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Comment by linmob | Hacker News Reader

I am pretty sure that it's not going to be the Librem 5, despite Purism's efforts to get it RYF certified (which, thinking of the Redpine WiFi card) went so far that they seriously impacted user experience.

Why? There's no Android port for that device and they keep mentioning LineageOS.

Even the PINE64 PinePhone would be more likely, as that has Android support and even some LineageOS 22 support [1]. The Replicant project had eyed it as a target device [2].

That said, I'd expect a different device, and, assuming LineageOS supports one, and I would not be suprised to see a device that's not powered by a Qualcomm, Mediatek or Samsung SoC.

[1]: https://github.com/GloDroidCommunity/pine64-pinephone/releas...

[2]: https://blog.replicant.us/2024/03/replicant-status-and-repor...

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You make it sound like the Redpine card ended up being shitty because of RYF efforts. The Redpine card was chosen because of its internal flash, but the fact that the vendor failed to properly support the advertised features (and even removed some that worked before), abandoned its mainline driver and pretty much halted the firmware development after SiLabs acquisition is orthogonal to that and could have happened with a different card as well. So nice it was a replaceable M.2 card, isn't it? ;)

> Why? There's no Android port for that device and they keep mentioning LineageOS.

The LineageOS folks are working on supporting their OS on Linux-first devices running a close-to-mainline (not AOSP) kernel. So it could go either way. Of course if they do choose an Android-first device, their efforts would ultimately also make it easier to run a mainline kernel on it as shown by projects like pmOS.

That's nice to know. Do you happen to have some links to where I could read up more on this effort?

> That said, I'd expect a different device, and, assuming LineageOS supports one, and I would not be suprised to see a device that's not powered by a Qualcomm, Mediatek or Samsung SoC.

Is there any actually relevant alternative to this oligopoly? Apple doesn't sell to third parties, NVDA lacks a baseband and so does (to my knowledge) Broadcom, and it's been ages since I saw anything from Intel in the mobile space.

UniSoc maybe? It appears to be reverse-engineerable [0].

[0]: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Jolla_C2_(jolla-c2)

I just noticed the part about FSF Librephone being based on LineageOS (therefore, Android).

Has anyone told the FSF that it isn't "GNU/Linux"?

I suspect that Purism has the better idea for a sustainable starting point for an FSF-ish phone.

I'd be curious why FSF is barking up the Android tree again (the massive, intractable Android source code tree).

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