> (correct me if I'm wrong) the only companies that offer bootloader unlocking is Google Pixels, Motorola, Nothing, and OnePlus
Pinephone and Librem 5 (my daily driver) do not have a locked bootloader in the first place. They are just little (GNU/)Linux computers.
The Librem 5 would be eliminated by the additional requirements of:
> "I want a CPU that isn't crap while being expensive"
> "I don't want to pay full flagship prices for sub flagship performance"
Adding my own experience: the battery life is also atrocious[0] and simply running a software update on a completely stock librem 5[1] managed to send it into an infinite boot loop that I was only able to recover from by flashing the factory image.
[0] Sitting on a shelf, with the screen off, not connected to cellular networks, not being used at all except to check the battery % periodically throughout the day: I got ~11 hours of battery life. My pixel 10 has been operating under the same conditions for 4 days and is still at 71% battery life (I'm intentionally draining it down to ~50% for long term storage while I wait for the bootloader to unlock in 2 years).
[1] The phone had been sitting on a shelf gathering dust for years. No software had been installed, no accounts had been set up, it had never actually been used as a phone. Could not get more "stock" than that.
> "I don't want to pay full flagship prices for sub flagship performance"
First, it is a flagship GNU/Linux phone. Second, https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/
> I got ~11 hours of battery life
Looks like you didn't enable the suspend. Later updates brought it to >20 hours.
> simply running a software update on a completely stock librem 5[1] managed to send it into an infinite boot loop that I was only able to recover from by flashing the factory image.
When was it? I never experienced this. It could be a problem in the first years though. Current PureOS Crimson is stable.
> Looks like you didn't enable the suspend
This was with the default settings after flashing Crimson (which I did to recover from the infinite boot loop), so if there is some active step that needs to be taken to enable suspend, then I had not done it.
> When was it?
This was within the past month. I see two possible reasons you didn't run into it:
1) You have been applying the updates as they come out, whereas I took a dusty phone that hadn't been turned on in years and ran the update.
2) You were already on crimson, so maybe they only broke byzantium (or whatever version it was on from years of sitting unused and then hitting update in the software center).
> This was with the default settings after flashing Crimson
This is strange. See this post concerning the battery life: https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-battery-life-improved-by-100/. Have you updated the modem firmware?
You are right, I have case 1). It is quite likely that Byzantium is (was) much less stable, as it required a lot of hacks and relied on a very old Debian version.
And Fairphone!