wusspuss

Well, given how all mainstream desktop programs are getting huge buttons these days...

>Because it predates them?

I know, point is Android could've been something like regular linux + flatpak, that's it. If "security" were so important to them they could just invent flatpak without reinventing the rest of the system.

>Also, flatpaks/etc don’t provide nearly the same level of security that android does.

1. There's an order of magnitude less effort being spent on them. They're like RedHat's side gig or something. So not exactly a fair comparison.

2. Who are you kidding praising Android's security? A couple of years after purchase that thing stops getting security updates anyway.

>A fundamental part of Android security is that it is user-controllable at runtime even, giving the user more liberty.

1. Initially it wouldn't allow you to reject an app's permission. You could only see what an app is allowed

2. Who are you kidding calling Android user-controllable? The thing doesn't even give you root access. Also all apps are mostly proprietary and can just refuse to work if you don't give them what they want.

>Display hardware for mobile SoCs often had no or poor x11 drivers during the early days of Android.

How is creating an entirely new SurfaceFlinger a solution to the lack of x11 drivers, logically? There could no drivers for SurfaceFlinger either, if it didn't even exist yet.

>x11 drivers are not easy to write,

I can't believe that's harder than redoing what X11 does from the ground up.

>Limited capability mobile devices really don't need to run a distributed systems protocol that outputs to screens as a side effect, regardless of how cool distributed systems are.

I don't see what the word "limited" has to do with anything here since system requirements of Android are greater than that of the desktop GNU/Linux. When a keyboard app eats away a hundred MBs, any overhead introduced by X11 is outright negligible.

And then even if X11 was so unsuitable that they just HAD to reinvent something, they could've done what Wayland is doing - reinvent it but that's it, don't reinvent the rest of the system, and keep it compatible with the existing ecosystem.

LineageOS is still buggy as hell (AFAIK it doesn't even make "stable" versions anymore since 2016 or so, just nightlies), still takes more resources than GNU/Linux, still doesn't support any good software from the desktop.

But yeah it can give you updates for a few more years after you purchase your phone if you're lucky. Still laughable compared to DECADES old pcs getting updates.

>Debian already fails to put your laptop to sleep half of the time when you close the lid and you expect it to work well with your phone that you send to sleep every other minute?

Debian isn't made by a trillion-dollar company. Very few resources are allocated to testing it, worse yet, there's Redhat always breaking things ever since Gnome went to shit in 2011, which affects pretty much all DEs to some degree.

>Because half the GUI toolkits on Linux are either absolute pieces of shit (GTK lol) or simply not enough.

Last time I checked even GTK manages to NOT fuck up its widgets when resizing the window without requiring the developer to go through all the bullshit of LiveData and then a couple of years later also some new bullshit like Flow or whatever, until Google comes up with something yet more over-complicated.

Then there's also Qt which has even been ported to Android.

>Just to add, because your rant is really not constructive and dismissive of a whole platform: android likely has more apps than desktop linux, plenty of them in better shape as well. Why on Earth would they be buggier, when they do in fact see more users?

What exactly is "in better shape" on Android? Why is there not a single file manager whose functionality even approaches that of say Caja or Dolphin, but which also doesn't have ads built-in? Why is multi-window some novel experimental afterthought when it's been done properly for DECADES now several times over?

>Android project back-ported countless battery optimizations to the kernel

I do wonder if just NOT making it a platform for spyware always running in the background (google services but also pretty much everything else, install Autostarts and see) would be more effecient...

>which would easily have 6-8+ hours of battery life on Android, yet it burns like fire in 2 hours with one gnu/linux-based mobile os.

Most reviews say quite the opposite, especially about screen off mode.

>Android’s biggest contribution/change is the security model — the old UNIX one is simply way too crude, so instead android runs each application as a new, dynamically created user so that UNIX permissions actually get used properly, to a degree.

That doesn't justify any of the other Android's "traits". It's also not clear why that couldn't be done as part of regular gnu/linux, as it is being done now with Wayland + flatpak/firejail/anything that introduces that sort of security model WITHOUT destroying the entire ecosystem. That would actually seem easier as that'd involve much less reinventing.

All of those requirements, 'user centered design' among them, to show a picture in the slowest way possible, ever, and to abuse the user by forcing them to download megabytes of malicious code to see that goddamn picture. The most outrageous part is that people actually get paid well for this.

You can't get paid to cut the web cancer out, but lots of people get paid and paid well to help grow said cancer.

This creates no value, this benefits no one.

Economy as a whole is not that much better than the popularly despised NFTs - entire companies and industries are first and foremost something to bet on, and what's behind them is hardly of importance - be it megabytes of bullshit code or a poorly drawn picture. Jobs are created the same way those monkey pictures are drawn - and the salary of a worker is affected by the importance of his work in hardly a greater part than the price of an NFT is determined by how well it is drawn.

What metadata do you believe it is giving out?.. And how it could possibly even be comparable to what an android espionage device gives out by itself in the first place

Literally half the OP article along with half the comments here explain how XML is a problem, how it is not equivalent to any other serialization format, etc. IMO the funniest example is stanza ids. That problem wouldn't exist even if they just used said XML in a remotely sane manner. But they really wanted to go all in on it. It's the XML mindset, the need to complicate things.

It is not a long solved problem if it takes a demo to prove. If it were long solved it'd be self evident. This argument wouldn't exist to begin with.

A demo is worthless if experience doesn't prove it in the long run. And I have the latter, and it doesn't prove. Yes, I know it's probably me, or more likely my friends doing something wrong. One of them restricted Conversations from running in the background for example, non-techies do all sorts of silly stuff. But then again, it shouldn't break with non-techies either. Nothing breaks with them aside from XMPP. Not even WhatsApp which is based on XMPP afaik