• Pxtl@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    They didn’t really have a choice. They were building on open-source software and Linux and Arm are somewhat bad at abstracting the hardware. So this means that the manufacturers must homebrew their own distro for their hardware, instead of just publishing drivers like windows hardware does.

    They’ve been working on fixing this, but fundamentally they built their castle on sand. And if they hadn’t, they probably never would’ve gotten anywhere at all and we’d all be on Blackberry or WebOS or WinPhone or whatever.

    • mean_bean279@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Windows Phone and webOS were amazing. Not just for their time, but even today. Major advancements in mobile OS’ came from WebOS like multi window task managing and my favorite feature of all came from Windows Phone. The most perfect on screen keyboard man has ever made. Specifically with audio. It had click sounds that were specific to a region of the keyboard and it was a low tone that was audibly pleasing. I wish we still had the same levels of competition that we did back in the day. Link to a video about the pleasing typing sounds on windows phone

    • MudMan@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      You guys really just said that Linux and open source licenses are “a castle on sand” and they should “have done it like Windows”?

      If you start running before anybody notice you may be able to make it. Go. Just. Go.

      But no, seriously, that’s why I prefer Android. I have versions of it customized to handheld consoles, single board computers and a bunch of other stuff. I don’t want to be out there buying licenses for my platforms from Google.

      Samsung is the biggest phone manufacturer in the world, Sony is a massive corporation.

      If people want to sell phones the least they can do is have the software staff to back it up by doing maintenance. If I wanted an iPhone I’d buy an iPhone.

      • Pxtl@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Look I love open-source but the whole lack of a separate binary driver layer is dumb and is why Windows can support a machine for over a decade while Android has terrible device-specific support windows and you don’t just get your new OS version from Android Update, you have to get it from your vendor.

        Imagine if you owned a Dell and couldn’t run Windows Update, but had to use Dell Update instead?

        • MudMan@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          I have an ASUS.

          So… no need to imagine anything.

          Also, I’m not an OS engineer, but that wouldn’t require a closed source, privately licensed OS, would it? Just to not build it as a Linux offshoot, I suppose.