If you want good software you simply have to pay more. These are small teams with no prior experience trying to do something huge, it makes sense to expect to pay even 5 times more if the direction of the project is good. Hopefully future versions will be cheaper as they learn and gain experience.
That was my motivation as well when I prepurchased the phone. Even though you might not get a $600 phone, Purism and the entire Linux community gain a lot of experience about the difficulties of designing hand-held hardware, applications and operating systems.
In my opinion their progress has been fantastic, and I am quite excited for the future of Linux smartphones.
So I checked, and there are no "official" current LineageOS builds for any Nokia phones (unless I'm missing something on https://download.lineageos.org)
There don't seem to be any builds anywhere for the 4.1 (is it an uncommon phone?)
For argument's sake, let's say you bought the 6.1, now your option is to download an "unofficial" ROM from some pseudo-anonymous person with an anime avatar from XDA, hosted on whatever free file hosting they can find today.
Don't get me wrong, I used Lineage when it was called Cyanogenmod, and it saved one phone from landfill which is great. But I'm older now, and I need my phone to work and work well - I really don't have time for problems like https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?s=76595163ac85.... For some people, that's worth the money.
Similarly, I've pretty much given up on LineageOS ever getting the Nexus 5X to the 16.0 version. Their list of supported phones looks decent, but when you realize they can't keep even those phones up to date the project starts to look like a failure.
I'm hoping to find an alternative for friends and family who still have the 5X - it's been dropped from Google's security updates for a while, because their support ends abysmally quickly.
You hit the 5X jackpot - up to a certain manufacturing date, those phones were notorious for bootlooping and never working again.
More on topic, the LineageOS support requires a volunteer maintaining a buildable tree for the phone, and testing will require the hardware itself. I'm not sure how much CI/CD helps here.
You're right: of the four 5X phones owned by close friends or family, only 1 bootlooped (and one was stolen). It would be great to have continued support for the remaining phones, but planned obsolescence is too strong.
The Nexus 5X supposedly has a maintainer with LineageOS, but maybe they're busy or no longer own the phone.
Unfortunately, I believe the supported phone is the Nexus 5. The 5X is not a different version of the 5, it's the next generation of the smallest Nexus phone line, since the "6" was already taken. The numbering went Nexus 4, 5, 5X.
Yes, who complain that the software might not be that great, but who also want freedom, your option would be to buy without expectations as a way of donating to the project or to simply donate money directly to the project.
That's the great thing about open source! People form groups and spend their own time/resources to build what they want instead of waiting around for the corporate big brother to build it.
You're correct, it's not a donation. However Purism right now is important in a way Comcast is not. Their work on the software side is making the GNU/Linux phone a reality and it will help both vendors and makers a like in the future. Supporting the company is indirectly supporting the GNU/Linux phone ecosystem and may be one of the best things to throw your money at right now to push development forward.
On the Comcast side, they can get fucked. My whole city pays them a crazy high fee for internet and more a month with very little improvements being made in infrastructure. Sure they now a have a remote with voice commands, but I and most people I know are almost never near the advertised speeds. At least the latency is good.
B corps are allowed to prioritize specific values enumerated in their corporate charter, even at the expense financial gains. Regular corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, which in recent decades has been interpreted as requiring companies to maximize short-term shareholder value
There is no fiduciary requirement to put profits above all else. In fact there is no fiduciary duty to make profits, just basically to do what's best for the company. There is no short term time frame listed. If there is a requirement to make profits it's not because it's a responsibility. Shareholders may want it but no one gets punished if a bad decision for the long term success of the company doesn't pan out. There's numberous examples of CEOs that attempted to pivot when it wasn't the most profitable course of events and then receiving a nice severance more than most employees make in a lifetime of work for failing.
It's almost as if the more and more you compensate your c-suite execs with your own shares, the more you would expect to see them chasing short-term profits regardless of the degradation of firm longevity...
Knowing what to measure against is harder the higher you go up the corporate ladder.
Incentives get skewed towards short term employees and short term rewards. Companies treating their employees as resources has only hurt loyalty. No one starts at a company in the US anymore unless they're average or below workers. The whole idea of companies not being willing to pay existing employees what they would pay a new hire is stupid too. You're willing to pay more for someone you're going to have to train and is a literal risk, versus a known commodity with known output. Generally you pay more for stability on the market not less.
