> Why hasn't the kind of ferver that created Linux driven engineers to fix their phones? Is Android and iOS just good enough to keep us complacent and trapped forever?

I obviously can't speak for all "Linux driven engineers", but only about myself, as someone who's daily driven linux for a long time and who enjoys tinkering with computers.

I consider phones in the same category as a gaming console: a "single purpose" device.

I find they're not practical for much more than mindless scrolling and the occasional text (and even that's a pain, to the point I usually do it from my computer). I just hate staring at a tiny screen and obscuring half of it with my hand when I need to interact with it.

I'm all for geeking out on things, and love to tinker. But the phones are simply not attractive to me. I used to have Android phones with custom roms, but that was only because samsung had atrocious support for older devices. My current iphone is supported until it can't be used anymore and does everything I need.

Whenever I get the itch to tinker, I'll do it on a computer with a full keyboard and big screen.

> Is Android and iOS just good enough to keep us complacent and trapped forever?

I think they are, especially since us "linux driven engineers" are a tiny fraction of the market. Basically nobody but us cares about these things. Just like almost nobody wants a small phone, or thick phone. Even with regular computers, most people didn't tinker, they would just install a few programs, which would have been on an hypothetical app store anyway.