Capyloon is an operating system designed around web apps and technologies that picks up where Firefox OS when Mozilla abandoned its now-abandoned web-based operating system. Capyloon uses Mozilla’s open source Boot to Gecko operating system as its base, but features a new user interface and suite of apps designed with privacy and distributed technologies in mind.
The new operating system is very much a work-in-progress that’s still in its early stages. But just a few days after I first took note of the OS, the developer delivered a new way to try the software: as a set of packages that allow you to try Capyloon on mainline Linux smartphones including the PinePhone Pro and Purism Librem 5.
The new PinePhone Pro and Librem 5 builds of Capyloon are bundled with Mobian, a Debian-based mobile Linux distribution designed for smartphones, and you can find download links and installation instructions at the Capyloon website.
Note that some features are only partially supported, including WiFi, telephony, Bluetooth, GPS, sensors, and audio channel management.
Folks who don’t have one of those phones can also try out a desktop version of Capyloon with a Debian package, or try the operating system on a Google Pixel 3a smartphone or other Android phones that support installation of Generic System Image (GSI) custom ROMs.
You can find downloads for those options at the releases page.
This is what it looks like: pic.twitter.com/nfBnxGHmqx
— LINux on MOBile (@linmobblog) March 25, 2022
Since there’s a GSI, I think I’ll give this a shot and see what it looks like.
…and it didn’t boot at all. Oh well.
Capyloon sounds interesting, but no Wifi? Linux without Wifi support is a dealbreaker to me.