Let's make a thought experiment: let's think about designing a new Linux distro from scratch. Obviously starting with Linux-the-kernel, and then thinking about what we need to be a modern smartphone OS.

- We'll probably want the security model, with the nice sandboxing and I would argue the verified boot.

- We'll want the battery optimisation.

- We'll want access to the firmwares of the components running in the phone.

- ...

From the very first step "start from Linux-the-kernel", every single question I ask myself goes towards the Android design and away from the classical Linux distro design.

In other words, the open source Linux distribution that is the closest to a modern mobile system is... Android :-).

▲

pjmlp 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Even more so, it is the closest to Inferno's design, which was the evolution the UNIX founders went through.

Like they created UNIX, they declared it done, created Plan 9, followed by Inferno, most as a reaction to JavaOS, but still, the creators of UNIX moved on.

Whereas the FOSS community seems to be stuck in recreating Bell Labs in the 1970's.

▲

microtonal 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Most of the FOSS community is hostile to even creating basic sandboxing. The Flatpak project gets panned all the time. Not for having a weak sandbox (which would be a fair criticism), but for having a sandbox at all and not using 90s-style package management.

A lot of people from the FOSS community seem to believe that (at least from recurring discussions) that Linux is secure because the software is open source and you can trust the maintainers. The idea that even trusted software can have vulnerabilities and that the 80s/90s security model of the standard Linux desktop means that you are only one Mastodon/e-mail/RSS/whatever client vulnerability away from exfiltration of your whole home directory does not even occur to them. All the while all these applications use (XML/image/...) parsers from the 90/00s written in C.

The only reason we don't see mass-exfiltration of data is because the Linux desktop marketshare is effectively meaningless. Though we see some results of the desktop security disaster (also to some extend of macOS) through leaked credentials obtained by compromised NPM, PyPI, etc. packages.

	▲	pjmlp an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, pretty much so.

▲

modo_mario 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Which is of course after having met those requirements IOS is basically android with a different name and closed source and we only need one player that isn't even properly foss. Or why ChomeOS invalidates the need to keep working on kde/gnome/etc

Or that isn't the case and this is all just a silly comparison.

	▲	palata an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Sorry I don't understand. Would you mind rephrasing that?