No. Maybe. Why not?
How are all the AOSP-based OSes, like for instance GrapheneOS, not Linux distros?
Lots of distros don’t use systemd, and a few non-AOSP distros don’t use GNU userland or glibc, Alpine for one.
glibc is key here, it’s what most linux distros use. One of Google’s vendor-lock moves was to start using their own libc implementation, making it incompatible with everything else.
I can imagine that theirs is safer and more suited for targeted devices. Linux is extremely generalistic and has a ton of cruft.
But I have never looked at their code or tried to port a Linux app to Android. The #Krita devs might have some insight here.
There are apps made for linux that don’t work with android, and there are apps made for android that don’t work with linux. That’s enough for me to consider them different
Also android just doesn’t use the basic mainline kernel which is what most people want when they say “linux phone”
Android is a Linux distro, just because its not gnu or running whatever subset of features a desktop Linux might have doesn’t make it any less of a Linux distro.
The real question is what do you consider a part of a “Linux disto” that currently isn’t available on android?
The only thing linux about android is the kernel, i wouldn’t call that a linux distro and it’s not even compatible with any others.
The only thing about Linux IS that its a kernel. Its not like BSD where all the tools get developed together and released in the same edition, Linux is a kernel, full stop. Anything built on top of the Linux kernel is a Linux distro.
Can you name something other than the kernel that would be considered an essential element of a Linux distro and not available on android or BSD?
Its always been GNU+Linux, even stallman acknowledged its a separate thing and distros without GNU or glibc do exist on desktop too.
Gonna pull your leg here and say Android or, as I’ve recently taken to calling it, busybox + Linux + Google
Actually thanks for the akshually, because I had no idea about its existence
fwiw: it was viable when i had the first android released to the public; it was an HTC and with debian.
So, 15 years later we’re worse off than then? Argh.
Out of curiosity, was it “just” a plain Debian system, or did it support touch screen and phone service?
androids can’t do base distro’s anymore?
the touch screen support was TERRIBLE, but it was helped a lot by the physical slide-out keyboard and i never got the phone capabilities to work correctly, but i heard from my colleagues at the time that some of them had figured it out.
androids can’t do base distro’s anymore?
I’ll be honest, I never tried. Seeing that there are projects working independently to bring Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch to Android, I’d guess no? Plus I know you can run any distro in an emulator within Android systems, but that feels more like a curiosity.
Around that time we had the Nokia N900. For me it was the perfect phone. Debian as a base with Nokia’s (unfortunately proprietary) apps on top of X11. You could just recompile Linux apps like Gimp and it worked. Apps that were made for Palm’s WebOS worked.
Pidgin’s libpurple was used for all the instant messaging so just about any protocol just worked without any need for extra apps. You could easily hack the underlying system. People added functionality like using the light sensor as a button. Angry Bird’s first release was on that phone.
I miss it dearly. It was killed by Microsoft. Nothing ever managed to come close. That little 128 MB RAM machine had better multitasking than modern 8 GB phones.
