[TUHS] The death of general purpose computers, was - AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Rich Morin]

Several projects are attempting to target cell phones with (mostly) Linux variants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_mobile_devices).  Most of these are focused on particular (or even custom) hardware, but at least one has the explicit goal of supporting "old" hardware:

> We are sick of not receiving updates shortly after buying new phones. Sick of the walled gardens deeply integrated into Android and iOS. That's why we are developing a sustainable, privacy and security focused free software mobile OS that is modeled after traditional Linux distributions. With privilege separation in mind. Let's keep our devices useful and safe until they physically break!

https://postmarketos.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostmarketOS

I'm particularly interested in this project, because it might let a few billion (!) retired cell phones be used as portable computing and communication devices. Here is a current snapshot of their porting progress:

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

-r

> On Jan 19, 2023, at 12:09, segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> ... I want to be excited about the idea of potentially having a powerful computer with me just about anywhere, but at the same time, if that power is significantly throttled (see Game "Optimizing" Service...), and full root access to the device is not granted easily, then it's not any more useful to me than a kiosk at Walmart. ...