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[SOLVED] Will Linux Phones ever become commercially viable and decrease to a price point of 200-400 USD? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Owell1984@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Don't say, hey android has Linux in it, yeah no, idc, I want to know how far we are from buying a Linux phone at a price point of 200 USD.

A Linux phone is one which is built completely on Linux, uses Linux apps and most important has a terminal.

I don't want a Linux Phone for privacy, although that's a great reason, but I want it for the freedom it provides me. Hell, I don't care if Android itself comes with a terminal and has similar features to Linux, I just want a Terminal which can install apps, where I can write commands and it will execute it. Complete Control on my phone and how it behaves is what I want.

I want to tell it when to sleep, when not to sleep, when to boot, when to edit a file and how, when to take a screenshot and what to do with it and where to save it, etc, etc. I hope you get the idea.

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[–] bingbong@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Do you think that might change with risc-v? As in, it would be more likely to have open source code and community support for kernel updates

[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think so, no.

What causes the situation currently is not ARM, but the companies making SoCs.

Currently, with RISC-V, we are seeing early-adopter trial runs by early-adopter companies. None of the usual suspects have any amount of serious skin in the game.

When Qualcomm is making mass-market high-performance RISC-V SoCs, they will treat them exactly the way they are treating their equivalent ARM SoCs right now.

[–] bingbong@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah good point, darn

[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 5 points 1 year ago

Tbh, if we are unlucky, RISK-V might even get worse than ARM.

The point of RISK-V is to get rid of ARM ltd., the company that manages the ARM ISA and the reference designs, and asks for a lot of money from companies that want to use ARM.

RISK-V was made to have an ISA without such a middle man.

The issue here is that (apart from some university researchers) nobody makes freely available reference designs.

If a company wants to make their own high-performance ARM SoC, they call up ARM, pay a lot of money and get some directly usable reference designs. They maybe configure it with the features they want and then send the design to e.g. TSMC and they build it. Apart from a lot of money, not much else is necessary.

With RISC-V, there is no such instance where you can buy great reference designs from.

Instead, each company designs their own designs. Maybe some will sell their designs, but it might well be, that the top companies will just not share their designs, same as is the case currently with x64, where you can buy a ready-made AMD/Intel SoC and that's it.