I currently use Leste on my N900 where it barely works. The hardware is very ancient by moderns standards and the basic kernel+services+X11 already swallows most of the 256MB ram.

The Droid 4 has 4 times as much CPU power and 4 times as much RAM and a slightly faster µSD interface. The system should be blazing fast on there. I just freed mine from old data and will try Leste in the next days. Will report back to you :)

Of course you will likely need a modern mobile phone as hotspot because 3G is shut down in most countries and 2G speeds are something else.

I think you can also expect a blog post from the Leste folks in the next week or so about their progress in the last year. E.g. the migration to Devuan Excalibur (~Debian Trixie). I am constantly astonished what the small group manages to do, as I am with @TheMightyCat and his progress on the Fairphone.

Thank you, I know, although I haven’t tried it yet.

Maemo leste offers several advantages over postmarket OS on the device as of now: (According to the postmaket OS wiki) Hardware works out of the box: Calls work, there is a dial UI. The UI is quite polished and was designed with the N900 in mind, middle and right click are only needed, when you install other Linux applications. You have interfaces to control the clock, for sending and receiving SMS, for GPRS, display brightness and a range of old maemo Apps compiled for leste.

Postmarket OS is a great all around effort, but Leste continues the legacy of the old Maemo OS and is very well suited for keyboard phones.

This is incredible work! Thank you so much for your contribution to open source!

When you are finished with your work, may I point you to Maemo Leste? They are working on bringing mainline Linux to old keyboard phones (and others) e.g. the Nokia N900 and the Motorola Droid 4. They have gotten quite far for the small team they are and upstreamed many patches, but are struggling with some remaining hardware components in the phones.

For the N900 - Bluetooth and the camera as well as the lowest power state do not work. Several parts can be improved. For the Droid 4 - GPS, Cameras and there is still a close source 3D acceleration in use.

If you have time to share even a bit of your experience and skills I am sure the people there would greatly appreciate it. You can contact them via the Mailing List or better via IRC #maemo-leste @ libera.chat.

Of course this is not as prestigious and does not help as many people as your efforts with the Fairphone so I fully understand and am happy that you placed your efforts there. But to some people unlocking the last few steps to support these old phones fully would mean the world, because nothing modern is comparable to the hardware (size and HW-Keyboard wise). Also of course because of nostalgia, as the N900 was the first fully usable Linux based phone.

I would be happy to send a donation your way for any major contribution. Just ping me here in case I miss it.

Yes thats pretty much the closest you can get to fully open source today. I have a number of devices I use:

• A Pixel 5 with Graphene because the modern world relies to much on Android Apps, also used as hotspot,
• A Nokia N9 for reading and light browsing, occasional navigation
• A Nokia N900 with Maemo Leste for secure administrative work.

We also have Sailfish devices in the house

In that case hardware wise you are out of options. With the Librem 5 you get the closest. There you only have the CPU Microcode, Wifi and Bluetooth firmware, and the cellular modem & GNSS firmware.

Software wise you have quite a few options, albeit few are usable as daily drivers.

• Android drops out because it requires hardware with proprietary HAL. You would have to rewrite huge parts of the OS so that it runs without them.
• Postmarket OS is your best bet for a somewhat usable experience
• Many open source systems run, but calls are difficult to setup and partly unreliable.
• Pure OS should fit your goal best, Mobian second.

With a Droid 4 and Maemo Leste you can also get quite close but have no camera.

But you can. Its Linux+GNU with a partially open, partially closed source UI. So you can run tracing utilities and other tools even wireshark!) to check that it values your privacy. That statement that it is a fully closed OS from the OP is wrong.

So does Graphene.

Both ship: Firmware, the HAL components (which are way more critical in my eyes as they have low level hardware access and could hide anything from the OS) Example for these are: The Camera Stack, the Audio Stack, under Graphene the Widevine DRM components.

Sailfish can run without these, e.g. on the Pinephone. Graphene OS can’t Graphene additionally comes with an eSIM binary, which is disabled by default Sailfish comes with proprietary UI components, a choice the company made because of their limited manpower as it allowed them to provide features where currently no open source solution exists or existed at the time of implementation) examples are swipe gestures for the keyboard, MS Exchange support, Android App support. That not great, but far from a closed source system where everything is closed source. There exist many patches for UI components because they are partly open source.

The OS ist still Linux, that is true. It is even LInux+GNU which Android is not. It is Linux with closed source components, thats true too.

No, not at all. Just check the things claimed by @pewpew quickly with a search engine or an AI of your choice (Always check the sources it finds!) and you will see that the overwhleming majority is wrong and the rest is blown way out of proportion. See also my answer to his retort below.

It may be a private phone, but you don’t really know whats going on under those proprietary blobs.

Yes thats not good, but also a problem of many common Linux distributions. If you have any linux-firmware-* packages installed on your system, they also contain similar binary blobs for the firmware. E.g. Intel or Qualcom wireless cards. But you can utilize all tools up to strace under Sailfish OS, to see what those drivers are accessing and check that they don’t do anything bad. Under Graphene OS, you can not do this. (But its resonable to trust the very privacy focused developer that they have checked and tested this and isolated them as far as possible on the OS level)

Sailfish OS is the definition of proprietary software. You need to buy a subscription if you even want to install it on third party devices.

Again this is not correct. If what you claim is true, how comes that the OS is available on all these devices?. Sailfish OS is open Source at its core and easily ported to new devices. What you can do is pay for the licensed content on official devices. That enables automatic updates and proprietary software as the MS Exchange support and the Android App Support. Though for the later you can also install Waydroid because, you know, its Linux! Paying Jolla however gives access to a more comfortable solution and support development of the platform.

It’s like Windows

Um… no. Can you port Windows to a new device? No, its source is closed. Does Microsoft support people hacking their OS? No, Jolla has community meetings for that. Do you have full Access udner Windows? No. Does Sailfish send your data to a third party? No. Does Sailfish show you adds? No, Does it force you to use AI? No and so on and so forth.

Please don’t hate on the one European company trying to do things right. Support them in making things better.

Uh even this short stab is quite wrong. Here notes from Jolla itself for Sailfish OS 5.2

• As promised, users can unlock the Jolla Phone bootloader. A corresponding menu item can now be found at the System Settings / Developer tools
• Users can do factory reset from the System Settings
• Users can enter the recovery mode with the volume up key + power key combination
• Flashable images and fastboot will be provided (coming soon)
• The initial version of the Privacy Switch was implemented. The function is end user configurable and to start with, the users can control e.g. Bluetooth, WLAN, Location and AppSupport status with the switch. Further implementations are coming and the framework is available for community contributions.

The base of Sailfish OS is a full blown Linux, way more open than Android (more options for the user, less secure than Graphene, which has that as main goal) you can easily install/compile Linux software on it.

Close source components are used. Parts of the UI (Jolla is open sourcing more and more), libhybris to run closed source Android drivers, Android App Support.

So yes its not as open source as debian, but offers more freedom to modify the OS than Graphene and gives you near full control.