>In short, don't complain to/about Lineage. Vote with your pocket and buy more open phones.

I agree with this wholly. Devices like iphones or the samsung devices are riddled with user-hostile features like KNOX, locked bootloaders, pre-installed payment gardens and proprietary blobs all over along with carrier locked, contractually defined handset ownership agreements.

The state of open smartphones is rather nacient, checking the wikipedia list page[0] there hasn't been a real handset launched in numbers for 3 years. I would describe the availability of these devices at best as Very Poor.

That said, HTC is much better for open firmwares than the big ones like apple or samsung. You can just ask and they will return the bootloader key. Try that with Samsung, they are horrible. Samsung is a very integrated vendor, and it can be quite challenging to develop for these very closed platforms, the software sometimes takes ages.

Case in point the Galaxy s6. The verizon locked phones still have no public bootloader unlock tooling afiak. Quite a hassle.

Currently the only Openish devices you might be able to get soonish are ( In the order of my own arbitrary bias )

- PinePhone (Pre-Production Developer Kits Shipped) [1]

- Librem 5 (Production Batches Shipping) [2]

- Necunos NC 1 (Released, Unavailable?) [3]

Unless I've left any out.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_pho...

1 - https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

2 - https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

3 - https://necunos.com/

> Librem 5 (Production Batches Shipping) [2]

There some threads here a couple weeks ago and on r/Purism, but it appears they have shipped 0 phones to customers so far. There are just a handful of pre-production units given to employees. Unfortunately it also sounds like they have spent all, or nearly all of the money they raised in crowdfunding, so how they are going to ship all the backorders is unknown.

Don't trust random gossip on the internet.

Always in matters like this, it's about degrees of compromise.

While some will be happy with one of these three options, some will find it a step too far from mainstream, low maintenance high end options.

With this in mind, it's important to make recommendations across the spectrum, to encourage those not willing to go "all the way" to still go some of the way.

In this area, I'd look at Fairphone (not great on the high end cutting edge tech side for obvious reasons, but decent on openness), Motorola and One+ (both more mainstream high-end options but also not quite as heavy on user-hostility as some competitors).

Google are also quite good in this area, on the hardware side, but given their ownership of the software side and general practices in that area, I'd be in less of a hurry to recommend them.

Great list. There's also the option of going for a SailfishOS smartphone because you won't have to abide to FAANG tracking.

Fairphone 3 doesn't quite fit the bill, but I'd still mention it in lists like these as it is possible to unlock bootloader, the phone is modular so can be repaired, and the Fairphone 2 ran a myriad of OSes (#3 just got released, give it some time).

>HTC are well-known for providing locked-down devices

I've been using HTC devices for ages, and so far every one of them was dead-simple to unlock: Just go to the HTC developer page and enter your phone ID, get unlock code and enter on phone, done! Naturally HTC will from there on out decline responsibility for bricked phones, but which company doesn't?

If you're talking about simply unlocking the bootloader, that's as simple on most phones. I'm more referring to the general barriers put up to doing anything with your phone, either before unlocking (the OS itself is restrictively HTC-oriented) or after unlocking (S-ON, etc.)

> Naturally HTC will from there on out decline responsibility for bricked phones, but which company doesn't?

The fact that this is an accepted norm is another part of the problem. Why "naturally"? Some manufacturers (like Google, Fairphone, Motorola on a limited number of phones) don't void the warranty, but even if none did: why do you think this "naturally" an acceptable thing other than it being the norm?

If you don't damage the hardware by flashing, there's no reason it should be out of warranty. If you do "damage" it because of some malicious hardware fuse installed by the manufacturer, then it seems to me that could reasonably be considered a faulty device.

You can actually permabrick the hardware with a non-compatible or buggy flashed OS. It's an embedded device, so the Linux kernel has access to a lot of stuff that it wouldn't, e.g. on an ordinary PC.

Kind of ironic that said embedded device is supposed to have at least nontrivially-above-average security.

But flashing itself can also go horribly wrong due to poor bootloader quality etc.

> The fact that this is an accepted norm is another part of the problem. Why "naturally"? Some manufacturers (like Google, Fairphone, Motorola on a limited number of phones) don't void the warranty, but even if none did: why do you think this "naturally" an acceptable thing other than it being the norm?

Because I want to be allowed to install software that will damage the phone. Holding the phone manufacturer responsible for code I wrote is not in fact a natural thing to do.

> Holding the phone manufacturer responsible for code I wrote is not in fact a natural thing to do.

I'm sorry but I'm really struggling to understand what you mean by this. What hardware should I be running the code I write on without fear of voiding the warranty.

If it's the fact I wrote the code that constitutes voiding the warranty, exactly who's code should we be permitted to run on hardware we've purchased? Only code which has been written by/provided by the manufacturer themselves?

What's the precedent for this absurd restriction?

You shouldn't be running the code you write on any hardware without fear of voiding the warranty. The point of a general-purpose computer is that the code you write might do anything at all. There is no warranty to cover that, and there shouldn't be. You should get over your desire for a warranty.

Why is this acceptable for the computers that go in our pockets when its clearly not the case for those that go in our backpacks or datacenters?

I've bought a handful of used HTC devices in the past. Only "real" HTC devices are go to dev page and unlock. If they've been through a carrier that isn't T-Mobile, it's very likely permanently not unlockable. Try entering a Verizon-issued HTC or Sprint-issued HTC on the page.

Yes, entirely possible (I wouldn't know, I'm not US based). When the carrier breaks the phone, is it the original manufacturer's fault though?

The carrier's contract with the manufacturer or something explicitly demands that the manufacturer not unlock the bootloader.

I believe you can unlock Pixels without voiding the warranty.

But yet Samsung is the only LOS option that doesn't have Qualcomm's broken-by-design integrated baseband/application processors.

I'm certainly not trying to fanboy here (Samsung cameras suck [0]), just pointing out that all manufacturers are intrinsically inclined to deploy some user-hostile features. "Voting" with your wallet doesn't particularly move their needles.

[0] More precisely their software support sucks, making the picture quality terrible. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21082561