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I wish there was an easy way to install Linux to any android device so I could ditch Android... {...} Ubuntu touch is dead and I'm not sure what else exists.

Jolla has developped Sailfish.
as they've developped libhybris (the same thing that Ubuntu Touch used), it's possible for the community to develop ports to lots of android devices (a couple of Sony Xperias, upcoming Gemini, etc.)

Jolla has also released it for a couple of select devices as an officially supported commercial project.

Also there's Purism's Librem 5 project to build a phone with an entire opensource Linux stack.

Just ignore it and use LineageOS. That's what I do (and CyanogenMod before that) and have been Google-free for years.

LineageOS is great as an OS, but it uses the Android ecosystem and to get most mainstream stuff to work you have to install Google's services. In which case you are back to using Google and their privacy "choices". Try using it with just software from Fdroid and you will find that whilst there's great stuff there, whole categories of software are missing.

This keeps getting better though. This is not like the proprietary efforts where all the work from failed companies gets thrown away. The Mer project did some great work and it's still available to start from. You can use LineageOS as a basis to start from. UBports is continuing the work on Ubuntu touch. There are a bunch of privacy respecting services like OpenStreetMap that you can integrate. Every time that somebody tries to build a new solution with copyleft software and open interfaces we move a step further in the direction of having a decent mobile system that respects privacy.

the best option is to completely abandon the manufacturer, unlock the bootloader and install a different operating system in the hopes it will remain better supported.

Example of a different operating system with commercial support : Sailfish X (for Sony Xperia X) by Jolla, the former Nokia engineer who were working on Maemo/Meego for the N700/N800/N900/N9 series before Elop and Microsoft happened to them.

That's another alternative possibility to the usual suspects (like LineageOS, etc.)

(Note: NOT Android based at all - except for the platform drivers, it's still GNU/Linux under the hood like back when at Nokia).

Regarding phones fromOnePlus, Jolla doesn't currently have an official line of products, but there's a vibrant community so a community port might show up in talk.maemo.org

the best option is to completely abandon the manufacturer, unlock the bootloader and install a different operating system in the hopes it will remain better supported.

Example of a different operating system with commercial support : Sailfish X (for Sony Xperia X) by Jolla, the former Nokia engineer who were working on Maemo/Meego for the N700/N800/N900/N9 series before Elop and Microsoft happened to them.

That's another alternative possibility to the usual suspects (like LineageOS, etc.)

(Note: NOT Android based at all - except for the platform drivers, it's still GNU/Linux under the hood like back when at Nokia).

Regarding phones fromOnePlus, Jolla doesn't currently have an official line of products, but there's a vibrant community so a community port might show up in talk.maemo.org

For my next phone I'm gonna pony up and buy one with a pure full GNU Linux distro.

The problem is that there aren't many thing on the market yet.

Best contenders are :

• Jolla they are the former Nokia engineers that used to work the Maemo/Meego system for Nokia'sr N800 / N900 / N9 series of phones until the whole Elop/Microsoft disaster shit-show happened.
  Now they are making Sailfish OS which is a continuation of the same development (but have now renamed the core from Meego to mer).
  They used to have some inhouse hardware (Jolla 1 Phone) then some manufacturer failure (Jolla Tablet), then some third party partner ship (Jolla C / Intex Aquasih). Their latest product is Sailfish X, done in partnership with Sony Open Devices, to Install Sailfish X on Sony Xperia X (single SIM version [the dual sim version isn't officially supported, but according to forum it works too), *not SIM-locked only* [SIM-locked phone cannot have their bootloader unlocked]). It's still an early beta, but if you're patient and willing to through the first few months of bugs, it might be worth giving it a try
  it's a full blown GNU/Linux under the hood, using modern features like Wayland, Systemd, etc. using RPM repositories for software distribution and significative developper community.
  Darbacks for your specific target is that to make deployment on smartphone easier, it does rely on same (closed source) drivers that the chipset manufacturer provide for smartphone (using an adaptation layer called libhybris), so you still have manufacturer blobs, and some bits of the infeface still aren't under a copy-left license yet (but Jolla plans to, and in the main time the source is visible any way, as the interface is mostly QML and Javascript anyway. With lots of patches available in the communities too)
• Purism has successfully crowdfunded their librem 5 smartphone.
  Good news is that they plan to develop a 100% pure Linux opensource phone with no blobs (partly by selecting chip with 100% opensource support, and partly by isolating problematic chips like baseband modem into separate chips that only communicate with the main chipset over a standard protocole - there's no "baseband modem actually serving as the chipset's northbridge" as in Qualcomm)
  the drawbacks are that it's still in development (obviously), and that it uses a chipset that is either completely antique (currently their test are done on Freescale i.MX6, because that the only one with 100% opensource drivers supported by upstream kernel) or might be less exciting than other phone (they hope to be able to shift to FreeScale i.MX 8 as opensource support improves).
  they plan pure linux interfaces, mostly gnome and KDE Plasma Active (yet another QML-based interface).
• Samsung is doing Tizen, which is a distant cousin of the Meego/Maemo family. But I don't know how much there is an active community

