It is one of those threads ...

I followed the link on https://fsfe.org/campaigns/android/liberate.en.html#OS to Technoethical and found all the advertised phones out of stock.

How would you do if having a Replicant-smartphone were important...
Let's say: important to you?

It is not yet for me, but 0 is also not much to stir my interest.

You seem to have done your Homework.

Have you looked at the latest Huawei non-Android phone? It has forked the open source bit of Android, afaik. Personally, I don't buy that Huawei are spying on the world, and don't intend visiting China anytime soon, so I don't care. My sort (JWs) are banned in China anyhow, so they'd hardly be keen to have me. We must be doing something right .

Not good enough, it seems.

In the answer to an inquiry about the future of these Replicant phones, Technoethical explain that they are available on pre-order. Apart from that they accept payment by means which are forgotten my most of the online selling ... companies.

Reads like: “If you frown on cancer, how about diabetes ?”

There are forks and forks.

That is the drama of our times... you have choices. In a way.

I don't think there's any guarantee with these pre-installed devices, that they would work better or be more stable or less error-prone than if you install it yourself.
The installation process does not look more involved than for, say, LineageOS.
And I am sure you can get one of the supported devices on ebay for way less than 100€.

Also, are you aware what the Replicant project status is and what it will mean for your installed system? Not everything will work...

FWIW, I'm currently invested in this.

Silver Shekels? Bank Drafts? Amuse us
Come on, be serious.
ROTFL

Thank you for the inspiration.
I am difficult. Once I had to install Linux on a customer's Compaq IPAQ. It meant erasing the Windows-CE system, to find out what to do next, to find a Linux system which would run on the thing... oh. Looks like my boss was informed, I got Familiar Linux... then pray and hope that something will reboot. It did.
But that was no fun. I do not want to repeat the experience, neither with foreign, nor my own “hardware”.

The second thing is eBay. There are other platforms, also French ones (and German of course) which I might actually use.

Currently, nothing works. I have never owned a “smartphone”. If I saw a penguin dancing on a telephone-display it would mean a completely new chapter in my life's story. There is no need for more, right now.

This, too, looks very nice. I am not in a hurry and currently do not “need” a smartphone. But I answer to people who wonder what alternatives exist to Google or Apple.

Bank transfer.

Since this thread is already off the zero-reply threads my answer is I would try to purchase a phone running GNU/Linux. I attempted but this may still be a failure. If it works I will "share with the group".

For anyone interested to know also the perspective of a Technoethical representative:

We encourage people to flash devices themselves. That is the easy and fairly predictable part. People that already have a device and prefer that we do the flashing for them, can opt for our Replicant installation service. We also thoroughly test and clean the device we receive from customers.

The problem is that most Replicant-supported phones that one can buy from other sources than Technoethical don't have fully functional hardware, even if they are advertised as refurbished. We really spend a lot of time on testing, fixing, replacing and refurbishing devices to make them grade A, so that our customers can have the best chances of using a phone with Replicant as their daily driver.

Replicant is a completely libre LineageOS-derivate verified by the FSF. While GNU/Linux on a phone is so much better than Android/Linux, there still isn't a completely libre GNU/Linux distribution for phones. For now we are in contact with the Maemo Leste developers and they seem to be receptive to the freedom concerns that we've brought to their attention.

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^ Thanks for replying!
Is too!
https://maemo-leste.github.io/
https://leste.maemo.org/Main_Page
I know, I keep pushing this. For good reasons. They have persistently been working on it, they got funding, they got realistic but not too egoistic goals, and they work with a good basis originally developed by professionals. They also have a fairly big community of dedicated hackers behind them who have long been thirsting for a dist-upgrade for their devices.

I don't want to enter a debate here. There are proprietary blobs (for WiFi, graphics etc) included in Maemo Leste and the developers are aware of this freedom issue. This is not to undermine the effort and great development results, it's just facts.

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I'm interested in a libre OS, but also in an ethical device (like the Fairphone). (I'd also love a device with a five-row qwerty hardware keyboard, but nobody else seems to care.)

Currently the Fairphone is Android, but other OSes with be supported "soon" - I'm tempted to just order one and wait until either LineageOS/Replicant or PureOS can be installed (or even help with that if the barriers are within my capabilities).

Are there any alternatives worth considering or reasons not to do that?

I am typing this on one right now but Linux support is, sadly, still "being worked on".
Heck, I can even use Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V for copy + paste and the keys are backlit.

I knew you were going to say this, but I still wanted to push my favourite project!
Let's put it like this: Leste is about as free as Debian proper.
I much appreciate your (plural) work on Replicant though.

The Motorola Droid 4 has it! And it's the 2nd best supported device for Leste afaics.
It always seems to be either the hardware or the software that's "ethical", never both
BTW, the fairphone is "as ethically produced as realistically possible" - some of the components used in smartphones nowadays cannot be had "ethically".

Personally I prefer to always buy used smartphones. In my book, that's ethical. Grassroot economics, just like the software development.

Personally, I don't think firmware is ever going to be an issue. Having been involved from the other side (Hardware R&D) you're often running some fairly low level cpu optimized for the hardware at hand, e.g. network control. Your ram, & program storage are limited. Microcontrollers are inclined to be very good at switching individual legs, and poor at normal cpu work. Owners/managers are paranoid, as they career (and perhaps their company) is history if they end up carrying the can for some security issue. ISPs, logs & firewalls will notice all internet IPs accessed anyhow, so your chances of getting caught are high. Huawei was a special case only because they were the output devices, and a 5G transmitter may just have got away with it, but their access back into their own systems would be limited. I'm sure they suffer from the same paranoia everyone else does. No peripheral board or chip runs hot, do they? So that outputting your hard drive contents as well as doing what it's told might take days or even weeks.

What concerns me about these alternative OSes is the size of the Dev team. If it's too small, updates are not forthcoming. The guy cops on (Like Cyanogen) and gets a life.