upvote

points

by d3Xt3r13 hours ago |
comments
upvoteby microtonal12 hours ago|
next
[-]
Volla just Eurowashes/rebadges other low to midrange phones at a huge markup. E.g., the Volla Phone Quintus is:

https://www.amazon.ae/Android-Smartphone-Storage-Octa-Core-M...

(If you don't believe it from the identical specs and design, you can look at the committers in their kernel trees and it is basically maintained by Daria people.)

Their new Plinius model is just the Gigaset GS6 with a 250 Euro markup:

https://www.gigaset.com/gigaset-gs6/

At least this is made by a German company, though Gigset is Chinese-owned now.

At any rate, these are just rebadged phones and IIRC, but don't hold me to it, in both cases the original phones also support bootloader unlocking.

reply
upvoteby d3Xt3r11 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
It takes more than an unlocked bootloader to make Linux boot on random phones and work properly (and ensuring all the radios, camera, audio, phone calls etc work), and Volla have achieved that with their phones. I could be wrong, but I don't think it was possible to get a fully functional Linux distro going on any of these rebadged phones before Volla got to them.
reply
upvoteby microtonal11 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
Volla is just forwarding the trees made available by their upstream ODMs. E.g. Gigaset publishes them:

https://github.com/Gigaset-dev

I am not sure about the Daria Bond, but in Ubuntu Touch (which seems one of the very few Linux systems that supports the Daria Bond, ahem, Quintus), most of it seems to be the work of LineageOS developers (probably for generic Mediatek support, since it's a run-off-the-mill Mediatek phone), with some changes from Daria people on top of it.

So, I think you are giving credit to Volla that should go to the upstream ODMs and Lineage.

Or just go to the Volla about page:

https://volla.online/en/about/

It's just sales, marketing, and customer support people.

reply
upvoteby HybridStatAnim83 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
Android similarly supports, and in fact uses, "proper" Linux. Android and its forks are Linux distributions. You can use a mainline kernel in Android just fine.
reply
upvoteby strcat10 hours ago|
prev|
[-]
Ubuntu Touch is drastically less private and secure than AOSP let alone GrapheneOS. Volla's devices don't come anywhere close to meeting the update and security requirements for GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS is a Linux distribution much closely following along with the Linux kernel LTS releases, unlike those devices. It also regularly moves to new Linux kernel LTS branches. Pixels are in the process of moving to the 6.12 LTS branch with Android 17 QPR2. 6.18 is currently in the early stage of stabilization.
reply
upvoteby d3Xt3r8 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
[flagged]
reply
upvoteby gf0007 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
Freedom to get a stroke from an incomplete toy OS?

Snark aside, desktop Linux userspace (or gnu Linux, call it how you want) is nowhere near production ready. And even for the more general point, giving out root willy-nilly is not more freedom. It's more like letting your child play on the 5th floor of a half-constructed building that's about to be exploded. Your kid can enjoy their time just as much in the safe forest trail.

reply
upvoteby d3Xt3r7 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
Not everything needs to be "production ready". And giving out root willy-nilly is freedom. It's my device, I should get to decide how I want to use it and not have artificial restrictions put on my be by someone else. If I want to rm -rf /, I should be able to do just that.
reply
upvoteby gf0002 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
You can, but maybe don't make it an easy to accidentally invoke default.

Like even `rm` added a flag to not do that without explicitly asking.

Also, there are plenty of immutable OSs now among Linux distros, are they also limiting your freedom?

reply
upvoteby Cider99867 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
How can you be free when you're not private or secure?

Grapheneos is fully open source and comes with 0 Google services.

>so called "security"

Grapheneos is widely recognized as one of the most secure operating systems.

reply
upvoteby d3Xt3r7 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
[flagged]
reply
upvoteby Cider99865 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
You can't have privacy without security.
reply
upvoteby d3Xt3r5 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
That is a vague, meaningless statement. What sort of privacy are we taking about? What sort of security? What's the target? What's the attack vector? What's the environment? What's your threat model?

Without all of those details, your statement is meaningless.

reply