And I think that's about all currently active project of GNU/Linux phones, now that Ubuntu Touch has dropped the ball.

(Also, not interesting for you, but Sailfish OS, on their official commercial product support a proprietary compatibility layer - Alien-Dalvik by Myriad - that enables Android Apps (though currently only at 4.4 KitKat level).
Purism has promised to consider some container based solution (andbox -based, perhaps ?) to bring compatibility to Android Apps.
Tizen can download from their application store OpenMobile's Application Compatibility Layer.

So none of these will suffer from "not part of a big app ecosystem" networking effect)

Sailfish is excellent, and is not vaporware. I've been using it on my Nexus 4 for a long time now, and there are ports for many devices.

If there's a version of CyanogenMOD or LineageOS available for your device, it's not difficult to port it yourself.

While C++ is the native binding of Qt (the toolkit Sailfish is based on), you perfectly free to write your apps in Python, as PyOtherSide is one of the officially supported methods for Jolla store apps. If you want to write apps to scratch your own itch and distribute them through FOSS channels to other nerds, you can easily use PyQt as well.

(Python wasn't invented in the 21th century per se, but most of the functionality that Python developers depend on these days dates from post-2000).

The advantage of putting a Mer project derivative like Jolla would be that you get a more or less full Linux and can easily add related packages. If you already have another Android device for other use and want to hack around a bit it's likely to be a better choice than just another Android.

MeeGo was an unknown with almost no apps and almost no community

But it had many carriers happy to support it. Unlike Windows Phone.

remember that Windows Embedded ran the first real smart phones

No, that'd be the Nokia 9000 Communicator, which ran GEOS.

there was a full stable of applications already available

That was true of Windows Mobile, which Microsoft abandoned in favor of the fully incompatible Windows Phone.

I just looked at the project's home page and it hasn't been updated since 2011

You don't say, Captain Obvious? Elop killed the damn thing! But, being open-source, MeeGo left an heir: Mer, the basis of Sailfish, which runs on the Jolla - made by a crew of former Nokia engineers.

and Tizen's major selling point seems to be that it supports HTML5.

Its major selling point, to manufacturers and carriers, is that it's not under the control of a single company. I guess they learned that from the MeeGo disaster: do not rely on something that can be obtained from only one company, since they may hire an imbecile or a saboteur to run themselves into the fucking ground!

You can install CyanogenMod in most android phones and restrict yourself to use only open source apps too. Or try Mer based ones (i.e. Sailfish), Tizen, Ubuntu Touch, or Firefox OS

Well, they're not glibc compatible. You can use them with Xorg and a standard GNU userspace via a wrapper like libhybris, which was developed for Mer and is being used by Ubuntu Mobile.

Not to mention Mer, with an 'e', is a linux distro built on the remains of Meego. Ubuntu on devices running Mir will be in competition with Mer.

With luck there will eventually be a push for a standardized tablet platform that is open enough to permit users to select their own OS.

That standard platform is the Android kernel.

Meanwhile Plasma Active, Salifish, and Tizen are based on a traditional Linux platform, and the Mer project hopes to be the common core distribution for them.

For the tiny fraction of users who "select their own OS", device popularity and an unlocked bootloader matter far more than standardization. If you buy an unsuccessful phone, it won't have a community providing images for it and jailbreaking its bootloader if necessary.

