Might not be 100% Europe-made from the get go, but good ideas and executions often start with small steps and iterate rather than having something groundbreaking out of the gate.
That said, I won't deny that Jolla is much more trustworthy than Google or Apple.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm not super familiar with Jolla's/Sailfish's architecture, but isn't most of the OS actually FOSS, while there is a thin proprietary compatibility layer, and that's about it? Was some months ago I last read about it so could be misremembering, but seems like a good first step at the very least.
https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/sailfish-os-clarifying-claims...
https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/sailfish-os-clarifying-claims...
Consumer don't care if the OS is proprietary, as long as it works and there is a responsible party they can trust to serve them the offering.
I agree entirely (and they also don't even care if there's a trustable party who they can trust, just look at how many people happily use Google).
And this is exactly the mentality that's gotten us where we are. Consumers don't care about these things, and then end up lock into vendor ecosystems like the one op is describing here.
And in any case if you use Jolla without the Android emulation layer (so Google again), the app ecosystem is as barren as the Siberian wasteland.
See: https://postmarketos.org/
FWIW, it's not just the EU that needs this urgently: most of humanity sorely needs a trustworthy mobile OS that's not designed against their interests.
I've recently had some fun at the intersection of "moving windows between screens" vs "ui scaling" vs "ambient system is wayland but the snap uses x11 internally".
OTOH, I know that recent versions of GNOME struggle with this. Just last year I saw plenty of situations where moving windows across displays triggered all kind of quirks. This is a GNOME-specific issue, and like most of its issues, doesn't affect all other compositors.
Manufacturers maintain long running forks of Android (often very old Linux kernels) with their drivers hidden in their fork's source.
I'm a firm believer in the right to repair software - and the fact that it's illegal to reverse engineer binary blob drivers (or proprietary software at all) is a shame (not that you could even untangle a driver from a binary blob of a Linux fork). I'd go as far as feeling strongly that drivers should be open source, and if they aren't, documentation sufficient for the community to write drivers should be made available by manufacturers.
Linux on M5? Should be easy
Linux on an X Elite Surface Book? Should be easy
Ubuntu Touch on my Pixel 9? Should be easy
Android TV on my TV? Should be easy
Proxmox on my 5g mobile router? Should be easy
No drivers / locked bootloaders = not possible
Where? I don't think it's illegal in the US at least. The only things I'm aware of that may have legal issues are related to radios, specifically modem/baseband stuff, and maybe WLAN cards.
You can look at a circuit board and figure things out and there are clean room techniques for decompilation - but neither of these are practical
It seems like a waste not to use an existing, well-developed, hardened, open source base, that at the same time provides great compatibility with most existing apps.
Since it is open source, it would always be possible to fork if AOSP goes off the rails.
I think the primary issue is that it is currently hard to get embargoed security patches, unless you have some partnership with an OEM.
It's "some sources available"