>Is there a single Linux phone/tablet that can last an 8 hour day of actual use?
What's "actual use"? Furi FLX1 has the best battery life I've seen on a Linux phone. Idling, it last 3+ days. I'm sure it could survive 1 whole day of "actual use". I also think almost any (official) SailfishOS device would last a day of actual use.
I have a Sony Xperia 10 III with SailfishOS and it easily does 48 hours on a charge when I'm not doing a lot of screen time. Also on days when I use it for tracking / navigation on 6-8 hour bicycle rides it easily lasts for the entire day and then some. I think this is not bad for a device that has been in daily use for almost three years and still has the original battery.
I'm running a couple of messenger clients and a web browser (Fennec under Android App Support as the native one is sadly a bit behind the times currently) all the time. The only thing I've noticed to eat a ton of battery is having wifi enabled when outside the range of my own networks, it seems the scanning the phone does in the background to look for known wifi networks is not energy efficient at all.
I also have this setup and SFos on Gigaset GS5. Similar battery performance. I did a roadtrip last week with navigation (starting with about 90% battery) and after 5&1/2 hours navigation was down to 65% or therabouts. Works for me.
And, yes, I often turn off wifi. I never go over my Data limits and 4G/5G is much more efficient for some reason.
SailfishOS is quite efficient. On Sony devices, I experienced maybe 15% extra battery life compared to stock Android, which is quite good given that Sony ROMs are excellent. Sony is known for their Sony Open Devices Program.
I genuinely think if Sony offered a Linux phone and didn't lock it down too bad, they could serve as the catalyst for the whole market. I don't think I would trust any other company at this point to execute the platonic "Linux phone" we need. The uncompromising vision on building a fantastic product for the technically minded make them an obvious choice.
I get the impression they shut it down, but Sony had/have the Xperia Open Devices program. They were close to having their devices running purely on the mainline Linux kernel:
Sony tries out so many different types of products too across their entire lineup. They have made some memorable handhelds over the years, even their eink readers were special.
I've been considering this as my Android exit plan (as part of a slow rolling de-googling effort, even before the recent "sideloading" news). Are you using it as a daily driver? I'm sort of surprised it doesn't get brought up more.
Yes, I used SailfishOS as a daily driver since ~2014 until last year when I moved to the Furi FLX1. The FLX1 has been my daily driver since. SailfishOS is much more polished, but it's not fully FOSS, and it follows upstream much less closely. FLX1 is basically in-sync with Debian testing, with the exception of kernel.
> FuriOS allows for running apps inside a container running Android codenamed Andromeda. This container has complete integration with the host and makes all Android applications work like native applications
Yes, both (official) SailfishOS and FLX1 offer decent/good Android app support. Not every app will work, but when I have needed Android (rarely, for basic stuff), the applications have worked.
Interesting. I had a poke at postmarket, which wasn't ready in comparison with SFOS. Would you say the FLX1 is at better stage in development than postmarket?
You're comparing a Linux OS (postmarketOS) to a device (FLX1). I think you meant to compare postmarketOS to FuriOS : )
FuriOS (and its base Droidian) are at a better stage of development for devices made to run Android using the old Android Linux kernel, whereas postmarketOS is better for devices made specifically for Linux, like the Liberty Phone, Pinephone, etc. Droidian will not even work on them.
I'm not familiar with postmarket, but I imagine it shares a lot of the same phosh+GNOME app ecosystem, in which case, the apps aren't in a better state.
In terms of polish and app/dev ecosystem, I feel SailfishOS still rules, but it's getting harder to justify using/development, with it's increasing divergence from upstream.
The only detractions on the software side that I ever see are about it being a “hack” via Hallium, but to be frank, the device actually ships and is usable today. Linux purists probably need to stop complaining.
