I have a Pine phone that I bought some time ago.
I tried a couple of distros/environments:
- Mobian
- Manjaro + Plasma Mobile
- Manjaro + Phosh
My experience: As a basic phone, it mostly works. Everything else is pretty bad. The Pine phone is underpowered, the environments are not very well optimised and polished, basic browsing was almost unusable, things didn’t work properly, I had to use the CLI to get around UI issues (which is very sucky on a phone), etc. Battery life is bad, the camera is a joke (if it works), the screen has dead pixels after less than a year, it’s not a great picture.
I fully support what Pine phone is trying to do, in fact I bought 2 of them and I don’t regret buying them, but know what you are getting into. It’s nowhere near ready for mass adoption. If you’re a hobbyist then it’s a fun toy to play around with.
Purism is more expensive/better hardware and uses the Phosh graphical shell. I haven’t tried it but I imagine the experience is a lot more polished. You could probably use that as a daily driver if you were happy to give up most of the apps / quality of life stuff your spyware phone currently does for you.
If you’re not, then going the degoogled route is probably your best choice.
I have a Lenovo ThinkPad T430 that is by now almost 10 years old, it runs perfectly on Linux and is a fantastic choice even today. It’s built like a tank and that Intel i5 powering it is immortal. DDR3 RAM is dirt cheap now and it takes up to 16Gb, you can swap its HDD to a SATA SSD (if not done already) and batteries for it are still cheap and plentiful.
If you’re looking for something affordable for software dev, I can’t think of a better choice for $200-$300
https://www.lenovo.com/lt/lt/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t430/
They really built this one right, they don’t make them like this anymore.