I’d love to see some Linux phone again. For me, propably something like the Nokia N950. But I’m fine without a keyboard, too.

Designing a phone from the grounds up, then also getting into the business of manufacturing for the first time… And having to adapt a whole operating system since it wasn’t optimized for mobile is just a lot of things at the same time. I’m really impressed by what Pine64 and the community were able to pull off. But it’s more a prototype.

I think what we’d need is some modern, normal and attractive phone that is produced by some established (or clever) manufacturer, went through extensive testing and mass production. It’d need to be affordable to attract developers. Have a decent and modern chipset and gain some good mainline Linux support. That always proved to be a bit difficult in the ARM ecosystem. And we’d still need to then proceed and change a lot of things about Linux. As of now it just doesn’t have any clever mechanisms to do something like a connected standby… i.e. save power while also listening for instant messenger messages. And ideally you’d like it to receive messages while in your pocket and not just SMS and calls. And we’d have to change a few more desktop apps to be responsive. All of that is quite some work that hasn’t been tackled yet.

I’m currently using GrapheneOS for my daily life. Maybe someday I’ll find some phone that has all the columns green with the components and features that are supported by a Linux kernel.