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Comment by qwertox | Hacker News Reader

It's mainly the OS which causes smartphones and tablets to end up on the landfill.

If it would be possible to install current, plain Linux on a device which can make use of a USB-Hub, in order to add a sound card, video camera, USB-to-serial or whatever it is, then these devices would get a second life.

Imagine a smartphone with a plain Linux on it and an extrenal USB-HDD and USB-to-Ethernet-Adapter attached to it to now serve as a DLNA server, or a simple NAS for a backup of the family's photo collections.

It's theoretically possible, but for some reason removing that Android and fully replacing it with a Linux/GNU system is close to impossible.

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Honest question - wouldn't rooted android phones serve the main use cases of what you're proposing?

To me, it seems the landfilling is mainly because people aren't technical and/or don't have any need for a tiny linux computer.

Raspberry Pi has proven that people can find uses for tiny low-power computers if it's hacker friendly

The issue is that you've still got Android's Java VM running alongside your lean Go/Rust/Python/Ruby servers with close to no use at all.

To me it's an entirely different experience to code a server in Python and leave it there running as a background process than to code an Android app which serves the same purpose, the latter is unnecessarily hard, specially keeping that process alive over weeks.

I love my Raspberry Pis because I can do whatever I want with them, I've got full access to the system and no junk is preinstalled.

If a phone is rooted, you can get the same kind of access, but the entire experience is so much different, even if you use root to run processes directly on the shell.

LineageOS might be excellent for devices which could still serve as phones, but nearly all of my old devices are just too old to offer an experience similar to modern phones, but they could well serve other purposes.

At that point running Google Play Services and all the vendors bloatware background processes is just a waste of resources.

not really, there's postmarketOS. Although only a handful of devices work well, you can still get some use out of many phones.

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