Comment by amiga-workbench
9 days ago
I feel like taking the approach of ramming the entire current desktop userspace into a phone is a misguided one. I can fully see now why Android reinvented the wheel across the board.
If I were to do a Linux Phone platform, I'd be targeting feature phone levels of functionality to begin with, with a focus on battery life and actually working telephony. I'd be aggressively throwing Wayland/GTK and all that nonsense in the bin just to get something basic working well. Draw straight to the framebuffer if you have to. This doesn't help with the app problem, but it sets a tide mark for quality & performance, and it can be iterated on.
With not-quite current hardware as supported by Pocketblue, performance is not that much of an issue, despite the OnePlus 6 being introduced in 2018. GNOME Shell mobile is quite smooth on it.
That said, if you want to start without the entire Linux desktop stack, you can, and there's even a project that already does something like that IIUC: https://sr.ht/~mil/framebufferphone/