If you're answering PorterBeen's question:
I dare to disagree since SailfishOS is a real and complete GNU/Linux smartphone OS, and it does not require more smarts than, say, installing LineageOS to install it - and using it isn't harder than using Android or iOS, although a bit different.
Also its predecessors Maemo Fremantle and Harmattan were - albeit a decade ago - real and complete GNU/Linux smartphone OSs that even came preinstalled on many decvices.

it’s a foundation on which various different approaches to mobile computing can be built, all with Linux at their heart.

Sadly it never really had commercial success, and is mostly unavailable both in product (ex. Jolla phone) or other mobile products with Sailfish OS.

You see, the mobile market is a tightly controlled market, not possible to penetrate. Even if you had lots of money to do so, you would not be able to. Everything is patented, copyrighted and owned, and you can't get anyone to produce your product. There is no way anyone will be able to penetrate that market with a non globalist operating system, especially GNU/Linux. That's just too dangerous to the globalists. Imagine what would happen if people had control over their mobile devices instead of being controlled by them. Nokia wanted to make GNU/Linux phones, and you see what happened to them. And yes, please indulge in the conspiracy theory.

^ Not sure what you're on about, I am using SailfishOS right now, I paid for it (so arguably it is a commercial success), I'm getting updates, it has Android app support...

It sounds to me like you want an alternative to Android/iOS, but at the same time you want the alternative to be the mainstream. Can't really have it both ways.

Yes, it's a niche market, but it's a market.
Oh look, they have a Christmas offer!

https://tuxphones.com/best-linux-pho...ng-guide-2022/

Some mind find that interesting.

I personally have the original fxtec pro¹; ran sailfishos on it for a while. Version 4.3 of sailfishos was released for it today in fact....Still need to give ubtouch a try...

I also have a few photon q, which I've also ran sailfishos on... but it's not so useful as only one LTE band, no volte, and 3G being shut down left at right around here...

1 members found this post helpful.

I don't want to be anal about it, but this thread's title is "Linux for cellphones", which is a slightly different topic than "Linux phones".
It's more about the operating system than the hardware I guess.

That F(x)tec Pro1 in the article looks sweet though.

Of the Linux operating systems that are being worked on for cell phones, the only options I see are those not quite ready for prime time but showing great promise (most of them), and a couple that look pretty good but will not run on any of my phones and are not available in my country anyway.

There needs to be a lot more work done to get them ready and generally compatible with the hardware in question, and then availability my be an issue.

I stand by my earlier assessment: we should support and keep an eye on them, but they are not yet ready for general use. No, not even by Linux groupies. Devs and evaluation teams has a very valid use case, but not the general user.


YET!

Some of our FOSS projects have been progressing slowly for YEARS and will take many more years. Others get a sudden infusion of developers and money and make rapid progress. You really have to keep your eyes open in this space as things CAN change very quickly!

tldr: What OS are you talking about and what country is it unavailable?

I can understand only having phones that are locked to their current OS, i.e. iphone and android phones with locked bootloader, or ones with unlocked bootloader but nobody has bothered porting anything to it.

But how could an OS not be available in your country, I've never heard of a country banning an operating system before? I'm trying to imagine. I guess Google's Android GMS is not allowed in China, but there are still other Android distros allowed there... and I don't think this thread's focus is android anyway. Or the opposite, I've heard Red Star OS is not readily available outside of DPRK... but not related to phones. So instead of my silly rambling... what os are you talking about and what country is it unavailable in?

Check the sailfishOS links in the third post above (from ondoho) and look at the models it runs on and the countries to which it can be downloaded for one example that is easy to access.

I am familiar with SailfishOS and have used it on couple devices, as mentioned before. Yes, Jolla provides a licensed version for sony xperia and at one point had their own phones. But it's open source and there are ports for lots and lots of devices that dont require jolla license, and certainly no restrictions, and those are not listed on anything he linked.

Although not comprehensive, there is a list of some devices with community ports on Wikipedia for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS Most of them are available on xda or tmo and not restricted download by any country that I ever heard of.

It is annoying they won't sell alien dalvik license outside of a few countries even if you want to buy it, but waydroid solved that.

???

I'm guessing you mean three posts prior to the post to which enigma was originally responding to. (Which is five posts prior to the post of yours which I'm quoting.)

It would be far easier to directly identify it as post #125.

That post contains a link to shop.jolla.com where the specific statement you're most likely referring to is:

Let me clarify: you are free to download, install and use it everywhere.

You won't get updates or Android support that way, although there's legal ways to achieve both.

IANAL, but AFAIU this:
means that (at least in theory) it is possible to sell the full version elsewhere, just not through the jolla company/website. Maybe it's possible to license sales from them?

SailfishOS has a forum and a large community of hackers on TMO. I suggest to look for answers about the specifics there.

Thanks for that

EVERY version of Android has been based upon a heavily customized Linux kernel. One of the original signs of discord between Google (now Alphabet) and the FOSS community was that they did not make the full source code openly available so that we could review the modifications.

(There's a hidden spam link in the quoted text.)