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Yeah, it seems like mobile oses are about as common as Linux distros in 1995. Sailfish, Maru, lineage, among the two you mention. If you have a nexus 5 or one plus one, you're in luck.

I recently tried lineage, ubports and plasma, and though I liked ubports, lineage was a breath of fresh air. Selinux, opengapps, regular privacy notifications, twrp, and privacy and security seem to have not taken a back seat in general. Sign me up.

If there hadn't been contracts 10yrs ago, I probably would have gotten an openmoko. Wanted one badly. If lineage, ubports, and plasma among others can keep developing alternatives to stock android, no reason to see why at least some or all hardware doesn't follow. It's taken AMD the better part of 10 years to have open source drivers that are as good as their closed source drivers on almost all of their GPUs if I'm not mistaken.



> If you have a nexus 5 or one plus one, you're in luck.

Which raises the question: if you want a phone that can run a FOSS mobile OS, what do you choose today? Nexus 5 and OPO were great a few years back (I bought the latter) but there is a need in the marketplace for (read: I need) an updated product that can run such a mobile OS.


Your best bet is to keep an eye on what Halium Project[+] choose as its reference phones.

[+] https://halium.org/


What's the difference between Halium and Mer? They both seem to be similar projects.


Packaging. If I understand correctly, Halium's goals are simpler in just doing enough to bootstrap the libhybris layer.

This allows projects such as Mer, Plasma Mobile, LuneOS, UBports and AsteroidOS etc to pool efforts without any distro-specific assumptions.


Currently it's the Nexus 5.


Depends on how open you want to be. Is CopperheadOS open enough for you? Then get a Nexus 5x/6P or a Pixel with the OS preinstalled.


Yep, Lineage is available on a 5X, Samsung S7, LG G5, etc.. Libhybris/Halium uses the driver parts of AOSP if I understand correctly, and Lineage uses ART in addition, they are all dependent on AOSP in some way currently atleast.

Google's project treble might make haliums' job a bit easier, so you might see halium on more devices than you'd think. Just speculating.




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