One general purpose computer is enough for me

I have a laptop and i am a huge fan of it. It is a very good computer for my needs and works very well for pretty much everything i want to do.

I also have a phone which runs android, and another phone which runs postmarket os. Unfortunately, although postmarket os is regularly getting better, it’s still not suitable to use as my main mobile device.

Many of the people who talk about postmarket os talk about how they want a real linux computer in their pocket. They don’t want the arbitrary restrictions that android or ios place on them to get in the way of taking advantage of the very powerful device they carry around every day. Actually, this is not why i want to use a postmarket os. I have three reasons i like the project:

It can help to avoid a phone becoming e-waste for no reason.
It avoids being tied to the whims of a giant evil corporation.
It is more pleasant to write software for.

The first reason is important, but is totally possible with an android system. The phone i run postmarket os on is a oneplus 6, a phone released in 2018, or over eight years ago at the time of writing. I used to run lineage os on it and it worked really well like that, and lineage is still supporting it.

The downside comes from the second reason, which is that although lineage still supports it, it has not been updated to the latest version due to complications around how google is developing android that i do not entirely understand, but that apparently make things much more complicated for the lineage developers. So whereas before i could be confident that a popular device would be supported by lineage for a very long time, i’m no longer so confident in that.

Which leads us to the third reason. I rarely write software for my phone. I’ve tried a couple of times, but i just don’t think that the android stack is particularly fun. I’ve written a bunch of little programs for postmarket os, though; all of them little command line programs or emacs functions that do helpful things, and that’s been really great! The openness of the phone allows me to turn it into a genuinely helpful swiss army knife.

The reason that i don’t mind using android, while it still supports my phone properly, is because there are a lot of people out there who do like writing android apps. I use oss dict, auxio, tack, and tuner almost every day, and all of them are useful and high quality. Each of them focuses on a single task, so i can open it when i want to do that task and close it again when i’m finished.

I have no interest in using my phone for programming, composition, video editing, reading the news, writing, or browsing the web. I already have a device for these, my laptop, which has a bigger screen, a better processor, and a nice physical keyboard. The things i use my phone for are looking up words, checking my calendar, tuning my instruments, playing music, and other such tasks that are for the most part a short-term task. I don’t want my phone to replace my computer, or even to act as a second computer; i want it to replace all the other little things that twenty years ago i would have either had to keep in my bag, or do without: an electronic tuner, a dictionary, an mp3 player. For it to do that, it does need to be a general purpose computer, but it doesn’t need to present itself as one. I think that someone people are quite indignant at this suggestion, but that’s okay, because phone linux can also let their phone present itself as a real general purpose computer too!

This is what i mean when i say that one general purpose computer is enough for me: the laptop is where i can do computer things, and the phone is where i prepare to do other things. Android is in many ways currently a better system than postmarket os for that, because there is a very strong existing app ecosystem. The main advantage, for me, that postmarket os offers, is that it’s much easier for me to create my own tools that fit into this second category.

For many people, the phone also fits into the first category, or perhaps is the only computer they own. In those cases, the ability to run desktop software on the phone is very helpful, and i think that reality is a long way off. But for me and my uses, postmarket os probably only needs a few more years of polish before the system does everything i need.