I will always be salty about the fact that Android phones (or, really, devices in general) are so fucking weird with installing alternative OSes
because they aren’t UEFI or really anything that’s standard (so already, you can’t just plug in a flash drive or SD card with a bootable image and just… boot it) AND, even if you’re able to flash a custom image, it MUST be specifically made for the device (I’m aware that GSIs exist, but they seem limited to only Android OSes, no proper Linux, at least not without further fucking around with the device) so if you have a device from a relatively unknown brand, or if the name of its SoC manufacturer starts with “Media” and ends with “Tek”, you’re kinda fucked (or completely fucked if it’s the later case)
it’s just all so needlessly different and more difficult from how stuff is done on good ol’ PCs
it really pisses me off because phones are, for the most part, relatively powerful devices that consume very little power
but you can’t just plug in a storage device with a generic OS image, boot, and install because Big Phone said so
and like… these phone companies are advertising their “desktop” mode like
“yeah, this can replace your laptop!”
NO IT CAN’T. UNTIL IT RUNS A PROPER, CUSTOMIZABLE DESKTOP OS, IT CAN’T
anyways, rant’s over, have a nice day :3

@SweetCoffyy much of this is the SoC vendor's fault for not bothering to mainline their kernel patches and also the fact that there is no standard way to pass devicetrees to the kernel on ARM

that's why the phones intended to run mainline Linux like the PinePhone all have ancient SoCs like the Allwinner A64, because they have good mainline Linux support (which is ironic in that case since Allwinner is a serial GPL violator)

@SweetCoffyy I believe the per-device thingy is due to kernel modules not being generally bioavailable to the kernel by default like they are with Linux… because, for some reason, android/linux devices need closed source kernel drivers for cameras and stuff. XDA forums posts usually list missing features (having to do with that).

so, there’s maybe an explanation for this shit. I’m not sure why we don’t have any hardware manufacturers entering the phone space with good intentions… maybe snapdragon phone CPU’s are hard to source? maybe the man is in on it??