And let's be honest, it's not like there hasn't been spent a decade or more, with thousands of developers working tirelessly on making Android as good as it is today. Like linux laptops not burning up immediately is itself a change upstreamed from android development, but that's just half of the story.

A mobile OS fundamentally needs a different application model -- apps can't just decide to run whenever they like. How will desktop GIMP know that it shouldn't waste my battery when in the background (unless it very specially requests it throuhg an API made just for that)? Does suspending it work as you expect? For how long will you suspend it, shouldn't you kill it as well after a while? Who saves stuff?

I can't help but feel that anyone strongly advocating for a GNU Linux phone (because let's be honest, Android is the linux phone) is just not familiar with the actual context of what it entails.

> My biggest question is if they use Halium/libhybrys at all,

That would be a showstopper for now, IMHO. Doing it with maintainable open source Linux drivers is the hard part of having a viable device, from everything I've seen.

Another concern are that I can't find who the developers are, nor even definitively what country they're based in. (I don't see it on their About Us page, ~~and the GitHub repo contributors are hidden.~~ I saw a reference to Sydney, but unclear.) (Edit: my mistake regarding GitHub contributors; they aren't hidden)

Also, it would be nice to have the option of a better hardware provenance than a generic whitebox(?) phone from some unidentified manufacturer in China. Even for individual hobbyist users, and certainly for corporate ones. (This is why I'd like hardware options combinations like Purism for the premium device, and a cheaper device that runs the same software but is still from a brand that at least has a reputation to preserve, like Pine64 or (ha) Google.)

I agree with you, and especially identify with the last sentence. However, I’m fed up with Apple and Google, and any alternative that doesn’t tie me to Google and has all functioning hardware and usable 5G or at least LTE with reasonable specs is a major win in my book. I’ve preordered the FLX1s. The FLX1, which is no longer in production, had a replaceable battery, but lack of a replaceable battery or non-pure Linux in an alternative phone certainly isn’t going to keep me chained to Apple or Google.

It uses halium and libhybris. Flatpak apps work perfectly fine on my FLX1. I have no usability issues with the phone at all.

> My biggest question is if they use Halium/libhybrys at all

From what I have been able to tell, the folks behind Furilabs are also behind Droidian, which is Halium/libhybrys based. Furilabs/FuriOS is the commercial version of it.

>(in fact, no device at all is reported as having a fully functioning camera, let alone everything else)

Nit: The Pine64 PinePhone's cameras at least have been fully functional since 2021. It's a very shitty pair of cameras, but they're definitely fully functional.

I know the wiki.postmarketos.org page for it says the camera support is "Partial" and that a bunch of drivers are out-of-tree. This and much of the rest of the page is extremely outdated, and I (maintainer) just haven't had the time to go through that page and fix it up.

> postmarketOS has no hybris and everything works great, but no device has all the drivers

this is why halium exists. OEMs don't produce drivers beyond whatever kernel they ship with, so this is an attempt to build a system that leverages the crap they do ship.

> why stop at the OS?

Because the OS is the only thing you control. The reason the Librem 5 costs so much for a decade-old platform is because they didn't grab a predesigned device from another OEM. Doing everything yourself is going to be the only way to produce a first-class linux phone.

Many want one, fewer agree to afford.

> Both GNOME Shell in the phone context and Plasma Mobile are evolutionary dead ends.

That's a hell of a hot take. Could you elaborate on why you think so?

That was always the challenge for computer phones, to get the phone part of the phone work. There's been many Wi-Fi only PDAs, non-calling data cards for those, non-calling but cellular-enabled ones, etc. before iOS/Android happened.

> but they get extra energy from this objecting-to-the-objections quality.

Should they not? It would be unfair "extra energy" if the comments were fair criticisms, but they're not in the spirit of hacker or entrepreneurial culture. The parent seems to be arguing that most of these comments are entirely ignoring who the product is for to leap to hardware comparisons pre-hoc. And I agree with that conclusion; there is nothing intellectually stimulating or helpful in a discussion about how a dev kit appeals to the broader consumer market.