The Pine Formula
I should start by notifying readers that is a slightly old post, initially written in reaction to first Fairphone, then Pine64 announcing their "true wireless headphones" in April. In spite of this draft staying on my laptop since then, the situation has not particularly changed.
Some days ago, I was sitting in a dark, neon-tinted, pleasingly nerdy computing club in Berlin, with several Linux hackers around me. Most of them either had a PinePhone or a PinePhone Pro, someone else had Librem 5s plugged into their laptop as they tested out new software. Most of them were developers of mobile Linux UIs, and what we all agreed on about the ecosystem was its general immaturity, none of us feeling it was complete enough to be advertised to the general world.
In this peculiar context, it was a long discussion on how the PinePhone appeared to many as just tangently open, but not per se "ethical", that encouraged me to polish the long draft, and finally publish this post. Because, in the end, it does not say anything too new.