Don’t say, hey android has Linux in it, yeah no, idc, I want to know how far we are from buying a Linux phone at a price point of 200 USD.
A Linux phone is one which is built completely on Linux, uses Linux apps and most important has a terminal.
I don’t want a Linux Phone for privacy, although that’s a great reason, but I want it for the freedom it provides me. Hell, I don’t care if Android itself comes with a terminal and has similar features to Linux, I just want a Terminal which can install apps, where I can write commands and it will execute it. Complete Control on my phone and how it behaves is what I want.
I want to tell it when to sleep, when not to sleep, when to boot, when to edit a file and how, when to take a screenshot and what to do with it and where to save it, etc, etc. I hope you get the idea.
If you want just an user-land mostly-compatible system, that’s pretty much it.
You can use Termux which proots if you don’t have root.
If you have root, you can use something like Linuxdeploy (which is seriously outdated, but if you know what you do, you can update the Linux installation in there). This gives you a chroot-based Linux with shell and GUI over VNC and root. It’s able to play almost everything you want.
On my installation (Ubuntu 22.04 with XFCE) I even got FEX to work, which allows me to run x86/x64 Linux programs. Then I installed x64 Wine and now I can run Windows x64 apps on my phone.