I see some core team on this thread, so just wanted to say THANK YOU! Awesome job! Keep fighting for the users!
I'm totally the wrong person to offer recommendations on mobile, but so far it works very well for me, but then, I use almost no third party apps, and none of them are Play store only. My only complaint is the hardware (outside of their control).
I wish that were true, but if you delete the 100s of binary blobs (many with effectively root access) copied from a stock donor vendor partition the phone won't function at all.
There is no such thing as a fully open source and user controlled Android device today.
The Precursor is the only pocket computer platform that is maximally open hardware, software, and firmware but you revert back to the 90s in terms of power as a consequence with alpha quality software today. If Bunnie is successful with his IRIS approach and making custom home-user-inspectable ASICS then maybe a middle ground path can be forged in the next few years.
For now the only modern computing experience with fully open hardware and software I am aware of are the ppc64le based devices by Raptor Engineering, but at a very high cost due to low demand, with huge form factor and no power management. I still own one anyway because we have to start somewhere.
For those that want this story to get better, please buy and promote the products of the few people trying to break us out of dependence on proprietary platforms.
MNT Reform has a regular closed source ARM SoC as the main component along with a bunch of other closed source components. The chassis, board and boot chain being open doesn't make a device mostly open hardware. Anything simply using an ARM or x86_64 SoC at the core is not truly mostly open. It's a closed source system (the SoC) with open source components between it and other closed source components like radios, a display controller, SSD, etc. The same applies to other ARM and x86_64 laptops. They're built around closed source components even if the board many components go in and the boot chain is open source.
Having an open source boot chain and not requiring loading proprietary firmware from there or from the OS doesn't mean the device has open firmware. It's conflating not needing to load firmware with the firmware not existing or being open, which isn't the case.
> The Precursor is the only pocket computer platform that is maximally open hardware, software, and firmware but you revert back to the 90s in terms of power as a consequence with alpha quality software today. If Bunnie is successful with his IRIS approach and making custom home-user-inspectable ASICS then maybe a middle ground path can be forged in the next few years.
This is far closer to being how you're describing other platforms. However, it does have closed source components including the FPGA and Wi-Fi. It's as close as it gets to being open hardware and that has a huge cost. Platforms simply using a closed source ARM SoC and many other closed source components are not anywhere close to being open. This is what it takes to get close, and it's not fully there.
> For now the only modern computing experience with fully open hardware and software I am aware of are the ppc64le based devices by Raptor Engineering, but at a very high cost due to low demand, with huge form factor and no power management. I still own one anyway because we have to start somewhere.
It's the motherboard that's open source. The IBM CPUs used with it are not open hardware.
> For those that want this story to get better, please buy and promote the products of the few people trying to break us out of dependence on proprietary platforms.
Laptops with a nearly completely closed source SoC / CPU are not a fully open platform, especially when it's an SoC providing most of the functionality. Talos II has a lot of functionality on their open motherboard vs. an ARM SoC with most of it on the SoC, but either way the CPU being closed source is still the most core component being closed source.