ish VS ente

You can, with ish (https://ish.app). It is a bit slow though and doesn't support the newest releases. (Well and by default it runs Alpine instead of Debian)

On IOS, there is a emulator called ISH which looks great. I haven't tried personally though, I couldn't afford an iphone. I will be using Termux on android for the rest of the post.

I'm a happy daily iSH [1] user, it's an amazing technical project, but I really pine for the day when `apt get blah` will be a reality, using an app available from the official App Store. Be it a paid or free app. CLI only, or with graphics. For concreteness, let's say a Debian-based distro in your iPhone upon tapping Get on Apple's App Store, independently of your location. It is pretty sad that, if this ever comes to be, it will probably be the result of EU/DOJ forces, not of technological advancements.

When do you see this happening (options are number of years)?

[1] https://ish.app/

You can run iSH on the device for Linux (somewhat limited)

https://github.com/ish-app/ish

If you're curious, iSH's source is public: https://github.com/ish-app/ish

You're correct that there is no Linux kernel emulation. They went with reimplementation for that. However, the userland is very much emulated x86 binaries. You can even compile your own C code inside iSH and run it. When you syscall, control passes from the threaded code[0] interpreter into the Linux reimplementation.

The reason why they aren't shipping Debian is that the threaded code technique being used as a JIT substitute in both iSH and UTM SE is far too slow to run a full Debian derivative. Believe me, I tried installing Ubuntu on UTM SE and it took literal hours and flattened my iPad battery in the process. iSH uses Alpine Linux because it's very lightweight[1].

As far as I'm aware there's no secret deal with Apple to lock iSH down. The only limitations I've ran into have to do with MySQL, which wants unaligned atomics, which you can't do on ARM64 without compromising the performance of the emulator. I actually had a discussion with the developer of iSH about this and put in a PR to make MySQL stop crashing iSH.

[0] return-oriented programming

[1] So lightweight it doesn't even ship anything GNU, making it one of the few genuine "Linux distros" with no slash or plus or "I would just like to interject"

> in software side of Ipad IOS, that is the biggest innovation in years

That would be iSH, slow but functional Alpine Linux emulation for iOS.

https://ish.app

> Just imagine how much more versatile the iPad Pro would be if only you could run Linux VMs on it

After installing https://ish.app for Alpine Linux emulation on iPad, one immediately comes up with use cases, even though it's excruciatingly slow.

Hopefully Apple opens up the imminent M3 iPad Pros to run macOS and Linux VMs.

I currently use Ente as a secondary photo syncing service in addition to Google Photos.

While I really like it — snappy and encrypted — I was surprised by how much the missing Ultra HDR implementation affects me. Photos are currently synced with brightness information but not displayed with it. Therefore, one photo that looks great in Google Photos looks far less vivid in Ente.

For what it's worth, I found a discussion on Ultra HDR. It isn't exactly bursting with a desire to implement it, though:

https://github.com/ente-io/ente/discussions/779

So this all about I prepared to tell you today's blog. For many details you can use this platform additional of Google Photos. Download the app from https://ente.io

…

# The ones I support by paying for one of its services bust mostly because its FOSS app:

- https://vorta.borgbase.com

- http://ente.io (But sadly not for long; because I really can't stand a non-native "photos" app. I just can't! Otherwise it's a great service!)

Hi HN,

We started building Ente in 2020 as an end-to-end encrypted[1] alternative to Google Photos.

We've come a long way since then,

- deploying on-device machine learning[2]

- undergoing a cryptography audit[3]

- open sourcing everything[4]

- replicating to 3 clouds[5]

- and shipping a lot of features[6]

We're trying to build a business that can outlive us, so we have a long way to go – this is only v1.0.

HN has been historically kind with feedback[7][8], a lot of which has influenced our culture in engineering, product, and marketing.

If you've any thoughts on what we could do better, please do share.

Thank you!

[1]: https://ente.io/architecture

[2]: https://ente.io/ml

[3]: https://ente.io/blog/cryptography-audit

[4]: https://ente.io/blog/open-sourcing-our-server

[5]: https://ente.io/reliability

[6]: https://ente.io

[7]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28347439

[8]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39570692

There are screenshots on ente.io [0] and their GitHub repo [1]

[0] https://ente.io/

Very disappointed with this, but I think will be finding alternatives.

Family sharing especially of Reminders is a hard one - we use lists for grocery shopping and it is extremely convenient.

Has anyone tried out Ente https://ente.io/ for photos?

Ente[0] has this feature (locally run on mobile/desktop). It marks recognized faces in your gallery and then you can search for any combination of faces.

[0]: https://ente.io/

Hi HN, we're the team behind Ente Photos, and we just published a deep-dive into how we built private, on-device ML features for photo discovery - an effort that's been in development for over a year.

What makes our approach unique is that we're running sophisticated ML features (semantic search, face recognition) entirely on users' devices while being fully open-source[1]. All ML results are then synced across devices using end-to-end encryption[2] - an approach we haven't seen anywhere else in the industry.

Building this was complex given the different platforms and devices we support, combined with limited compute resources. We had to write numerous custom implementations for image processing and rebuild data science tools from scratch to work across different platforms.

Our users can search their photos using natural language or find pictures of specific people, all while keeping their photos private[3]. No data ever leaves their device unencrypted, and the ML processing happens entirely locally.

Happy to answer any questions!

[1] https://github.com/ente-io/ente

Ente CLI [0] has an export service with read only access to the cloud and deletes are renamed.

The Go binary runs everywhere including most NAS except at least 1GB RAM is needed for decrypting the master key due to Argon2.

[0] https://github.com/ente-io/ente/tree/main/cli