I grew up with my brother throwing used computer parts on my bed whenever he upgraded something, in case I wanted to reuse them. He also gave me a copy of Windows 98, and later XP that I reused every time I did a major hw upgrade. But one day the XP CD-rom was just too old, but I was too young to start working and had no money, and so Linux came into my life.

I’m no porting expert, but to me there seems like they pick mostly well documented phones that already has a history of being worked on by other tinkerers like Lineage, Mobian, PMOS. They also tend to be cheap ish to buy used or they come from a company with a good history with open bootloaders, like the Fairphones.

There are users of the FP5 in areas where VoLTE is required now, including the US (though not on all carriers, as I understand it). VoLTE is enabled on an experimental basis for several devices. There are a few quirks to iron out, but it’s coming!

The porting of devices is done by volunteers owning the devices and not being afraid to brick them, which leads to a pretty weird list of supported devices.