nikodunk
Joined 9 years ago
Joined 9 years ago
The software side (Phosh, KDE, etc) is now improving fast (both IMO because the obscure frameworks they're written in are easier to contribute to with AI, but also just thanks to time and maturity).
And if the firmware/hardware side can graduate the treadmill of endless bring-up and instead work on performance and fun stuff, that would be fantastic. We need our Raspberry Pi moment. First the Librem and Pinephone were our hope, then the OnePlus 6, but they all stayed 80% usable. Currently it was the Fairphone, but now tbd which the savior device will be. Exciting!
- IDEs are no problem. Editors will "just work" for anything you type into the app store - Bazzite handles the special cases for you and installs them through brew taps or Flatpaks.
- For development it's basically just like a Mac where you also can't install system-level packages: Node, Python etc work through brew / nvm / uv same as on Mac. Development that involves containers will be unchanged from a Mac. For compilers specifically, same as on Mac: Install it through brew, or if you need a Debian or Fedora base you do `distrobox create` and you can apt-install in a transparent podman container.
The product: https://pilaenergy.com
brew install llama.cpp
llama-server -hf ggml-org/gemma-4-E4B-it-GGUF --port 8000
Go to localhost:8000 for the Web UI. On Linux it accelerates correctly on my AMD GPU, which Ollama failed to do, though of course everyone's mileage seems to vary on this.
- Apps: It's Linux (like desktop or server), but "image-based" so you install apps in containers like iOS or Android do (and therefore OS updates basically-never break). https://flathub.org is generally the main app store for Linux containerized phone apps.
- Screenshots: It'll look the same as other Linux-on-phones, so like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostmarketOS for instance. It's just built differently.
Portfolio at https://nikodunk.com
Engineer at https://www.pilaenergy.com