Sure, there's a market for these phones and I absolutely do not speak for everyone :)

Still, I can get a Samsung Galaxy A20e for 150€ right now, which has about the same specs (actually slightly better) and spend two hours to get Lineage on it.

My point is, I do value my privacy a lot, even to the point of running my phone without GApps (which drops a lot of features), and I think these projects are absolutely awesome, but with their current offering those phones are simply not a general solution to someone with a budget.

Your cheap Samsung phones are not running open firmware with mainline Linux, nor have hardware kill switches.

A PinePhone/Librem 5 will also always be capable of running emacs/golang etc. which is not easily doable on Android if termux isn't possible anymore.

> A PinePhone/Librem 5 will also always be capable of running emacs/golang etc. which is not easily doable on Android if termux isn't possible anymore.

So can a phone running Lineage. The thing blocking termux is a config file; any phone that isn't locked down can handle it.

You're not getting all of the openness for free, but you can get a lot of it for free.

I think it's important to point out that you'll always rely on proprietary blobs and generally hostile hardware that way.

For now it's a config. As these things progress and get more locked down with each release in the name of security, it's going to be harder and harder and I don't want to scramble the moment it is practically impossible. I'd rather push for a free, open, libre hardware now so that the polish is there when there's no alternative.

> As these things progress and get more locked down with each release in the name of security

If that actually happens.

I haven't seen any downward trend of LineageOS. I haven't seen any downward trend of Samsung hardware.

I have certainly seen a much longer lag between a phone release that is not a Pixel and it being rootable+able to run Lineage compared to the Cyanogen days.

I've also noticed that nowdays, few phones are able to run more than one newer major Android version ahead because the OEM will simply not release the firmware needed to run newer versions and Lineage doesn't have the capacity to update/release their own firmware rebased against the latest Android, (I am talking about things such as the radio firmware, OnePlus is a famous example I know of).

A rooted Android will probably still be able to run termux and most other software. But fair point.

Seems more like $X >> 0.

The most I've ever paid for a phone is $300. I value open/libre more than $0, but not more than I value the phone itself.

These phones are for people willing to push the boundaries of free software and early adopters. This is for the people who ran early GNU stuff in the 90s, not the ones who said, "well, I can get a more polished toolset from <insert commercial vendor here>"