Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Phone Maker Huawei Risks Alienating Its Loyal Customer Base By Taking a Strong Stand Against Unlocking of Its Handsets, Users Say (irishtech.ie)
A post on Irish technology news blog, which criticizes the recent works of the world's second largest smartphone maker Huawei, is being widely circulated across several Android communities, with most people agreeing with the concerns raised in the post. From the story: Huawei is the second largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, falling second only to Samsung having recently overtaken Apple. They're huge in Ireland and across the globe. As a company, they have done a number of great things for both the enthusiast and the general user alike, but amidst privacy concerns the company has started to lash out at the community which helped get it (and especially its sub-brand Honor) off of the ground. Not only have they begun to block users from unlocking the devices which they've paid for, they are now looking to make users return their already unlocked devices to their normal state, according to numerous reports on the forums of XDA-Developers and well known Magisk developer topjohnwu. "I am informed that a new Huawei OTA will render Magisk-installed devices from booting," the developer wrote. Magisk is a popular "root" solution used which gives a user access to their device's system files.
Huawei was huge with the development community for a number of reasons, no less because their devices were some of the easiest to unlock out of all of the major manufacturers. You simply applied for your key online and promptly received it. It was a rather painless system, which allowed you to then install what's known as a "custom ROM". A custom ROM is simply just a custom version of Android, free from all of the included pre-installed applications from Huawei. They often run better too, again because of the lack of bloat.
Huawei was huge with the development community for a number of reasons, no less because their devices were some of the easiest to unlock out of all of the major manufacturers. You simply applied for your key online and promptly received it. It was a rather painless system, which allowed you to then install what's known as a "custom ROM". A custom ROM is simply just a custom version of Android, free from all of the included pre-installed applications from Huawei. They often run better too, again because of the lack of bloat.
What holds Linux back is not "games", nor Acrobat. It is a tool for massively managing desktops in a commodized fashion. Microsoft's main reason for being so entrenched in the enterprise is the entire Active Directory GPO system, which allows for a lot of flexibility. Microsoft's AD also has a lot of enterprise tools as well.
This doesn't say that one can do similar with a masterless Puppet setup using hiera and a ton of custom manifests, or having Salt, Chef, or Ansible have clients pull the configs from a load-balanced Git repository. However, for a massive scale, AD and GPOs are definitely top dog, making it easy to manage thousands to millions of Windows desktops.
For Linux to really hit the desktop market, there needs to be a similar mechanism that can be opened and deployed out of the box, or Linux distros should have some way of being able to be managed from an AD GPOs (where one can set password policies, Fail2ban, and other stuff.)
Once the enterprise has mass management tools in place, home desktops will follow.