I have been looking at Fairphone and Volla, and it feels like the Smartphone scene for Linux is going very strong right now.
Think of it like this: We got 3-4 end-user ready Ubports smartphones, made by IN Europe(Volla/Gigaset is), with recent hardware, swappable battery, very good service and repairability in various formats. You can even purchase Gigaset phones (commercial equivalents of Volla) in stores/Amazon for a very good price.
The immediate orbiters of Linux smartphones like Fxtec, Planet Computers and Jolla are also based here.
I think we reached the year of the Linux phones. Atleast it is not the niche it was in 2020. I wonder how usable ubports is. If you got any experience with these phpnes on ubports, feel free to share.
Agreed, halium and Ubuntu Touch aren’t true Linux phones in my book. To be a true Linux phone you need to run mainline, or at least very close to it (pmOS forks, Megi kernel, etc) and do things the Linux way not the Android way (KMS/DRM/Mesa stack, ALSA/Pulse/Pipewire stack). There are some phones that are getting there thanks to postmarketOS like the OnePlus 6/6T but the ones you listed are the main true Linux phones.
Typing this from my PinePhone Pro running postmarketOS.
How’s that working these days? From time to time I dust off mine, try it a bit, and see that while there’s progress, it’s way too unstable for a daily driver. PPP even more so than old PP. I’m using a Pixel 7 running Graphene these days…