Hacker News: moWerk

New comment by moWerk in "Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway"

moWerk — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:28:09 +0000

This is totally doable! The Always on Display screen can have colors and those do not impact the battery life much. Nothing hinders you to show a full color as AoD. There are some watches however that only support 4 colors in AoD mode. Namely the ASUS ones. If you are serious about developing such a watchface, come to our matrix chat for more tips where to start.

New comment by moWerk in "Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway"

moWerk — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:10:31 +0000

Full disclosure, i spent ~3 hours crafting this post to hit the tone i wanted to convey and am kind of proud of the wrist-size linux banger i came up with. I am usually not good with writing since it takes me ages and i might be a bit over sensitive right now. All i wanted was to spare you all the rocky grammar as a cherry on top. To now find that the polished version triggers your "its (completely?) Ai written" sensor. Lesson learned i guess.

New comment by moWerk in "Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning"

moWerk — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 12:33:58 +0000

This was a super encouraging and uplifting experience for everyone involved in the project. Thanks so much for providing this excellent platform.

New comment by moWerk in "Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway"

moWerk — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 11:30:53 +0000

QML runs interpreted at runtime and Qt is very close to native C++, so both are actually quite lean and fast on these devices — the overhead is surprisingly small compared to full Android Wear, and we've tuned it heavily over the years to keep battery and UI responsiveness solid. If you see devices lagging, like the sawfish (Huawei Watch 2), its usually due to updating the android base to a newer one as the manufacturer planned for and losing some of those optimizations in the process.

New comment by moWerk in "Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway"

moWerk — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 11:20:03 +0000

While the PineTime/Infinitime is an awesome project everyone in our community roots for, the hardware platforms are totally different. The PineTime is microcontroller based and works on just 64KB memory and 512KB flash. AsteroidOS is a linux distro tailored for devices with SoC, half a gig of memory and >2GB storage. Arguably its much smarter on many levels to use the microcontroller approach for the rather simple smartwatch task. But somehow these full SoC general purpose computing smartwatches have been produced and we as linux people slipped into the niche of seizing those.

New comment by moWerk in "Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway"

moWerk — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 01:37:13 +0000

Perfect! Our Ring is libhybris, Sauron is the binary blob drivers the manufacturers cursed us with, and we're still hobbling toward mainline Mordor one old kernel backport at a time. One does not simply upstream a smartwatch driver.

New comment by moWerk in "Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway"

moWerk — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:46:50 +0000

Fair suspicion in 2026 — but we actually started drafting that announcement in early 2023 before first committing it here: https://github.com/jrtberlin/aos2.0-post. As a non native speaker i sure ran my commits through grammar polishing multiple times over the years. And i am genuinely curious now what to avoid to not sound like an LLM if you could dig out one or two examples.

New comment by moWerk in "Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway"

moWerk — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 23:47:54 +0000

With the latest devices its usually a problem that manufacturers choose to omit the usb pin outs in favor of water resistance and wireless charging. Making them a challenge to flash and still wear afterwards. Another issue is that we currently need to rely on libhybris for quick porting process that employs the android drivers. And the new devices run android versions that libhybris can not handle yet. Its just a slow process on all fronts but we are actually releasing this 2.0 publicly to possibly interest more developers.

New comment by moWerk in "Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway"

moWerk — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 23:22:58 +0000

Nice, thanks for the bug report! I have made in issue in the stopwatch repo: https://github.com/AsteroidOS/asteroid-stopwatch/issues/13

We have implemented a wifi toggle in the quickpanel with 2.0. But the wifi credentials still need to be entered into connmanctl on the cli. As soon as you got wifi set up and connected, you can already now sync weather data usin asteroid-weatherfetch. But right, wifi usually uses up to 30% more power and should be enabled selectively.

For the postmarket question, yes, it is our longterm goal to mainline watches, which we are sort of doing in coorperation with the postmarket guys. But thats a humongous task and part of the idea of this 2.0 release is to interest capable contributors to push things further ;)

New comment by moWerk in "Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway"

moWerk — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 22:00:34 +0000

Thanks so much! The peek gesture is inherited from lipstick and we kind of built our UI around those possibilities.

New comment by moWerk in "Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway"

moWerk — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 21:57:54 +0000

Usually the Ticwatch Pro 2018/2020 (catfish) is widely available since it was a popular model. The more recent version Ticwatch Pro 3 (rubyfish/rover) is freshly ported and not as well supported as the first Ticwatch Pro yet. I bought one new in box just this week from german ebay for 70€. We got a Team member in the US/ML who is hoarding watches and seems to have no problem acquiring them :D I wish you luck.

New comment by moWerk in "Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway"

moWerk — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 21:51:12 +0000

It would be possible to use Rust. Nobody got around working on it tbh. But simple things like your mentioned watchface idea are really quick to do in QML.

New comment by moWerk in "Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway"

moWerk — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 21:04:27 +0000

Indeed quite some watches share the same platform as can be seen in this list: https://wiki.asteroidos.org/index.php/Technical_Details_of_A... But the manufacturers all cook their own soups and its surprising how much adaption is still necessary per device.

Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway

moWerk — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 19:24:55 +0000

Hi HN, After roughly 8 years of silently rolling 1.1 nightlies, we finally tagged a proper stable 2.0 release. We built this because wrist-sized Linux is genuinely fun to hack on, and because a handful of us think it's worth keeping capable hardware alive long after manufacturers move on. Smartwatches don't really get old — the silicon is basically the same as it was a decade ago. We just keep making it useful for us.

No usage stats, no tracking, no illusions of mass adoption. The only real signal we get is the occasional person who appears in our Matrix chat going "hey, it booted on my watch from 2014 and now it's usable again" — and that's plenty.

Privacy is non-negotiable: zero telemetry, no cloud, full local control. Longevity is the other half: we refuse to let good hardware become e-waste just because support ended. On the learning side, it's been one of the best playgrounds: instant feedback on your wrist makes QML/Qt, JavaScript watchfaces and embedded Linux feel tangible. The community is small and kind — perfect for people who want to learn open-source dev without gatekeeping.

Technically we're still pragmatic: libhybris + older kernels on most devices since it just works, but we've already mainlined rinato (Samsung Gear 2) and sparrow (ASUS ZenWatch 2) — rinato even boots with a usable UI. That's the direction we're pushing toward.

Repo: https://github.com/AsteroidOS Install images & docs: https://asteroidos.org 2.0 demo video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6FiQz0yACc Announcement post: https://asteroidos.org/news/2-0-release/

Questions, port requests, mentoring offers, criticism, weird ideas — all welcome. We do this because shaping a tiny, open wearable UX and infrastructure is oddly satisfying, and because Linux on the wrist still feels like a playground worth playing in.

Cheers, the AsteroidOS Team

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051852

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# Comments: 68