The standardized platform is vital for all these also-ran OSes to get lots of apps. Aaron Seigo's post about standardizing the QML compontents across KDE Plasma, Jolla Sailfish, BlackBerry 10 and Ubuntu is a good sign, but they still suffer from inconsistent device APIs and different packaging requirements. That's where Firefox OS has a theoretical edge: apps for it are just web pages with a manifest. The number of web developers (incuding "app" developers who just put a wrapper around an HTML app) is orders of magnitude more than QML developers.

Most likely this will come from the second tier Chinese manufacturers who would benefit most from a common reference standard.

They don't push for anything. They ship Android.

You are badly informed. The update to the N900 is the N9 (Wikipedia, price comparison). It has been available on the market for over a year now.

You will not get anything better than this from Nokia anymore as the development teams are sacked. There will be no more official software updates for the N9, but the fan community picks up the ball because the OS (MeeGo, a Debian derivative) is quite hackable. I have installed the whole GNU and Qt developer toolchains and can develop both live on the device and cross-compiling to ARM from my laptop. It's also easy to flash alternative OS like Mer.

Some ex-Nokia developers formed a new company, Jolla, and have demoed their first product just a couple of days ago.

And if the system itself is fairly modular AND the hardware is open then there should be no stopping you from replacing the closed bits. But that's a big if.

There's three parts to this puzzle here. Mer, which is the core distribution. Nemo UX, an open source UI for phones built on top of Mer. Lastly, there's the Sailfish UI, which is the proprietary, Nemo-compatible Jolla-look&feel UX.

It's currently possible to build Mer along with Nemo for N900/N950/N9 (along with several non-Nokia devices), but as far as I understand, the Nemo UI is not usable for the former device. The Mer wiki has quite a lot of relevant information on the topic.

It's just a gui for Mer, which you can fork already.

Based on Mer if it gives you a hint. Looks like it will be pretty open.

There are about three linux based distros for the openmoko, all with custom UI front ends.

Most "distros" that you see are exactly that; ways of experimenting with different UI, usability and system administration concepts. The guys that do them don't want to do much of the low level plumbing. Think of Linaro as being similar to Mer which is the underlying developer whilst Plasma Active and Nemo the consumer distros built on top of it.

In the case of Linaro, though, they are trying to support completely embedded customers. These users often don't end using a proper distro at all. For this reason Linaro is less building a distro that people build on top and more building examples of working systems people can copy from. Let's say you are an SOC or sensor vendor that wants to sell to Android vendors in future. Your first place to start would be cooperating (paying) Linaro to get it working. Once that's done, everybody can can see how it works and is confident that they can also get it working in their own build of Android. At the same time you get access to the massive embedded Linux market.

This is one of the ways in which modern community oriented FOSS software works a bit differently from proprietary software. You see all of these experiments and development versions out in the open where each of them would be hidden somewhere deep inside Microsoft's R&D. For the hardware company this is a great way to address all the different Linux distros via one place. For the Linaro guys this is great because they continue to get the latest hardware to develop on all the time and they don't need to stop working and integrate to other distros. For the developer this is a great opportunity to understand which hardware will be best supported in future. For the normal user the message is "don't worry be happy".

Poulsbo was a disaster even on Windows thanks to Imagination Technologies.

This type of continual ABI breakage is not seen in both the Mac and Windows worlds

They also aren't open source. That the kernel ABI doesn't remain constant is something that has held true for Linux since it was created.

Imagination Technologies is a company that, IME, is very hostile to open source as a whole. If you are foolish enough to license their core without also getting the driver sources so you can rebuild as you see fit, then you deserve the misery you incur. Nokia did this, with the licenses required that allowed things like this project to continue supporting multiple devices with a PowerVR GPU almost 3 years after release of the first.

Intel seems to be slowly learning that lesson as their SoC designs are trending towards an internally developed GPU rather than PowerVR.

In fact, it isn't even using MeeGo, but Mer, which spun off from MeeGo when it became obvious that Nokia was going to walk away and Intel was off to pursue other things.

Mer was originally a community version of Maemo. I used Mer on my N800 before the N900 was launched. The current Mer is a natural continuation of this project, even if they relaunched it in some sense.

No worries, I doubt there will be a product named MeeGo. In fact, it isn't even using MeeGo, but Mer, which spun off from MeeGo when it became obvious that Nokia was going to walk away and Intel was off to pursue other things.

Jolla will probably name it something else exclusive to them. All that matters is by going with Mer (or as they've been saying, MeeGo) you know one thing: Qt.

