I've looked a Librem but $1500 is kind of hard to justify when I have all my other expenses that come with a young family.
Anyone have any suggestions?
The idea is you buy one of the supported Xperia phones, buy a Sailfish OS license and flash it on the phone. The license you bought pays for continued software updates (new features & security fixes) as well some external software they integrate (predictive typing support & android app emulation support). Yeah, if the native Sailfish OS apps are not sufficient for you, it can also run most Android apps via an emulation layer.
So while Sailfish OS is not fully open source unfortunatelly, it's at the moment IMHO the best mobile Linux distro available on easy to get modern hardware.
Ideally over time fully open source distros and more open hardware take over but till then Sailfis OS can serve as a good "bridge", AZ it has since the Jolla company taking care of it was started by the ex N900/Maemo/MeeGO crew.
Going to buy the Sony 10 II once they release support for it.
I am trying to get linux on my phone since HTC Blueangel (Ångström linux was the first booting from SD card) and it was always barely usable.
Sailfish works so great that it was no brainer to pay those 50 euros for license. Fingerprint reader, camera, bluetooth (as common painpoints for linux on phone) are all working flawlessly. I had to reverse 1 android application that I really need (banking app) and remove safetynet checks but beside that, zero issues. And I dont any other application from android ecosystem that I dont have here as native (and far less battery draining) version.
I hope that Jolla will continue its great work and I really hope they start supporting some other phones like Huawei. I am sick of google and its toxic, spyware driven ecosystem.
I dont have issue paying for useful application or operating system. But having operating system that is preinstalled with google spyware and than 99% of applications you try to install try to steal your data (not to mention that they all ignore GDPR) is not acceptable.
The only issue that I might see as a blocker for some users is that the Android layer is not perfect. It does not support Bluetooth properly so pretty much any Android app that connects to some external peripheral like smart watch will not work. Additionally, you might need to install for example microG to run some apps via the Android layer.
What do you mean? I've had a couple Motorola phones from the G series (G1 and G4 and currently an AndroidOne) and AFAICT it's been pretty much stock Android apart from:
- an app for support enquiries (with diagnostic functionality for the screen, sensors etc.) which I've actually used before,
- one app you could opt-in to to get something like product newsletters from Motorola (I don't care for spam)
- and since the AndroidOne an app for audio EQ (which I don't really need/use).
All of these don't even use 80 MB of the internal storage (64 GB) so I don't really know where you get the "bloatware" from.
I'd hardly call that bloat given the "Samsung Experience" I once had on one of those GalaxyNote 10.1 tablets. It was slow (basically everything in any app lagged), the OS was a non-upgradable Android 4.3 or 4.4 with heaps of Samsung BS constantly running and replacing standard apps (e.g. the browser). Also that tablet one day just would not charge anymore after ~1.5-2 years of fairly light use (reading, some video streaming, things like that).
Huh, did you accidentally look at the price of a Librem laptop? The Librem 5 phone USD$800. (But $800 is still kind of hard to justify, especially with "wait more than a year").
Though it was cool installing/running VS Code on it
It costs $800, not $1500.