It's sad to see free hardware is so comically behind commercial one.
When the distros get good enough, they can price out higher end hardware.
That $100 Android phone is going to be carrier locked (subsidized by the carrier) and probably an older model where the R&D has already been paid-off, not an all new device. Once the Pine64 has been out for a few years, it's possible its price will drop to similarly competitive levels.
A major problem is that people almost always underestimate the difficulty of a good UI. Good UIs can be a lot harder than the rest of a system and a modern UI toolkit has a feature set and difficulty level approaching that of a good 3D game engine like Unity.
But I disagree because it is really rare to have a completely unified UI with Linux. We have separate applications for Gnome and KDE for most tasks. Sometimes one is better than the other, or one has a feature you need, but you have many different competing applications. If you want to use the “best”, you end up with a mix of different styles.
Or, if you want to use an office suite, Libre Office is a different style altogether!
So, you say KDE has a unified style. That’s great. But KDE != Linux. And Linux is never going to have a unified style. That’s just the nature of the beast. There isn’t one group out there that can make UI/UX decisions for all of Linux. No group that can set priorities and make decisions about what features stay and what can be removed.
But that’s okay. That’s the trade off we get when working with FOSS software. We get to make those decisions for ourselves. But it rarely results in a “unified” UX. Powerful, yes. unified? No.
I am interested to see how the new KDE/pine64 relationship plays out though. Hopefully it will be great. And maybe I’m just a bit pessimistic after the last time with Nokia/Qt.
I mean neither does Windows 10, which basically does a split between at least 3 different styles. Tacked on top of everything sits the metro post Windows 8 style, but is a toy UI for many aspects, click on a random setting and it is likely you will then encounter settings in the windows XP/7 style.
The third one is the older Windows XP style UIs, which you still encounter once you have to venture outside of regular user territory (registry editor and the like).
You can run a complete desktop on KDE and have a good, well-integrated experience. Maybe some people will try to tell you that Firefox would be a better browser or whatever, but as long as Konqueror is good enough for you then why do you care? (Personally I actually think it's significantly better, and a lot of the KOffice tools are better than their LibreOffice counterparts, but taking it as a given that there are "best" versions of some things that are not on KDE).
Maybe you value one particular tool that doesn't fit into your integrated desktop, but that's a common experience on other platforms as well. But if a unified UI is what you want, you absolutely can have that.
This isn't entirely true, because e.g. Gnome has been an enthusiastic adopter of all those anti-patterns. But, unlike other platforms, you still have other DE options to choose from.