Please help me find out which phones I can expect to able to upcycle Andoid on. Or a list of phones with gnu/linux pre-installed. Need is urgent.
Hi @OldKettle the How to upcycle your phone page has a section on choosing a distrubution or custom rom: Upcycling Android - How to upcycle your phone - FSFE I think that is a good starting point, because often you are dependent on the producers of the distributions or custom ROMs to support a phone model. PostmarketOS is a GNU/Linux distribution that has an impressive long list of supported hardware on their wiki: Devices - postmarketOS Custom ROMs mentioned on the page are ClayxOS, LineageOS and Replicant.
I think the software ecosystem on the native GNU/Linux phones is not near as mature as on the phones that are based on Android. This is getting better though as projects like Waydroid offer ways to run Android apps on GNU/Linux operating systems. I personally have a Pinephone with Mobian testing (Bookworm) and I like it a lot. I find I cannot use it as my ‘daily driver’ yet, because some application functionality is missing or buggy and the battery performance is not as great as my other phones. But seeing the speed of development, this gap is closing, and I expect that in about a year I can do away with my Android phone. I think the app of my bank is the main reason that would keep me running Android, thinking that it would be difficult to run a secure app in Waydroid. But I do know FSFE community members that happily use the Pinephone with Mobian as their main smartphone, so it can be done.
I know this is far from a concrete advise, because it depends a lot on your wants and needs. Do you have an existing phone lying around or do you want to make a new purchase? How much money do you want to spend? What tasks do you need your phone to do for you? Do you want a free software solution that works now or are you willing to accept some remaining bugs while the ecosystem is maturing?
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