It doesn’t because you run out of security updates after 5 to 6 years. Which I hate. But nowadays switching to android alternatives is an option once a phone is no longer supported.
Or Apple which is surprisingly good in that department, my sister’s iphone 11 is still receiving updates.
Enshittification, they code poorly on purpose so people need to upgrade their hardware for ever increasingly bloated software. Linux doesn’t play those games.
Proprietary drivers and the lack of a hardware abstraction layer seem to be the main problems. The big, popular desktop environments on Linux have also grown pretty heavy, but there are plenty of alternatives.
As much as I detest Apple, they do work really well as work phones. My work phone is an iPhone 12. Outside of the somewhat degraded battery life because it’s 5 years old, it still works flawlessly.
That said, I haven’t updated it to iOS 26 yet, even though it’s available. My wife’s 16PM is running iOS 26 and she is not happy with the “upgrade”.
My last phone upgrade was in part because my previous phone didn’t have NFC, which is a significant technology nowadays. I wonder what’s going to motivate my next one, if it’s gonna be general performance, software support, or some hardware feature (like wifi… was it 7? That allocates a separate band for each device, so it doesn’t shit itself when you use more than 1 device in a large area).
They need to have a working spare parts program first. If your phone is busted you should have an option other than “overpay and wait a week for it to be shipped to the repair factory where it might be data wiped” or “hope the repair shop guy isn’t lying about original parts and is competent enough to install them/know if they are original”
A modern cell phone at this point has no reason not to work for decades.
Decades is a stretch
However it should work for 4-7 years
It doesn’t because you run out of security updates after 5 to 6 years. Which I hate. But nowadays switching to android alternatives is an option once a phone is no longer supported.
Or Apple which is surprisingly good in that department, my sister’s iphone 11 is still receiving updates.
I would install Lineage on day 1
It didn’t have to be this way. I can run modern Linux on 20+ year old PCs.
Enshittification, they code poorly on purpose so people need to upgrade their hardware for ever increasingly bloated software. Linux doesn’t play those games.
Proprietary drivers and the lack of a hardware abstraction layer seem to be the main problems. The big, popular desktop environments on Linux have also grown pretty heavy, but there are plenty of alternatives.
As much as I detest Apple, they do work really well as work phones. My work phone is an iPhone 12. Outside of the somewhat degraded battery life because it’s 5 years old, it still works flawlessly.
That said, I haven’t updated it to iOS 26 yet, even though it’s available. My wife’s 16PM is running iOS 26 and she is not happy with the “upgrade”.
My last phone upgrade was in part because my previous phone didn’t have NFC, which is a significant technology nowadays. I wonder what’s going to motivate my next one, if it’s gonna be general performance, software support, or some hardware feature (like wifi… was it 7? That allocates a separate band for each device, so it doesn’t shit itself when you use more than 1 device in a large area).
They need to have a working spare parts program first. If your phone is busted you should have an option other than “overpay and wait a week for it to be shipped to the repair factory where it might be data wiped” or “hope the repair shop guy isn’t lying about original parts and is competent enough to install them/know if they are original”