Hardware

or which device to get. This list is limited to devices reasonably well supported by a mainline kernel:

Smartphones

  • Purism Librem 5 (mass-market release "Evergreen") or Liberty Phone (US-manufactured Librem 5 with more RAM and storage), currently supported by PureOS [default], Mobian and postmarketOS)
  • Snapdragon 845 powered devices like the Shift 6mq, OnePlus 6(T) and Xiaomi Poco F1, supported by postmarketOS, Mobian and other projects,
  • Google Pixel 3a (see the postmarketOS wiki page for details, it should be in Mobian soon, too)
  • Generally everything in postmarketOS's Community Devices section. If you want to get a device for daily driving and able to last you a bit, make sure to get an AArch64 device with calls support and at least 4GB of RAM; read the support matrix and device wiki page carefully before committing to a device. If you prefer Debian, here's the list of suppored
  • PINE64 PinePhone (supported by a plethora of distributions), but future support in some projects is not a given, and issues due to old OpenGLES 2.0 only GPU will not become less common)
  • PINE64 PinePhone Pro (see PINE64 Wiki Software Releases; experimental, do your research before purchase),
  • Motorola Droid 4 (Maemo Leste and, to a lesser degree, postmarketOS).
  • Nokia N900 (shipped in 2009 with Maemo 5, supported by Maemo Leste and (to a lesser degree) postmarketOS),
  • and many more, see the "supported devices" pages of projects like postmarketOS (if you intend to purchase a device, limit your research to main and community devices), Mobian

Non-Mainline

For non-mainline see the following distribution/OS-specific pages that list supported devices:

Also, the FuriLabs FLX1 deserves a mention (see also FuriOS below).

See also: Wikipedia: List of open-source mobile phones, postmarketOS Community devices, Amos B. Batto's "Comparing Linux phones".

Tablets

Ultra Mobile Somethings

Software

Mobile Linux Distributions

The following list is mostly an adaptation of the Pine64 wiki PinePhone Software Releases page. images refers to PinePhone images in most cases. See also Wikipedia: Linux for mobile devices.

This list is sorted alphabetically.

Mobile optimized Linux Software Lists

Accessibility

As mobile Linux is still nascent, accessibility is quite limited. The following is a list of links that hopefully will help in evaluating how mobile Linux can fit your accessibility requirements:

History of Linux on PDAs and Smartphones

PDAs

  • 2000: Agenda VR3 PDA (Wikipedia)
  • 2001: GMate Yopy (Wikipedia),
  • 2002: Simputer (Wikipedia),
  • 2002: Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 (Wikipedia)
    • Sharp would continue to produce many more Linux powered PDAs till about 2005.
  • 2005: Nokia 770 Internet Tablet (Wikipedia)
    • Nokia would follow up with the N800 and N810 and then shift to a smaller form factor with the Nokia N900 smartphone.
  • In addition to the named devices and their followups there were ports of Linux to devices like Windows CE/Windows Mobile based devices, booting via haret, mainly by projects like linuxtogo.org and handhelds.org. Other victims of linuxification were Psion Revo PDA and later ARM based Palm PDA. See also The Linux Documentation Project and the memento of tuxmobil.org.

Smartphones

  • 2005: Motorola E680 running the Motorola EZX platform, limited availability to Asia. The later A780 model (Wikipedia) featuring GPS for navigation was released to Europe, too. The EZX phones, of which only the A910 (Wikipedia had WiFi, were target devices of the OpenEZX project (Wikipedia), which worked on adding mainline Linux support (at the time 2.6) to the EZX family of devices.
  • 2006: Trolltech Greenphone (Wikipedia), developer device
  • 2007: OpenMoko/FIC Neo 1973 (openmoko.org): The first smartphone hardware made specifically with the intention to run FOSS GNU/Linux software.
  • 2008: OpenMoko FreeRunner (openmoko.org): Iterative improvement on the Neo 1973, sold in larger quantities. The not that fast ARMv4 processor was not the main problem, as the added graphics accelerator turned out to be a graphics decelerator as it could not handle the 480x640 pixels of the 2.6" display.
  • 2008: HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1 (Wikipedia): first commercial Android smartphone)
  • 2009: Nokia N900 (Wikipedia): Nokia's first Linux smartphone running Maemo 5 (Debian based with a GTK2 interface).
  • 2011: Golden Delicious/Open Phoenux GTA 04 (openphoenux.org): An attempt to equip the old OpenMoko hardware with newer, TI OMAP3 based boards.
  • 2011: Nokia N9 (Wikipedia) is being launched using "Meego", which is really Maemo 6 "Harmattan". It uses a Qt 4 based GUI instead of the GTK2 based user interface of the N900.
  • 2013: Neo900, a project to re-power the Nokia N900 with more RAM, a slightly faster chip and LTE connectivity gets announced. Their latest blog post from March 1st, 2018 thanks PIA for support supposedly helping the project to continue.
  • 2017: Purism start a crowdfunder for their Librem 5 smartphone, with an estimated ship date of January 1st. The hardware specs weren't finalized at this point, evaluation boards have the Freescale/NXP i.MX6 chip.