The reason many of them failed is exactly what Purism is trying to break (the hardware layer) by mainlining their phone OS/kernel. Jolla is a userland built on top of libhybris built on top of android kernel. hybris introduces own HAL making it non-native linux (eg not exposed to /sys, no ioctl, etc). So it’s a bit problematic even rolling out sailfishos on real linux (eg vm) as it still needs HAL.
So while librem5 will also be single-soc phone (like jolla phone) it will use native linux api/abi which enables it to be used on any other generic kernel once SoC support is implemented.
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