Mobile is a massive chicken-and-egg problem. The main purpose of a smartphone these days is to run apps. Nobody is going to buy a smartphone which can't run the apps they need in their day-to-day life. On the other hand, no company is going to write apps for a platform with basically zero users.

OpenMoko & friends are selling devices which basically only run Firefox, and sometimes make calls as well. The only people interested in that are diehard FLOSS enthusiasts, which means they have to use ancient hardware because new stuff doesn't have open drivers, which means that even if you ignore the app ecosystem they compare incredibly poorly to mainstream smartphones. No wonder they keep failing.

Interestingly, the desktop/laptop market is heading the other way. The move to cloud SaaS products means a decent number of people now only need a browser. What's keeping a lot of people on Windows is often literally one or two applications. Valve's push for Proton is the perfect example of this: the Steam Deck is providing a huge incentive to fix those last few bugs keeping a game from running on Linux, and with the way Microsoft is screwing up W11 it is now ironically the gamers who are moving to Linux.

What you are seeing in "regular computer stores" is mostly irrelevant. That market is basically dead. Corporate gets its machines directly from Dell/HP/Lenovo, PC enthusiasts mostly get custom builds, and casual people stick with smartphones and tablets. In-store PC sales is now reduced to a university student's Google Docs machine - and Microsoft is doing a pretty good job bribing the manufacturers to push Windows there.

What I see is regular people buy their computers at Media Market, Cool Blue, Saturn, Fnac, Public, Dixon, you name it.

Most of them have no clue that something like System 76 or Tuxedo exists in first place.

Likewise on corporate world, I have long moved into Windows/macOS as official desktops for the last decade, GNU/Linux is only available on VM or servers, and usually it is the cloud provider's own distro.

Those customers where IT allowed the use of GNU/Linux desktops, it was with zero support from them, it was up to us to deal ourselves with any issues preventing our work, and to deal with upper management, in case it impacts delivery.

Until SteamDeck gets rid of its dependency on Windows as source, it is pretty much irrelevant. Games developers will keep using their Windows workstations, while a community smaller than Switch, will get those games thanks to Proton.

And it remains to be seen for how long Microsoft will tolerate Steam, or use their weight as OS vendor, and one of the biggest publishers.

OpenMoko phones were too underpowered to run Firefox, but they could run a ton of other apps. I was running non-AI automated human language translation on the thing.

You know, I could do without the telephone and SMS features nowadays. I just need a data SIM. Then the device just needs to run a Linux distro with a mobile UI.

I'm pretty sure my Linux desktop version of Signal runs great on small screens.

Aren't people using fewer apps than ever?

At least for mean almost everything has moved into the browser except, Whatsapp, maps, and music