> A 10-year old Android performs better and is more stable.

A decade-old phone would run Android 2.3.7 (Gingerbread), have a dead and unchargable battery, no longer support modern SIM cards which is fine because its odds of connecting to any modern networks approach zero as the old spectrum gets recycled, be unable to run any recent apps (ancient OS version, no memory) including not being able to run any browser capable of opening modern websites, and would have a slow clunky UI on a cramped little screen. The PinePhone has a long way to go, but it would destroy any decade old phone in very nearly every comparison.

I dug out a Nexus One last week, and even after upgrading it to Lineage on Android 2.3.7 it's basically useless.

The stock browser crypto algorithms are too old to connect to most sites, practically zero apps of use support anything that old, you aren't going to be running Firefox or Chrome unless you grab an ancient build. No WhatsApp, Signal, etc. The majority of stuff on F-droid doesn't run, the camera is terrible, it has basically no app storage and you have to use that old mod which allows an ext partition on your SD for apps, which is _slow_. I'm really not sure could find a single practical use for it.

On the other hand, I'm still using my Galaxy Note 3 (2013). Only some months ago did I eventually get around to flashing it from Lollipop to latest Lineage (android 10/Q). The battery is fine because I replaced it. 4G works fine. 5 GHz wifi works fine. A few apps were unstable or had performance issues which led to me finally upgrading and they went away. I can watch YT just fine, play various games, whatever, it doesn't feel slow.

I'm (hopefully) getting a Librem 5 phone sometime this year but I already know it's going to disappoint even as I've been expecting as much from the start. You're not getting these phones for their practical superiority on any metric, but as a weak signal to the world of an approach you'd rather others took, and maybe this will help form a better bedrock for yet another attempt in another 5+ years especially given how much upstreaming is going on vs. what Mozilla or Ubuntu did. I think the Librem is even more disappointing than the PinePhone (which, given its much more reasonable price, I'm tempted to buy for the same reasons I'm getting a Librem) and that's only comparing with my Note 3 let alone some of the monsters out there now (16 GB of RAM on a phone exists). The Librem/PinePhone have as much RAM as my nearly 8 year old phone, same number CPU cores (but lower frequency and probably lower performance), same internal storage, in the case of Librem actually more money in nominal prices, both lower screen resolution, uncertain whether Librem'll survive carriers moving to VoLTE (my Note 3 will)...

My only point in this mini-rant is that while it may not be a 10 year old phone, at 8 years my Note 3 is still looking better than these 'new' things on feature set. GP is right that these open phones are disappointing, even if in some cases there's nothing to be done because of the higher level project goals.

My 9yo Samsung runs 7.1 (I have an 8.0 image, but it's less fast and stable) with a couple gigs of ram, and has an up-to-date Firefox and Brave on a comfortable screen. Sure it's painfully slow, but so is my HP mini netbook, and I like using that (with an SSD).

It's tri-band, but I only use it on wifi. I might be able to compile newer firmware, but the Android SDK has never worked for me even in the most casual use, so I never tried.

Android Gingerbread was my first real phone. I think I had an LG Nitro. It was awesome. But yeah it wouldn't be great in the modern world at all. Still better than my OnePlus 8. What a complete piece of trash! At least old android gave me clear access to see what was running on my device. New android doesn't do that.

A pure Linux phone could obviously benefit from being as polished and streamlined as its iOS and Android counterparts.

But thats not its main mission. Thats not what it's selling.

Total user control, like on real desktop Linux, for those who can wield it, because thats literally what youre getting.

For now this space is for a very specific audience. Maybe in time (like Ubuntu did for desktop Linux on PCs) there will come a distro which is usable enough OOB to have the same effect on mobile.

We mobile Linux users will still be a minority though, and we probably wont mind. Just like we dont mind being minority desktop users either.

I was hoping that there would be a reasonably rock solid "feature phone" platform we could start building from, but it seems everybody wants to scale down the full linux desktop.

I just want a feature phone with a browser.

I would even be keen to see KiaOS running on it, but I don't think you can right now.

If you want to, you can have that; just take postmarketOSs new stable release when it's out with your prefered mobile shell and put the bare minimum of apps you want/need on there and you'll be set.

As for KaiOS, I doubt we'll see that soon, as IIRC like FirefoxOS it's designed to run on Android kernels. With GloDroid being mostly dormant and incomplete, I doubt we can pull that off.

Thanks. I will try that!

Update: Hold on, I thought it's the shells that are the problem. They are trying to do too much at once and doing it badly as a result.

Linux isn't all that will run on these.

Genode is working on a port. I'd gladly run seL4 instead of Linux.

10 year old Android means roughly a single-core 1GHz CPU, 512MB RAM and a 480p screen. Would it be more stable? Maybe. But certainly not better performing, as that's more or less Raspberry Pi 1 hardware.

Have you tried Arch Linux ARM/DanctNIX?