ollieparanoid

After I listen to a podcast host for quite some time, and then read a text message from them, my brain starts reading it in their voice. That definitively happened here. Thanks a lot for making this great show, listened to quite a few episodes by now and had a great time!

When looking back like that, it's mind boggling to realize how far we've come. I sincerely thank everybody who is mainlining their devices, reporting bugs, sending patches, reviewing and testing patches, maintaining packages, updating the wiki, helping out others. Without such a huge and skilled community, we wouldn't have made it this far.

And yes we have a challenging road ahead, as the blog post mentions. But at the same time, I believe the wider Linux Mobile community has reached critical mass of developers and projects. There are so many great projects in this space now (which collaborate quite a lot, Mobian developer kop316's MMS efforts is just one great example). Multiple phones where mainline support has a bright future. Even if a few of these projects or even phones should fail, Mobile Linux can still carry on. Let's find out where we all can carry this effort in 2022 and the years to come!

Thanks for this post, Drew!

I'm involved in postmarketOS, one of the Linux phone distributions the article talks about. Also a heavy Qubes OS user and previously user of a certain hardened android project on the nexus 5x while strcat was still involved in it.

I think it's quite simple,

* if you are a more casual user with strong security and privacy needs, then the Linux phone distros are not there yet. Use something else.

* if you are a Linux enthusiast/developer/hacker who is interested in getting away from Google and Apple eco systems, consider getting involved in one of these Linux phone projects and helping out there.

This should not be seen as competition, it's all free and open source software. Android hardening projects focus on delivering a reasonable solution today while Linux phone projects focus on getting something truly independent in the long run.