True enlightenment is realizing that variables don’t exist, it’s all just a sequence of bits in RAM that we assign meaning to as desired.

Ascension is realizing that bits don’t exist, it’s all just trapped electrons in transistors which we imagine to be bits.

Transcendence is realizing that transistors or code doesn’t exist, and it’s just some quarks and electrons attracted and repulsed by weird forces, vibrating and convulsing in a soup with entropy constantly rising until the heat death of the universe, of which we make futile attempts to make sense or purpose.

I’ve built and run Mobile NixOS on my OnePlus 6 (without modem, fingerprint or GPU accel support but meh) before it became officially supported (this was relatively easy, compared to most other vendors, but did require a bunch of hacking to get the Linux fork OnePlus provides to work with the Nix kernel compilation machinery and the NixOS userspace).

I have also implemented initial support for running NixOS proper on Librem 5, packaged/fixed some stuff 1 2 3 (and more which didn’t make it to nixpkgs) to make it semi-daily-usable with Plasma Mobile, and daily-used it for a couple of weeks and then on and off for a couple of months.

I know how mobile Linux works, from the bootloader to the kernel to the userspace to the DE to apps that run on it. I also have a cursory understanding of how Android works, enough to know that it’s not feasible to build “a base that replaces AOSP”, let alone make it work with vendor-provided driver blobs and proprietary Android apps (which is what you’re proposing?). What manufacturers actually do is take AOSP, patch it to fit their needs/work with their shitty drivers, and ship it on the device as a bunch of blobs because it’s Apache-licensed.

solid base

GNU+Linux

driver layer

Linux

and then UI layer.

Plasma mobile

The split is already there, the problem is that most Android phone manufacturers never publish the drivers (let alone make them open-source) and the only way to get anything but stock image running is to just rip parts out of the stock image, which significantly limits what you can put below it (i.e. Linux version) and on top of it (i.e Android Java gubbins). And you can’t “just replace AOSP”, as it’s a huge complicated thing (kind of by design) which allows vendors to tightly couple the drivers to the system image. The idea of all these “mobile Linux-es” is to get rid of AOSP entirely, replacing it with “desktop Linux userspace” (systemd, musl, D-BUS, NetworkManager, pipewire, upower, mpris, libnotify, Qt/GTK, Plasma/Gnome, etc etc etc). A DE is an integral part of this; you can’t build and run Nova launcher just with Wayland and Pipewire but without Dalvik and Android SDK/NDK, and remaking all of that from scratch would be an insanely hard undertaking.

To put it another way,

Get a good base that is removed from Google, THEN do this project.

This project is required if you want to make a “good base”, otherwise that “good base” would just be an empty TTY that you can’t interact with because there’s no on-screen keyboard; besides, that “base” is already there and has been for 20 years, what’s missing is the drivers.