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Today 10 years ago I went to Poland to buy a Phone with pre installed #Firefox OS on. The Phone was a Alcatel One, so very shitty. Two years later I installed Firefox OS on my Nexus 5 instead.
It was a very good concept, but sadly rolled out on too shitty hardware so it never caught on.
How much functionality is left on that phone?
I remember using multiROM to install Lineage OS, Sailfish OS and Firefox OS all at the same time on my Nexus 4. I wished there was some kind of software today that you could dual boot an android phone.
I tried it on my Nexus 5 as well. It didn't work well for my needs at that time, so I went back to putting Android on it.
I daily drove the ZTE Open and then the ZTE Open C for over a year each. Still have them kicking around in a box somewhere. Returning to Android was weird, but unfortunately there just weren't good alternatives, since Ubuntu bailed on Ubuntu Touch about the same time Mozilla pivoted away from FirefoxOS.
I've considered going with a Pine Phone, but not sure I want to go back to not having 5G support at this point. Kinda hoping that eventually we might start seeing more open alternatives once RISC-V matures a bit, but that's probably still quite a few years away at this point.
I spent a couple weeks in Poland exactly in August 2013 and I distinctly remember a huge Firefox OS billboard on the Warsaw Central train station building.
Oh man, I wanted one of those so bad back in the day, how was it?
It was quite slow because of the hardware, it sometimes wouldn't recognize touches, and the software had so many bugs like that when you got a call, you couldn't take it because there would be some overlay over the button to take the call which would steal the touch most of the time, etc.
So development was abandoned, whatever happened with the Ubuntu OS for cell phones?
It still exists but only officially supports google nexus and some niche phones. I don’t think it’s going anywhere but I do hope to be wrong someday. At the moment there are options like GrapheneOS to run Android without letting Google into all your shit by default.
That home button is really cute. Reminds me of the iPod Nano 7
I forgot this even existed. I had the HTC One and/or Galaxy S4 around this time.
OS aside, the Nexus 5 was boss.
