Sorry for the blatant n00b question. I searched online, the FAQ etc. and didn’t see what to me is an obvious question. Supporting old devices is great. In the PC world we have general linux, but on Android and some other consumer devices, solutions have been limited. There are Android forks(?) or implementations like LineageOS that run great. I’ve used non-Google Android since 2018.
So what is the motivation for yet another OS solution? There must be a reason for this project to go on and have so much enthusiasm.
We think computers should act in the interest of their users. For example, they should not participate in the privacy nightmare of targeted advertising, as it is directly built into the operating systems from Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft, as well as the apps and services recommended by them.
This is kinda FUD, right? Google-Android has a lot of privacy invasion. But there are all kinds of Android versions that are de-Googled.
My best guess right now is that it is attempting to provide a “full featured” distro for devices that run phone and tablet OSs now. So if you want a server or full coding environment on a phone, pmOS may be better suited for that than an Android “fork”.
Well, for one that quote does also say “as well as the apps and services recommended by them”. Most Android apps come with ads and tracking built-in, because Google makes it very easy to set that up in the standard Android development toolkit. Similarily, lots of Android apps require the Google Play Services.
But the open-source part of Android (AOSP) still has design decisions which work in favor of advertising. There’s no internet permission for apps, for example, even though this could resolve many security concerns.
Which kind of brings me to more of a personal opinion: Android is also just bad.
Its filesystem is pretty much completely broken, because Google would prefer you put your data into their services rather than keep it offline.
Hardly anything can be scripted.
Getting admin permissions on your own device is an ordeal.
In many ways, I like the Plasma Mobile UI already better than the Android UI. And going back to my first point: The whole ecosystem is hostile.
In particular, I also like to tinker with and improve the ecosystems that I use. I do still use LineageOS, and I just set it up so it’s acceptable to use, then I leave it alone, because I’d rather invest my time into ecosystems that I actually like.
So it’s better to spend resources developing a brand new OS for Android devices, than it is to address the flaws in the Android model? I guess that makes sense.
Well, it’s also not really a brand new OS. In many ways, postmarketOS picks up where desktop Linux stands. There’s some general integration tasks to solve, like how you can talk to the modem to make phone calls or how to deal with touch inputs, and then you may need to either update or rewrite desktop applications to make them responsive, so that they fit onto a phone screen, but then you end up with a pretty good OS relatively quickly. That is why I like the Plasma Mobile UI so much, because it’s just KDE Plasma from desktop Linux with some different configurations.
There will still be certain drawbacks, for example some people rely on proprietary apps on their Android phone to interact with their banking or whatever, which are unlikely to become available for postmarketOS. But personally, I wouldn’t use these apps anyways, because they are so user hostile, so I won’t miss them anyways.