@liaizon Ughhhh.
I really want things like these to be, well, real. They are barely ever real. Quick glance at Brax Wink landing immediately suggests it's not real at all.
I suppose Fairphone 5 and Furilabs' FLX1S+ are promising steps in the right direction (still can't get my hands on any of those tho), meanwhile we need "Linux phone problem" solved, like, "I'm going to randomly install Arch" level of solved, "just use Proton to play games" level of solved. The deadlines are looming, and we're not exactly close to meeting them.

@lnkr I was excited briefly after randomly coming across the video but then quickly got the vibe that these people are not serious

@lnkr this project actually looks like it will come to fruition tho https://mecha.so/comet

@liaizon ooooh, this one looks so much better, I can at least feel some involvement of the people who happen to know what they're talking about. Still, I'll believe it when I see it, preferably with LTE kit, there is still a handful of red flags there if you ask me, with "funded in 6 minutes on kickstarter" label being one of them

@lnkr they are also active here https://fosstodon.org/@mechasystems and the founder responds to peoples questions here too

@liaizon @lnkr Thanks for this, I am on the hunt for a roughly phone-sized handheld with LTE and a keyboard. This would fit the bill, though I'd still have to figure out the Orca situation.

@liaizon I think the the Graphene community is very vocal in an assholish kind of way against everything that doesn't match their definition of purity when it comes to phone OS alternatives.

I've seen a couple of mentions about Sailfish OS and Jolla's latest phone that felt very "sour grapes"...

@mariusor yes for sure that is also true. but looking into some of the things that are mentioned by them it mostly comes across as true and I saw no other sources for this information. looked up the one tech person that was mentioned in this rant https://x.com/dominic_gingras and it does seem to track that the whole thing is super sus. his previous company seems to be a fork of signal with the protocol renamed.

@liaizon sorry, my comment wasn't about this specific instance, but more, take what they're saying with a pinch of salt, which it sounds like you did. :D

@liaizon also to maybe point you in the direction of the Jolla phone, if you need a linux phone that can be daily driven, to the expense of the OS not being fully open-source.

@mariusor yeah I got to see a friends recently. the interface design is pretty depressingly bad, I don't know why they are trying to do so much custom front end instead of using whats already there in the ecosystem but yeah at least they have a shipping product

> the interface design is pretty depressingly bad

Strongly disagree. Android borrowed, or convergently evolved into having gesture based UI over years, which is the signature feature of Sailfish OS.

> whats already there

What's already there? Do you mean linux mobile OS UI, or something like Android's Material? The project started in 2014, there was even less there than it might be today.

@liaizon

@mariusor I don't know the history of Jolla's front end interface, it was just with very briefly playing with one recently. Maybe they were much earlier then the others. I have played with UBports and Gnome Shell mobile both of which seem much farther along then what I briefly saw on the Jolla. But yeah opinions of interface design is also very reliant on what you are also used to.

@liaizon I haven't really seen Gnome shell on mobile, but I'd probably be based against it due to hating how Gnome behaves on the desktop. But I'd be interested in what you experienced that they do better.

@liaizon @mariusor Sailfish predates most of the rest of the mobile Linux ecosystem is partly why. It first released in 2013, at which point Phosh, Plasma Mobile, libhandy/libadwaita, etc didn't exist yet

Sailfish is something like a spiritual successor to the even earlier Maemo/MeeGo (especially the version that shipped on the Nokia N9)