Nemo Mobile, part of Mer which also targets KDE (Plasma Active) and Hildon (Cordia)

http://wiki.merproject.org/ presents the Mer project as a "Core optimised for HTML5/QML/JS, providing a mobile-optimised base distribution for use by device manufacturers ... aims to share effort and code together with the Tizen project once Tizen tools and code are publicly available. ... We have some clear goals: ...To be inclusive of technologies (such as MeeGo/Tizen/Qt/EFL/HTML5)"

Sounds great. All these minor platforms share so many open source building blocks that isolating themselves based on a toolkit choice is silly.

Your strategy didn't move many units for Openmoko, Neo FreeRunner, N900, etc. Why will it start working now? The Vivaldi tablet running KDE Plasma Active is supposedly shipping soon, did you order one?

People's expectation for a phone/tablet have gone up. They expect a consistent touch UI which is only now starting to appear in Linux toolkits and will take a while to come to native Linux apps. They expect maps and navigation, calendar & contacts sync, device sync, an app store, which all require hefty investments in online infrastructure, or Google to provide it for your platform. It's daunting to compete, HP and Nokia decided they couldn't.

The only realistic hope of > 1% market share for "old-school" (not-Android) Linux on phones and tablets is if most apps are written in HTML5 as Tizen encourages. Then the platform matters less, and people can switch, the same way a desktop user surfing Facebook and Gmail plus doing some light document creation can switch to a Linux distro. Yet I mostly see old-school Linux users belittling HTML5 and insisting web apps will never happen. Fair enough; so long as enough developers are motivated to work on projects like Mer then users will be able to install Meego/Maemo/Plasma Active/Tizen on their phones and tablets, just like the few who install Linux on their desktops. But very very few will do so.

In my opinion it is Mer that is the successor to MeeGo. Not Tizen. Does Rizen evwen run on the ARM architecture?

you can't ... replace the kernel

Nokia specifically made provision for this, there is 'open mode', you can flash kernels onto the device, they need some patches to disable the security framework if you want to boot Harmattan (and you may lose some functionality that is protected by Aegis), and while you have a non-Nokia kernel running, you will see a nasty warning when you boot the phone.

But, you can easily install (multi-boot) other distributions.

Really, how do you think mer / Nemo and Nitdroid (Android 4.0.3) run on the N9 ? Since Nokia did things right with the N9 (upstreaming as much as possible), the Nitdroid team has almost full functionality available (calls, 3G, USSD, bluetooth, wifi etc.), where on the N900 years of work by the same team and they didn't manage to get calls or 3G working (though I think mer on the N900 does).

Mer is the Qt-based successor to Meego. Tizen is all HTML5 happy, without Qt.

But it had some nice things, and is also based on a Linux core. So, hopefully, there will be some cross-polination with Android.

Android is so insular I don't expect anything to make the leap. The webOS core was so close to a common Linux platform (sdl, glibc, etc.) that games transplanted relatively easily to Maemo. If anything, you could see some cross pollination with initiatives like Mer or Tizen, once Samsung and Intel get that off the ground.

$25K? Why? These aren't bizzare, incompatible platforms, it's a rather standard Linux platform that makes porting trivial.

Mer will probably shift to a Tizen-compatible base, plus Qt, before long.

What's key here is that they have fully open software running on real hardware. From here there's actually a chance of moving forward. Also they aren't tied to any particular manufacturer so they won't be killed by some management whim.

What's key here is that they have fully open software running on real hardware. From here there's actually a chance of moving forward. Also they aren't tied to any particular manufacturer so they won't be killed by some management whim.

The problem is that most of the uneducated masses don't care about privacy and don't see a need for it. So they go for the number of Apps or GHz when purchasing a new mobile device, without caring that this device is a fully functional computer with all sorts of sensors that is connected to some sort of network 24/7!

There were a few attempts at true Linux mobile devices, but even the last two devices with potential (the Nokia N900 in 2009 and N9 this year) only got a lukewarm reception mostly due to crappy marketing and not enough people promoting truly open platforms that let users know what their devices are actually doing in the background.

The N9 is still up for graps. There is even an independent project called Mer being worked at that aims to be fully open, based on Meego, feel free to join if you have some coding skills.

Read the other Android article published today and go for something open source instead. Maemo, Moblin, Meego, Tizen, Mer or just plain Debian.