I think I’m reading this blogpost correctly: Mobian devs working on maintaining Linux kernel support for Pinephone painted themselves into a corner with tech debt, and may not be able to continue porting new kernel updates. Pinephone Pro runs a different chipset with wider community support, so it’s not affected.
I didn’t see any communities or articles talking about this, so either it’s not a big deal, or nobody is talking about it.
AMD APUs are beasts !. That would be a computer disguising as a phone. Now, that’s what I would call a revolutionary product. Kinda like Samsung Dex but libre.
I think back in the day, we had more diversity on the market. In the pre-smart-phone era Nokia came out with silly keyboard designs regularly. We had blackberrys at one time. And now they all look the same. Slightly different form-factor but that’s about it. You can spend $1200 to get a status-symbol phone but that does practically the same my $350 phone does. (Okay, Samsung tries silly flip-phones but I don’t like them.) All the more recent attempts kinda failed. Like Motorola doing attachable acessories, or Google trying to invent a modular phone. (I believe Samsung Dex, LG’s WebOS etc are also a thing of the past.)
I’d like some company to be bold and try new things. For Linux it’d be probably enough if some current SoC got free software support (and drivers for the camera, peripherals etc). We could buy a standard phone then. But currently I don’t see that happening. All the phones with mainline support are very old and/or severely underpowered. And there is no one phone with a big free software community behind it. Well, Pine64 tried…
Valve seems to be more successful with their Linux endeavours. Maybe we can expect more from that corner of portable Linux devices. And the Steam Deck costs like half an S23 Ultra (or iPhone).