A crappy distro on a couple of old devices? No thanks. I'll just wait for the Librem 5 [0]
0) https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
Edit: Misread "Note9" as "Note7" (don't ask). Ooops. My conclusion still stands.
In any case, in terms of what you are capable of doing to your device (e.g. running Linux distros, controlling radios, etc), the Librem smartphone is years ahead of anything else in the market.
This is about your phone doubling up as a Linux PC and being able to use your phone as a PC seamlessly when required by simply connecting it to a monitor. This can be super useful for a lot of users.
Current 8 core SOCs with 4 to 8 GB RAM should be more than usable and its great Samsung has been trying to make this happen. And there is nothing 'crappy' about Ubuntu 16.04 especially given all distros are the same underneath. Why this name calling against Ubuntu?
Something a phone that supports running arbitrary Linux distros will naturally do without having to depend on random projects like this one which try to give similar functionality by shoehorning a Linux distro on top of a mobile OS. You're also at the whim of mobile OS 'manufacturers', who may make changes to the OS which then break the shoehorning effort.
> And there is nothing 'crappy' about Ubuntu 16.04 especially given all distros are the same underneath.
This isn't even remotely true. Here's a few ways distros differentiate from other distros: custom kernel patches (or not), custom patches (or not) for applications they distribute, package management (!!!), response time to security issues, support they offer (official, community, etc), upgrade model (rolling release vs big crap dump of updates every X months).
> Why this name calling against Ubuntu?
Ubuntu does a lot of the above differentiation stuff wrong, IMHO.
Quite a few people already have bought it.
> or support
Quite a few applications will run on it. Linux on ARM has been a thing for years... it's not like this is some walled garden bullshit 'ecosystem' that has to be painstakingly grown from nothing.
It's really odd to support manufacturers who create walled gardens in order to lock in customers and prevent users from actually owning the device they purchased.