> Or maybe Linux is becoming, more than ever, a convenient brand to put on any piece of technology that aims at being secure, or simply at escaping the norm, rather than something companies should not only adopt and modify for profit, but also contribute to.<p>This might be true of Purism, but for XOR stuff, I don’t think Linux has anything to do with it except that it is there. Recall that XOR's lineage traces back to Vertu, a onetime Nokia subsidiary that used to sell $50,000 Symbian phones (and later equally overpriced and outdated Android phones) that then went through an assortment of owners and ultimately went bankrupt after a bunch of fraud [1]. To me, it seems much more likely XOR is just trying to continue the grift of selling “luxury” to sheikhs or other people with endless amounts of money, but without having to either deal with the Google licensing requirements for Android or the hassle of doing AOSP. Linux is what XOR uses because that’s what is available, but it isn’t part of the branding or the identity of the phone.<p>As for Purism, aside from price, I wouldn’t call a phone that doesn’t support MMS or group SMS messages and is running hardware that was obsolete in 2019 when the specs were finalized, let alone now, “luxury.” Purism is certainly going after a very specific audience of users willing to pay extraordinary amounts of money for alpha-quality hardware/software (this isn’t a slight at the difficulty of what Purism is trying to achieve, but facts are facts), not to mention waiting months/years to get their devices to begin with, but I don’t know if that is luxury as much as it is incredibly, incredibly niche. That said, Purism certainly leans hard into the Linux branding, even if it isn’t able to deliver what it is promising.<p>My personal favorite “luxury” Linux phone (although it was Android-based) was the Blackphone, the super expensive, “super secure” phone that turned out to not be so secure after all [2]. Or maybe the not Linux but QNX-based Porsche Design BlackBerry P'9982, which was a $2400 BlackBerry 10 phone that was identical to regular Z10 in specs, but had a better chassis and a nice leather pouch (certainly worth the 4x premium, right?) [3].<p>[1]: <a href="https://gizmodo.com/ridiculous-rich-person-phone-brand-vertu-somehow-contin-1793227868" rel="nofollow">https://gizmodo.com/ridiculous-rich-person-phone-brand-vertu...</a>
[2]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackphone" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackphone</a>
[3]: <a href="https://www.engadget.com/2013-11-19-blackberry-porsche-p9982-hands-on.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.engadget.com/2013-11-19-blackberry-porsche-p9982...</a>