[gue5t]

"LINEAGEOS, UBUNTU TOUCH or ANDROID" is a euphemism for "we did not do the important, hard work of upstreaming drivers".

This phone might be perfectly nice, but it's a "Linux phone" in a marketing sense only; nobody has properly ported Linux to it, and you'll be stuck with an ancient kernel full of proprietary userspace blobs.

I'd love to hear otherwise, but I've seen this pattern repeat a number of times (the Gemini PDA and successors, various "secure" phones, essentially all the Ubuntu Touch devices https://phone.docs.ubuntu.com/en/devices/devices, etc.) and those who do put in the critical driver work are in-touch enough to know it's worth being explicit about upfront.

[robert_foss]

You can't really blame a tiny manufacturer for not having all the drivers upstreamed. They probably don't have access to the relevant datasheets even if they had the money/time/developers to pursue full upstreaming. Upstreaming drivers is the vendors responsibility.

[jrwr]

even the rPi has a bunch of firmware that just is not open sourced, they used their own kernel for years because of that.