It does seem like there’s been a backlog with the latest orders though - maybe due to tariff hell? I keep wanting to order but their forum has a few people being thrown for a loop on the order side, so…
>The design and concept of EverQuest is heavily indebted to text-based MUDs, in particular DikuMUD ... John Smedley, Brad McQuaid, Steve Clover and Bill Trost, who jointly are credited with creating the world of EverQuest, have repeatedly pointed to their shared experiences playing MUDs such as Sojourn and TorilMUD as the inspiration for the game
The situation with systemd cannot be compared to special circumstances of Godot and shady practices of its management. It's an essentially open core but privately owned product. I guess this is a better arrangement than Unity but it is not a true FOSS engine in the sense of the word.
There's a gamified version of nand2tetris available on Steam called "Turing Complete" (https://turingcomplete.game).
I completed it up until the assembler challenges, and I felt the same way as the author. Granted I knew Kmaps, etc. from my uni days, but given the nand2tetris book you might be able to figure it out.
Quite. I had a great Christmas break a couple years back going through all the missions. It has some edges to it but people have also implemented things like RISC-V in it so it's also quite complete. The game portion is enough for fun and exploration.
I got all the way to the final missions where you're writing your own assembly (that you created) to solve various programming puzzles. Only stopped because I got busy with something else and break was over. I def recommend it. Reminded me at the time of Code by Charles Petzold but applied.
(Last I checked the Author was rewriting much of it for performance reasons and to fix up a few gotchas that should be possible with circuits but aren't here - no idea if they still are but that was my understanding before)
The game has an alpha version appropriately named save_breaker that gets regular if not daily updates. Some of the later puzzles are completely different, the second architecture has been replaced with a more advanced one that includes pipelining, and some new puzzles are still in the works. The new assembler is much more modular and many of the components have changed shape, with some having been removed or combined. The author plans to release it as v1 when stable but who knows when that will be. Breaking changes still occur occasionally.
IMO, yes it is complete enough (note: I only went as far as the assembler challenges, I'd done enough assembler beforehand). But I did build a general purpose computer from NAND gates up.
Development still appears to be ongoing on Discord, which is quite active. I think the dev may have bitten off more than they could chew with their last patch promise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38cKko7sViw
It's complete enough, yes. I played it up until the "main quest" was done (building a TC machine).
It took approx. 20 hours and I loved it in a very similar way as the blog post author describes Nand2Tetris, so I'll have to look this one up too.
I bought it to revise my intro to computer engineering course before the exam and it worked pretty well for that. Didn't hit any bugs and it also was content complete as far as I could tell
A huge number of developers started in HTMl/CSS/JS because it was a super-low barrier to entry.
I also know a huge number of professional developers that started off as teenagers tinkering with Linux. They started with Linux because the hurdle was so low. No accounts, no fees. Download an ISO and burn it.
These platforms are hurting themselves long term by increasing the barrier to entry.
I'm not going to spend a second on the Apple/Android platform if I need to fork out money/account to try it out (even if I can afford it).
There's SailfishOS. It still uses Android kernel+drivers, but above that it's a "real" GNU/Linux system (glibc, systemd, bash, Qt, connman+ofono, zypp/packagekit, Gecko). It's not completely FOSS, but it is usable as a daily driver, and has been for at least 10 years (based on personal experience).
>Spectrum is garbage and ZX81 is even more garbage... especially when considering that Commodore 64 was only slightly more expensive.
Jack Tramiel (owner of Commodore) was hugely influenced by what Sinclair was doing (really cheap computers). It definitely influenced the VIC20. You can't underestimate how widespread their influence is/was. Source: Commodore: A Company on the Edge.
Sort of like the Velvet Underground quip about only 20 people seeing the band live at one point, but every single one of the viewers starting their own band as a result.
What's "actual use"? Furi FLX1 has the best battery life I've seen on a Linux phone. Idling, it last 3+ days. I'm sure it could survive 1 whole day of "actual use". I also think almost any (official) SailfishOS device would last a day of actual use.