Comment by 827a

> Should service providers be forced (e.g. by regulation) to support consumer hardware stacks they prefer not to?

Yes.

Well, sort of. They don't actually have to do anything. Nobody wants to force them to work for us, that's slavery.

Just don't get in our way when we start writing and using our own software. That's the "support" we want. Just stay out of our way. Leave us alone, without actively discriminating against us for it.

> Should service providers be forced (e.g. by regulation) to support consumer hardware stacks they prefer not to? By what mechanism do you propose we stop a bank from saying "we'll only support connections from iOS devices", if not the democratic market force of ensuring enough of their customers demand access from devices running free and open source software?

The same mechanism that stops a bank from saying, "sure you can withdraw more than $10,000 from your account and we won't ask any questions about what you plan to do with it" - explicit financial regulation with real penalties attached to it, that banks systematically adhere to. I'm not necessarily a fan of all legal regulations around banks or other financial product providers - this is a huge reason I'm interested in truly decentralized cryptocurrency systems - but given that the regulated fiat financial system does exist and is widely used, we might as well demand that these regulations include provisions that the bank has to let people running free smartphone OSs connect to their systems too.

> We need nerds who care about this to stop typing on hackernews and go start a phone hardware company.

We need nerds who care about this to stop complaining about minor things in existing GNU/Linux phones and other similar devices on the market and go buy them. These hardware companies have been there for years already.

It's hard to build a profitable and sustainable business only basing on the minority that doesn't mind it being "too thick", "too slow", "not high-res enough" or "unable to run modern PC games" (all of these are real things I heard from people here, no kidding). And I assure you that if you really care, you'll easily find a way to live with a (swappable) battery that lasts 20 hours.

> By what mechanism do you propose we stop a bank from saying "we'll only support connections from iOS devices", if not the democratic market force of ensuring enough of their customers demand access from devices running free and open source software?

Similar to all the accessibility requirements, of course. Do you think the society / government should force banks to provide services to blind or deaf people? Or should we just let the market decide?

I've done research on this, and have considered it but it's capital and time intensive even if I think it's viable.

There are two reasons I think it's viable now:

1. It's possible to wire an agentic system management service into the OS to handle a lot of the routine stuff, so non-technical users will be able to just talk to their computer and it'll be fine tuned to be good at fixing system issues, installing/removing software, managing windows, etc. I developed a scheduling inversion of control executor for enterprise agent control that I've looked into adapting for this use case.

2. The steam deck has proven a new model. Game friendly and a simplified UI is enough to carry Linux. New Arch rices like Omarchy are pushing the envelope of usability. I've been ricing desktops since enlightenment on slackware 96, so I'm pretty familiar with this world.

Regarding form factor, I'm not a huge fan of phones, too many tradeoffs. I think with strong AI voice systems, the optimal setup is buds + tablet. That's a better setup for mobile linux anyhow, and it makes the hardware almost a non-issue.

This is a valid take. I do not agree with it in general: if we look beside the consumer devices, FOSS software us everywhere. and powers almost everything consequential.

But the mobile phones specifically turned from phones into trusted terminal which institutions like banks and governments use to let users control large amounts of money and responsibility. And the first rule of a secure device is to be limited. In particular, the device should limit the ability of its owner to fake its identity, or do unauthorized things with networking, camera, etc.

This junction of a general portable computer and a secure terminal is very unfortunate, because it exerts a very real pressure on the general computing part. Malicious users exist, hence more and more locking, attestation, etc, so that the other side could trust the mobile phone as a secure terminal.

It would be great to have a mobile computer where you can run whatever you please, because it's nobody's business. And additionally there'd be a security attachment that runs software which is limited, vetted, signed, completely locked-up and tamper-proof on the hardware level (also open-source), which sides of the communication would trust. Think about a Yubikey, or a TPM, but larger and more capable. The cellular modem and a SIM card are other examples, even though they may be not as severely hardened. They are still quite severely limited, and this is good.

If I were to offer an open-source phone (and, frankly, any mobile phone), I would consider following this principle. Much like the cellular modem, it would carry a locked up and certified security block, which would not be user-alterable. It would be also quite limited, unable to snoop into the rest of the phone. The rest of the phone would be a general-purpose computer with few limitations. Anything that would want to run on it securely would connect to the unforgeable interface of the security module, and do encryption / decryption / signing / secure storage that other parties, local and remote, would be able to verify and thus trust.

One can dream.

At this point there are only two things stopping me from using kde or gnome on my work box: Apple and my employer, and I could probably convince my employer. The hardware though is something I’m not willing to compromise on and Apple is in a tier above everyone else currently, so I’m stuck with subpar macOS, not planning upgrading to Tahoe for as long as possible.

Nerd have been at it since the OpenMoko days, the problem is that they don't understand what the general public cares about, thus all those efforts end up failing, as the few nerds that care about being customers all get a phone, and there isn't anyone left to keep the business going, buying new devices.

> We need nerds who care about this to stop typing on hackernews and go start a phone hardware company. That's it.

We need nerds that are more politically conscious than that, and are not naive enough to believe they can solve political problems through creating companies and hardware.

Eh? Samsung still maintains a whole suite of independent alternative apps, providing things ranging from NFC payments to calendaring and contact management, that they stuff onto their phones in addition to the usual Google fare.

Until very recently, most/all of their phones had alternative Samsung-produced chipsets available in various markets (Exynos).

They've got their own app store as a built-in.

And they also maintain their own small-system operating system, with Tizen, in case it all goes to shit.

They've been working very hard on parallel development for quite a long time. They're probably better-prepared to jump ship than any other top-tier manufacturer of Android cell phones is.

Motorola Mobility? That was spun out of the stodgy-big batwing mothership in Chicago a long time ago -- and first purchased by Google, before being sold to Lenovo. Subsequent to Google's influence, whatever remains is ill-prepared to jump ship, but that was certainly a design intent. That behemoth is much more dug-in.

So the outlook is certainly gloomy, but it's not all darkness.

(In terms of things like banks only supporting one OS or another: Gosh. Prior to the entrenchment of the smart phone age, I never installed a company-specific consumer banking application on any computing devices at all. It was OK. I just used Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web to do that stuff, sometimes with a side dose of SMS on my dumb-phone for active notifications.

And still today, I don't have banking apps for most of the companies that I do banking-stuff with -- and I get along fine with keeping track of the money I have, the money I owe, and the bills I need to pay.

Maybe the right answer here is to shore up the utility of the platform-independent WWW.)

> To me, this is... fine. Not ideal; but fine. We should fight like hell to score wins where we can, like in right to repair, parts availability, ensuring old devices are kept up to date for as long as possible (Apple is pretty good at this); but if I have to carry an old iPhone in my backpack to access my bank because they refuse to support my hypothetical GnuPhone 5, the world isn't going to end.

But even as you say, as you're using Arch as your desktop computer, things may be fine now, but they're only going to get worse.

Should we all have to carry two laptops because anything running a free software core is just utterly unusable due to remote attestation?

> We need nerds who care about this to stop typing on hackernews and go start a phone hardware company. That's it.

Didn't you just spend most of your comment talking about how the market forces don't care anyway? Would good is starting up a phone hardware company that will ultimately go bust due to total apathy of the general consumer?

Yep

"free and open web" isn't even used to be anymore, many are using bots and AI to make things worse and many people especially young people didn't even do "surfing" on the web anymore

like it or not but internet that need verification on personal level is the future, I don't agree with it either but if you see from the progress perspective its always been like that