alt Hacker NewsiOS and Android have an incredible amount of engineering to make them RAM and battery efficient that desktop Linux simply doesn't have.
And its not a case of simply implementing some feature, since all apps have to written with this stuff in mind: apps can be suspended/killed at any time and should be able to restart gracefully, notifications go through a side channel, etc etc
Do these phones have any of this?
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this. years ago i was working with Intel and Samsung to enable Tizen on x86 phones. energy management was the biggest problem they had. RISC won. moreover, 8 years later Apple was moving away from x86_64 to ARM, so one could say ARM won because of better energy management, either through lower usage or other types of energy saving techniques. Google Pixel (ARM) had similar issues with battery life, or better yet battery drain during idle times. People underestimate battery saving techniques. As in all software engineering, when the focus is enablement, optimizations take a second stage.
And it doesn't actually work reliably, at least on Android. My wife and I frequently don't get notifications from specific apps, only once we open them. My impression is that the platform just changes too frequently with regards of what you have to do to work well even when you're killed. Also, especially for push notifications, your now at the mercy of Googles service to delvier them to your app (not sure how the open source variants do it)
> iOS and Android have an incredible amount of engineering to make them RAM and battery efficient that desktop Linux simply doesn't have
This one of the most understated reasons.
It's just closed source drivers stored in private Linux forks (or Apple's code dungeon).
There's nothing inherently special about their optimisations, but hardware is incredibly complex and without documentation, open source drivers cannot be written that are anywhere close to what engineers with hardware docs can build.
Asahi Linux is a great example. It's an unbelievable project but still far from first party Apple drivers.
Once the hardware can actually be used, competition in the OS space will follow.
They have no incentive to offer documentation and competition is bad - so they won't allow that. Regulators must step in here.
Looking at the amount of RAM phones have nowadays I don't know if this is an issue, desktop Linux runs fine with those amounts. Also Android is not really memory efficient so they needed this workaround.