Don’t say, hey android has Linux in it, yeah no, idc, I want to know how far we are from buying a Linux phone at a price point of 200 USD.
A Linux phone is one which is built completely on Linux, uses Linux apps and most important has a terminal.
I don’t want a Linux Phone for privacy, although that’s a great reason, but I want it for the freedom it provides me. Hell, I don’t care if Android itself comes with a terminal and has similar features to Linux, I just want a Terminal which can install apps, where I can write commands and it will execute it. Complete Control on my phone and how it behaves is what I want.
I want to tell it when to sleep, when not to sleep, when to boot, when to edit a file and how, when to take a screenshot and what to do with it and where to save it, etc, etc. I hope you get the idea.
Do you think that might change with risc-v? As in, it would be more likely to have open source code and community support for kernel updates
I don’t think so, no.
What causes the situation currently is not ARM, but the companies making SoCs.
Currently, with RISC-V, we are seeing early-adopter trial runs by early-adopter companies. None of the usual suspects have any amount of serious skin in the game.
When Qualcomm is making mass-market high-performance RISC-V SoCs, they will treat them exactly the way they are treating their equivalent ARM SoCs right now.