Nice review. I agree with others here that this phone is borderline scam for the price and with all the delays people had in receiving them. Performance seems on par with the $200 original PinePhone which I had a similar experience with.
The one good thing that came out of Purism/Librem 5 is Phosh. It's a pretty good phone shell/UI for other more capable Linux phones to use. I particularly like Phosh for its on-screen keyboard Squeekboard which allows for custom keymaps.
I mean, it's not the OS, its the hardware support that's needed. A Linux phone just has to support the hardware of the phone, and then it can run waydroid to run apps from android ecosystem, until the Linux app ecosystem catches up. Hard part is all the hardware is proprietary with no help from manufactures on drivers and firmware, so people have to reverse engineer everything which takes an incredible amount of skill, and time. Hence why we don't have a viable alternative to iOS and Android yet.
All manufacturers who follow US law do, it's part of the GPL license. The problem is that the code is all made for some really old version of Linux, either 2.4 or 4.x, which isn't compatible with mainline.
