Well, just so that you don't throw the baby with the bathwater...
Pinephone [0] is a platform designed by pine64 together with the community. A community that is very FLOSS-centric.
That phone has a few pieces of proprietary firmware, that's true[1] (mostly for the RF parts). But besides that, you can pretty much do anything you want with it, even write your own bootloader[2].
By default, the bootloader will try to boot from the SD card over the EMMC, so you can just slap an arbitrary system image on an SSD card to distro-hop. That's right, there are multiple distributions available: Ubuntu touch, which is indeed built like you say, but you should also have root access OOTB, and AFAIK can change every piece of the system (OTA source, system image, build your own). But also a few others like Maemo Leste (a meego spiritual successor, I think), SailfishOS, android[3], or even plain Linux distributions: PostmarketOS [4] is an Alpine-based distribution tailored to phones, but you can also run Manjaro, Arch Linux, Fedora, Nix, and port your own.
The Lima open source graphics driver for Mali GPUs works quite well, so that helps a lot compared to other "open" phones.
A similar phone is the Purism Librem 5, that goes further with the de-blobing effort, though the price point is quite different.
Pinephone [0] is a platform designed by pine64 together with the community. A community that is very FLOSS-centric.
That phone has a few pieces of proprietary firmware, that's true[1] (mostly for the RF parts). But besides that, you can pretty much do anything you want with it, even write your own bootloader[2].
By default, the bootloader will try to boot from the SD card over the EMMC, so you can just slap an arbitrary system image on an SSD card to distro-hop. That's right, there are multiple distributions available: Ubuntu touch, which is indeed built like you say, but you should also have root access OOTB, and AFAIK can change every piece of the system (OTA source, system image, build your own). But also a few others like Maemo Leste (a meego spiritual successor, I think), SailfishOS, android[3], or even plain Linux distributions: PostmarketOS [4] is an Alpine-based distribution tailored to phones, but you can also run Manjaro, Arch Linux, Fedora, Nix, and port your own.
The Lima open source graphics driver for Mali GPUs works quite well, so that helps a lot compared to other "open" phones.
A similar phone is the Purism Librem 5, that goes further with the de-blobing effort, though the price point is quite different.
[0]: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone
[1]: https://www.pine64.org/2020/01/24/setting-the-record-straigh...
[2]: https://megous.com/git/p-boot/about/
[3]: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=10613
[4]: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/PINE64_PinePhone_(pine64-...