I remember running x11 and Java w/swing on 8MB 486 laptop... So something is off if multiple cores at 30-100 times the frequency can't run a gui?
The FreeRunner and Zaurus were sluggish, but they’re also on hardware that’s about 15 years old
Something I have found worthwhile has been listening to the UBports podcast over the last 6 months or so. They really do seem to be 'getting it' faster than most re: what's left to be done. That's partly because they're in the rather unique position of coming from a place of having the Android kernel (which isn't just a vanilla Linux kernel) do a lot of things for them (i.e. UBports on Android phones) and now that they're running on bare metal (i.e. UBports on Pinephone) with (mostly) the same code base they are able to see 'oh, yeah... the kernel and/or apps need to be able to do Y' in order to replicate the functionality they get on Android phones.
Just curious, what corporate backing are you referring to? I hadn't heard that before.
However, the Pi has never gotten much beyond being a forky port of Linux software (back then they had to: they were an arm6hf device in an arm7hf world) and since they seem determined to stay forked (i.e. they no longer need to be a fork, but rather seem to want to be), I don't expect much more from the project in terms of broader Linux enhancements. I'd love to be proven wrong on this.
On the Pinephone, and all other ARM-based Linux devices, we're still running applications like web browsers that were written expecting to run on multi-core I/O monsters with lots of RAM, beefier GPUs etc. (the main exception being the main GUI shell... it would be so much worse if you had to boot the phone into a full Gnome/KDE environment) We're still in the late stages of getting the pile of software that is a typical Linux distro running at all on a mobile device. Then assuming these devices get enough traction, you'll start to see more effort put into mobile-optimized software.