This month is the final month of guaranteed major and security updates, and we already know Android 14 won’t land in the Pixel 4a (though it will in the Pixel 4a 5G as it has guaranteed updates until November).

So for those of you who own that phone, what do you plan to do with it? Are you going to keep using it for a couple more years without the updates? Install a custom ROM (which one?)? Or are you maybe planning to get a new phone (a Pixel?)?

If you still own an older Pixel phone, how are you keeping it alive?

  • @MarkaosEnglish
    11•1 year ago

    But even then, I still don’t get why that has to be the case. Linux still supports drivers for very ancient hardware.

    Linux is kinda infamous for not having any stable driver interface - it doesn’t really have a concept of drivers in the way Windows does, Linux drivers are just indistinguishable parts of the kernel and their only way to interact with the rest of the kernel is to use the internal kernel functions that have no stability guarantee.

    The idea is that if someone wants to change any of the internal functions, they will also be expected to go and find all parts of the kernel that would be affected and update them to work with the change. That works great for “drivers” that are part of Linux, but it makes maintaining out-of-tree drivers a nightmare.

    This isn’t going to get any better until either Linux gets a stable driver API (fat chance) or SoC manufacturers decide to release their drivers under GPLv2 and go through the effort of mainlining them into the kernel (also a fat chance - current situation works great for them and guarantees more sales of new SoCs).