"Real Linux on a phone" sounds to me like the worst user experience imaginable. And the whole thing about "no phoning home" should be interpreted as "we have no idea whether the latest release is crashing in the wild or not".
You probably never used Maemo, whose UI (and also Palm's WebOS UI) were ripped off for later versions of Android and iOS, which wasn't even multitasking yet. Literally hired the same people to do them. Jolla started with the FOSS parts of Maemo but went proprietary.
If Nokia hadn't been intentionally destroyed by its board in a romance with Microsoft cash, through a Canadian snake, Maemo would have been a real contender. You can get an vague idea what it looked like from here: https://maemo-leste.github.io/
Also, I don't know what's motivating you to just make negative shit up from whole cloth. Where did Linux touch you?
You probably never used Maemo, whose UI (and also Palm's WebOS UI) were ripped off for later versions of Android and iOS, which wasn't even multitasking yet. Literally hired the same people to do them. Jolla started with the FOSS parts of Maemo but went proprietary.
If Nokia hadn't been intentionally destroyed by its board in a romance with Microsoft cash, through a Canadian snake, Maemo would have been a real contender. You can get an vague idea what it looked like from here: https://maemo-leste.github.io/
Also, I don't know what's motivating you to just make negative shit up from whole cloth. