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Meanwhile in the "repurpose existing phones" camp: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/SDM845_Mainlining

Yeah, sure, the Librem5/Pinephone boot directly into open source firmware instead of some Qualcomm monstrosity that even acts as a hypervisor, but. Near-mainline Linux with GPU support on actually powerful devices with 3-ish-GHz fast cores, 8GiB RAM, and so on. And you can buy these on the used market rather than investing in more new e-waste.

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GNU/Linux phones provide a few things which are not achievable elsewhere: convergence, lifetime updates, killswitches and so on.

I threw out my Qualcomm phones long ago because the lack of software updates had made them useless and freedreno really didn't look like it was going to catch up. Part of me wishes I hadn't but also the Pinephone is better than my Samsung galaxy S3 in terms of specs and with actually competent software.

If people on qualcomm phones had any amount of faith the company wouldn't screw them over or the community would be able to make a huge leap in terms of compatibility they probably would keep the phones but that's not how things have worked for about a decade.

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