Everything that matters is open source and upstreamed or on the way there. Haven’t kept up with the state of things but as far as I am aware you can already run a mainline kernel on the Deck. Would love to see an open phone you can easily run your own distribution on without jumping through hoops.
But phones are hard. An x86 phone with decent battery life is even harder. But one can dream.
It’s certainly great that you can install any distro with mainline kernel on the deck (even if some things don’t work). But my point was that Valve doesn’t care about user freedom. Their OS and the Steam client are proprietary. If they made a GNU/Linux phone, there is no guarantee that you would be able to install a free distro and it almost certainly would come with non free software by default, which would be bad.
Would love to see an open phone you can easily run your own distribution on without jumping through hoops.
I think PinePhone Pro and Librem 5 can run a mainline kernel. It’s possible that some things won’t work, but a lot of stuff has been upstreamed. I’m curious if you can easily install an ARM build of Debian on them, but couldn’t find any information last time I looked it up.
But phones are hard. An x86 phone with decent battery life is even harder. But one can dream.
Oh yeah, that is the dream. I wonder how are the current mobile Ryzen CPUs. I’m curious if there is any that could work well in a phone.
There is a Debian spin for the Pinephone called Mobian. I ran that for quite a while with Phosh as the front end. It’s probably still installed on the device.
What I hate about ARM is that you basically need a separate image for every device instead of one for everything like with x86.
