My biggest question is if they use Halium/libhybrys at all, something that is hard to figure out from the marketing but their GitHub repos does have hybris-related stuff. That makes it a non-Linux device to me. Hybris breaks a lot of linux stuff that should just work like flatpak, something I found out incredibly quickly when using SailfishOS.

I don't think depending on Android drivers and having to run a small android just to access said hardware makes it a "linux phone". Especially when the linux experience is compromised because of it.

postmarketOS has no hybris and everything works great, but no device has all the drivers (in fact, no device at all is reported as having a fully functioning camera, let alone everything else) so there isn't a "flagship" device.

If I were to overspend on a linux device I want it to actually run Linux, not a handicapped version of it.

And even then, why stop at the OS? Why is this overpriced "linux" phone not boast having user-friendly and sustainable things like a replaceable battery (probably because it doesn't?). People in this niche don't want just a Linux phone, they want a phone that respects them.

> 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.