the state of ARM SoCs isn't like the x86 platform where there's a lot of standards you can follow, everybody just ships bespoke code to boot their SoC and only their SoC. I don't see how shipping a "real" GNU/Linux userland addresses that.

It won't, as proven by netbooks distributions or Treble based handsets.

Which has finally driven Google to change their Play Services access contract.

Wait what? Google changed the Play Services contract? Is there a page or a HN thread with more info?

Yes, there is.

https://www.osnews.com/story/30820/google-mandates-two-years...

We are addressing the mainline issue, a few devices actually run closely to the mainline kernel in postmarketOS. See our previous big update post for details:

https://postmarketos.org/blog/2018/06/09/one-year/#mainline-...

The reasons are very clear, while I trust Apple so far, it’s both important and awesome that a bunch of nice peoples start building a real FOSS alternative in case they are actually screwing us.

Android can’t be trusted anymore unless major change of policy. By extension AOSP are better but still dubious since they can’t totally cut the cord from Google if needed (as far ad I understood).

What do you mean by "cut the cord?", AOSP doesn't use Google Services and it could be forked at any time (but would admittedly be difficult to maintain without Google's resources).

The mainstream Linux stack is getting closer to parity with AOSP and ChromiumOS anyway, gaining features like touch-screen-first input, small-screen support, phone calls & SMS, GPS location, privacy-focused sandboxing etc. It's all about having a single system for the community to focus on, thus reducing fragmentation. AOSP app support can then be layered over the basic system if needed.

> The mainstream Linux stack

Without taking away anything from your argument, I'd like to point out that by most objective measures, Android is the mainstream Linux stack.

I think they meant mainline.

Exactly- even if you want to diverge completely, it still seems like you're better off with that enormous head start.

https://postmarketos.org/static/slides/2018-akademy/#18

The /e/ project is trying to do something like that https://e.foundation/

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