• Björn Tantau
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    1095 months ago

    I wish Valve would make a Steam Phone. They seem to know how to do Linux devices.

    • @Vilian@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      they don’t know to make a good android app, and you want them to make an entire cellphone💀💀

      • TimeSquirrel
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        5 months ago

        They made an entire Linux-powered portable game system that’s revolutionizing Linux gaming at the moment…an embedded engineer is not the same skillset as an app developer. Not even close.

        • @lemmeee@sh.itjust.works
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          -44 months ago

          They made a device with a proprietary operating system and proprietary software. If you really want that, why not just use Android?

            • @lemmeee@sh.itjust.works
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              04 months ago

              Steam OS is proprietary.

              But Arch contains proprietary firmware, so technically it’s not fully free software either.

              • @Titou@feddit.de
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                14 months ago

                SteamOS is open source with some closed sources component. But most important think you seems not being able to understand is that Valve provide high support to Open source community, which means it wouldn’t be surprising if they decided to drop a open source phone.

                • @lemmeee@sh.itjust.works
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                  -14 months ago

                  SteamOS is open source with some closed sources component.

                  So it is not free software. It’s proprietary, unethical software that takes away your freedom. Just like Windows, Android, etc.

                  But most important think you seems not being able to understand is that Valve provide high support to Open source community, which means it wouldn’t be surprising if they decided to drop a open source phone.

                  By doing what? They only want to lock you in their proprietary platform. Most of heir software is proprietary, their games are proprietary and they restrict users with DRM. It’s a terrible company, which abuses their users. If Steam Deck contains proprietary software, why would their phone by anything different?

    • dadarobot
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      115 months ago

      Hell, I think even Raspberry Pi Foundation getting into the phone market would be a game changer too.

      • mesamune
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        05 months ago

        If they did that, it would be sold out for years before you or I could get it.

        • Teppic
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          15 months ago

          They seem to have resolved their supply chain issues for now. I could buy a Pi 5 and have it dispatched tomorrow, and I did buy a Pi 4b recently, no issues with delays or lead times.

    • @ikidd@lemmy.world
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      64 months ago

      I don’t think you could go fast enough to catch Valve as they ran screaming from that idea.

    • @cm0002@lemmy.world
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      45 months ago

      Maybe it’d be the first “specialty” phone with decent specs. I always get excited for these “specialty” type phones like “Linux on my PHONE? Fuck yea!”

      Until I look at the specs and it’s crap every single time and then I’m just disappointed, like the PinePhone Pro has just 4GB LPDDR4 (No not even the good LPDDR4x) lmao like what is this, 2015?? Lolol

      • Björn Tantau
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        14 months ago

        Everything that matters is open source and upstreamed or on the way there. Haven’t kept up with the state of things but as far as I am aware you can already run a mainline kernel on the Deck. Would love to see an open phone you can easily run your own distribution on without jumping through hoops.

        But phones are hard. An x86 phone with decent battery life is even harder. But one can dream.

        • @lemmeee@sh.itjust.works
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          14 months ago

          It’s certainly great that you can install any distro with mainline kernel on the deck (even if some things don’t work). But my point was that Valve doesn’t care about user freedom. Their OS and the Steam client are proprietary. If they made a GNU/Linux phone, there is no guarantee that you would be able to install a free distro and it almost certainly would come with non free software by default, which would be bad.

          Would love to see an open phone you can easily run your own distribution on without jumping through hoops.

          I think PinePhone Pro and Librem 5 can run a mainline kernel. It’s possible that some things won’t work, but a lot of stuff has been upstreamed. I’m curious if you can easily install an ARM build of Debian on them, but couldn’t find any information last time I looked it up.

          But phones are hard. An x86 phone with decent battery life is even harder. But one can dream.

          Oh yeah, that is the dream. I wonder how are the current mobile Ryzen CPUs. I’m curious if there is any that could work well in a phone.

          • Björn Tantau
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            14 months ago

            There is a Debian spin for the Pinephone called Mobian. I ran that for quite a while with Phosh as the front end. It’s probably still installed on the device.

            What I hate about ARM is that you basically need a separate image for every device instead of one for everything like with x86.

            • @lemmeee@sh.itjust.works
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              24 months ago

              I use Mobian with Phosh too! What I love about Mobian is that it’s just a small overlay on top of Debian. The project’s goal is literally to upstream everything into Debian and to stop existing. You can see that it doesn’t add a lot of packages: https://packages.mobian.org

              Yeah, you are right about ARM. It seems to be true about RISC-V as well. It’s so weird that so many people think those kinds of devices will be good for us. Sometimes I watch reviews of single board computers on YouTube and the reviewers never mention that the device can’t run mainline Linux. They can’t install Debian from debian.org on them. So instead they install some distro provided by the manufacturer and for some reason they are just fine with that. Raspberry PI is the same and almost nobody seems to be talking about this. So that’s why I’m not sure if you can install a normal distro on PinePhone Pro or Librem 5, even though they can run mainline Linux.

              Also ARM SoC manufacturers don’t seem to try to have upstream Linux support. So I think that’s why PinePhone uses a 2010 SoC (if I remember correctly) and Pro uses a 2016 SoC. It’s a bad platform.