You say “go back” but that was never more than a niche thing. For better or worse, Google’s Android has pretty much always been the chief representative of mobile Linux. And far from being a waste of time, Android is the most widely distributed mobile operating system on the planet.

> You say “go back” but that was never more than a niche thing.

but you could walk to a phone shop and buy a Linux phone, for example FirefoxOS.

Firefox OS lived a short and obscure life years after Android entered the market and certainly wasn’t a GNU or Debian-like distribution of Linux.

Yeah, and there was also Maemo/Meego that was also sold on stores. Neither had a very high market share.

Here you go: https://mobian-project.org/

postmarketOS is based on Alpine Linux: https://postmarketos.org/

Still there is yet to be a device that is completely supported, see the following section which is currently empty:

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices#Main

Interesting. I know the Librem 5 is usable as a day to day phone (I have been using it as such for 3.5 years), and a few phones used to be in that catagory. I guess they changed how they consider main vs community.

> just go back to having some sort of Debian-based GNU/Linux on a smartphone

Two years of full time engineering man hours

> Just create a really great mobile interface on top of that.

Probably another 3 years of full time engineering man hours

It was never a thing since OpenMoko, with exception of Nokia's N9.

There's still Sailfish OS... which is not open-source.