Upgrades of the phones have been weighing on my mind quite heavily recently, particularly due to how awful the Android process is, whether running community or vendors ROMs.
I’ve been a Debian devotee for more than 20 years and it was in part due to PureOS being based on Debian that I bought a Librem 15 and backed the Librem 5. Another factor was PureOS being endorsed by the FSF and the ongoing process to have the Librem 5 “Respects Your Freedom” certified.
Still upgrades weighed on my mind. Not for the hacker community who I have no doubt make up 100% of the backers - they would be undoubtedly comfortable with the Debian based upgrade process.
However I think you have an opportunity to go one better.
I would recommend taking a long look at how NixOS does it’s atomic upgrade | roll back processes. It’s incredibly graceful and smooth and IMHO, a significant leap forward in that particular space.
I think there’s much to be learned in how that is performed and I for one, would definitely appreciate a mobile device with the NixOS atomic upgrade | roll back processes.
Food for thought and worth taking a look at, at any rate
(as re-tooling your existing work flows may be a massive ask!)
As far as I know, every time someone says “atomic upgrades” and “rollback process”, they mean “developer controlled upgrades that the users has no part in”. If the user does not have FULL CONTROL of the upgrade process I want no part of it.
PS: I have never heard of Nix OS and maybe it solves all the problems very well.
NixOS updates are no more developer | vendor controlled than PureOS, Debian, et all. So there’s no difference on that front.
I also would not go so far as to say it “solves all the problems” because it plainly doesn’t.
It is however, a step forward in managing your OS upgrades. You can’t, for example, cleanly roll PureOS or Debian back to a known good state after an upgrade of either the OS or individual packages.
NixOS does facilitate that, as well as reproducible builds, among other things that would be of use on a mobile device, IMHO
I was just remembering snappy ubuntu core and what that turned out to be . . .
You should look into GUIX SD too. Transnational Updates, Rollback, User installed software (no root needed), full reproducible, and support for fetching and compiling of source packages without any extra work!
