I would honestly just prefer that they use some semi-crap Chinese phone that is running on well-documented stuff a generation or four behind. If you could get Linux on a $50 phone, whoever was shipping them would sell 100K units. People would buy them just out of curiosity.

I'm behind though: aren't the UIs for mobile Linux still bad? I still can't get the experience I got out of my N900 that had only 256M of RAM, right? Every project I remember to bring the Maemo experience to Linux seemed to wither because there was ho hardware.

In one of my Linux handheld attempts, I looked to evaluate Maemo for the vintage Nokia N810 and N900 as a starting point, but much of open source artifacts (code, docs, forums) had mostly disappeared, even from where there seemed an effort to preserve/migrate.

(But someone's copy of some of it might have resurfaced now; I haven't looked recently.)

Usually things like this disappear because whoever was paying for hosting for them (company, accounting unit within a company, or some random techie's basement) gets shut down. And maybe no one who had the interest and ability was able to preserve it in time, and archive.org hadn't picked it up. But occasionally, things get deleted with intention to suppress them.