Very sad news

[user641]

Thank you for the reminder, I'll have to use my Librem 5 under PureOS in order not to be forced to go back to Android and to avoid keeping an obsolete kernel.

Understandable, but I like the Pinephone's keyboard case. The closest match for the Librem 5 is the lapdock, which I haven't bought but it appears to be much bigger and heavier.

It's hard to imagine that no one will maintain the mobian project being debian with all the skilled people behind it and the pinephone a hardware many of those people have.

I'm a user, not a developer, so I don't pretend to understand all the complexity of patching the kernel. I'm looking for a tiny computer that runs as close to vanilla Debian as possible and can use mobile data. I don't know of any hardware makers besides Pine64 and Purism making phones where Linux is a first class citizen (although I believe Volla and Fairphone, to their credit, at least support running Ubuntu on top of the proprietary Android crap).

So you're right that there is little hardware to choose from and Debian has a strong developer community. From the post on the Mobian blog, my takeaway was to expect effort to start revolving around the Pinephone Pro in the near future.

For my use the original pinephone with 3GB of ram is a nice hardware, with the current pace of progress things are getting better with time. I would keep using it for years, plus I like the minimalist approach. If mobian drops support for the kernel in the future, I will use other distros, but mobian is my favorite.