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I was a Linux phone that I can daily drive. Pine Phone is awesome. I would buy one (even at the pro price) *right now*, if it was competitive or even in the same ballpark of any other random budget phone you can pick up at the Walmart. Hell, you can get a 5g phone right from Motorola for less than 200 bucks now.

I know the reason old hardware is used is based on Linux compatibility, but we can't focus on random older ARM chips forever. I would 100% get into Linux on mobile ARM development and do my fair share of work if I saw a viable future for it, if there was an integrator out there using somewhat competitive parts.

Still, I'm tempted to pick up an original Pine Phone as a dev toy. It's a beautiful idea, but I don't think I'll ever see it work out.

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@BluefoxLongtail Yeah, it's pretty crazy what even older phones that were mainlined can do. I've seen people run AAA games on one using box86/64 and proton, at extremely low framerates but still! Minecraft runs like a dream and I would actually have no issues playing on such a device.

Battery life is what's most important though, I could easily make my phone last, even with mobile Linux having some poor optimization compared to android.

Biggest drawback is that these are still android devices with all their design flaws, they have icky bootloaders, notches, lack of headphone jacks, and no way to hook up a display, so no docking :/

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@BluefoxLongtail the focus on random older arm chips is price mostly, you can get these for dirt cheap. Upstream linux didn’t support either the allwinner a64 or the rockchip rk3399 before enthusiast devices were being released, so i’d argue the same would happen with newer mobile chips too

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@awooo I was actually looking into the process of installing Linux on an existing Android phone, but unfortunately most of my collection of phones are...old, and my current one is a carrier branded model without much support.

I feel like that direction might actually be more viable than purpose built enthusiast devices.

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