We tried.
- The FirefoxOS team.
- The Jolia team.
- The UbuntuPhone team.
- ...
- The FirefoxOS team.
- The Jolia team.
- The UbuntuPhone team.
- ...
Most people need things just work.
Much like Ubuntu made desktop Linux a viable prospect for many people, after being enabled by Debian, I could see a future libre smartphone being enabled by the work done on PinePhone.
They're great for developers, but they've been unable to provide a usable and simple alternative for most people. Imo, partly because a lack of incentives since developers tend to create for themselves. Partly due to fragmentation leading to projects moving in every direction at the same time, which does not lead to a consistent or simple user experience.
For you and me maybe. But don't expect other people to have your standard of software choices etc.
Well sure, it's supported on X, Y and Z!
- Oh but I'm on distro A.
Oh sorry, that's not supported. But here's a post by some guy on some forum who says he made it work by doing a bunch of complicated things no one understands.
This is obviously quite doable with basically any distro.
Some might want a full mail client and possibly a printer configured and that's about it.
But I can't really imagine phones going away that fast---what, we all get some Uber regulated neural thing? I think the tech companies are too unpopular for that---and so I think PinePhone can catch up. Plus, the Duopoly is way more annoying for regular users than Windows ever was.
Since PinePhone became available, Linux distributions made huge leaps forward - Debian/Mobian especially.
And there are community maintained builds for the PinePhone and many other devices.