I've been using the Nokia N9 and some of the Jolla Sailfish offspring to this day. The phone part has been very reliable. The rest of the ecosystem is very mini

I've been using the Nokia N9 and some of the Jolla Sailfish offspring to this day. The phone part has been very reliable. The rest of the ecosystem is very minimal, almost non-existent, but I can't complain about the basic phone functionality. With these ARM-style devices that are quite closed down and need their own respective device tree, mass adoption seems a requirement for a company and ecosystem to hit critical mass and be financially viable. I don't think a "Linux phone" is enough of a value proposition to hit that critical mass without any specific features that would appeal to a non-technical crowd and can't easily be replicated by the iOS or Android behemoths. So personally I think it's not that the open-source/Linux approach can't produce a phone that has good-enough basic functionality, but that there's no clear way to market and sell these phones to a sufficiently large crowd to offset the massive investment into a new platform. Linux as a whole might be far ahead of iOS and Android as a general computing platform, but a viable device would have to break through the mass production hardware (and marketing!) barrier.