[OT?] Android phones

[Evan Leibovitch]

On 1 April 2010 18:23, S P Arif Sahari Wibowo <arifsaha-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:


>  What a "common Linux system" means is a mighty elusive thing;
>>
>
At one level, it isn't. The Linux Standard Base group (now a part of the
Linux Foundation) has a fairly well-defined standard of what a minimum core
"Linux OS" should look like... kernels, libraries, core apps, etc. (
http://www.linuxbase.org)



> IMHO Linus is partly to blame for this. :-) Obviously Linux refer to the
> Linux kernel. However when asked about naming the OS which were built on top
> of the Linux kernel, Linux preferred to call it Linux as well. Well, now
> everything that have a little part of Linux in it, is being call Linux. :-)


Generally these days, in my travels "Linux-based system" has been accepted
to means anything with a Linux kernel and other stuff built on that. A
"Linux (operating) system" these days generally means something that is LSB
compliant of very nearly so.
And calling something a "GNU/Linux system" describes more about the person
talking than about the system.



> Which actually have very little in common with Linux OS. Same with WebOS, I
> guess.


The may have little more than kernels and core libraries, but that's a
reasonably common foundation.



> Well, actually I guess common Linux applications may be able run trivially
> in Meego x86s phones. :-)


Yeah, I just can't wait for the ability to run KDE and OpenOffice and Gimp
and Seamonkey on my 3.5" touchscreen. :-P

Just because they can be done doesn't necessarily mean that they should.

There are very few standard apps that I can run on my Kubuntu desktop -- or
the Netbook Remix on my EeePC, for that matter -- which I'd like to see
duplicated on my smartphone. If there was any lesson learned from the
rampant success of the iPhone and the parallel miserable failure to date of
Windows Mobile, it's that the entire user-centric paradigm needs to be
different on mobile devices. Not only the interface but the entire
relationship between user and device. For similar reasons, the iPad (which I
find boring) is the hype-darling-du-jour while previous mobile devices, from
the early Windows attempts to the OQO and the Nokia NX00, are treated as if
they never existed. It's why nobody really gives a damn about the HP Slate,
which is little more than a conventional Windows netbook with some
touchscreen features instead of a keyboard.

For all its warts, IMO Google seemed to do what was necessary to fully adapt
Linux to mobile devices to provide a credible iPhone alternative -- keep the
Linux core but overhaul substantial chunks of the periphery to suit the
needs of tiny device users and developers, and keep the ecosystem open. We
can already start to see some of the same fragmentation-on-top issues based
on the different front ends that Moto and HTC have been adding to the stock
OS, not too unlike the KDE/GNOME desktop rivalries. It is indeed an
ecosystem of its own, enabled by a Linux core but with a very different
direction from the LSB. By contrast, the Google ChromeOS looks to be a more
conventional "Linux OS" (though stripped down and with a new UI).

- Evan
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