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It is, however, a lot more open than most ARM Single board computers and ARM phones. Most ARM Phones/SBCs cannot run mainline Linux, and due to closed drivers, will likely never be able to. You in addition have Phones with locked bootloaders, so you can't even load your own firmware in it! This gets us into the situation we see today: even if you have a Phone that you can run your own firmware on it, it has a lifetime because the vendor has little financial intentive to do so. Even the most open Android Phones (Pixels) have about a 3 year lifetime: https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/4457705 On an iPhone, you are completely at the mercy of Apple for updates (for which they have a much better track record than Android). Meanwhile, my Thinkpad x200 was released in 2008 and continues to be a supported just fine, with no end in sight. I hate to say, in contrast to even my Novena, is much better, as my Novena sits in my desk because it does not run mainline Linux, and I can't even get it to run properly on an updated Linux 4.4 Kernel that I tried to compile (due to no support). So the Pinephone (and Librem 5) shooting to ensure that they can run unmodified Mainline Linux is a huge win for openness and longetivity in a Phone. |