> > We desperately need a standardized open source phone. The raspberry pi of phones.

> It seems like we're getting there with Prism [1] and Pine [2]. Seems to be a couple more I've never heard of [3].

But are they standardized? That is, can I have a single "phone OS" distribution which can be installed unmodified in all of them? We're already there with the Raspberry Pi: the 64-bit Fedora I installed on mine boots through UEFI, and the same Fedora install should boot on any other UEFI-using 64-bit ARM board. That's the only way to get the necessary scale; otherwise, the community will stay split in separate silos (a purism silo, a pine64 silo, etc).

The Librem 5's PureOS is very nearly stock Debian and the Purism devs have been very diligent about getting their stuff upstreamed into mainline Linux and Debian.

Pine doesn't employ software developers, but the Manjaro and Mobian communities are also doing their best to stay as close to stock desktop distributions as possible.

A key difference between the Pi and both the Librem 5 and Pinephone is that the latter two made an explicit design choice to use stock-standard (nearly) blob-free hardware. Unlike Raspbian, which relies on a custom kernel, PureOS, Mobian, Manjaro, etc... are very nearly standard desktop operating systems, with relatively minor tweaks to system defaults. Heck, PureOS and Manjaro are desktop operating systems just running on the phone with mobile-oriented shell .

There was a nice, related post on this from Purism a few days ago: https://puri.sm/posts/investing-in-real-convergence/

Worth noting that Purism's ex-CTO seems rather pissed about the company: https://twitter.com/zlatandebian/status/1287317134423535622

Those are just the next ones on a long list started with Openmoko.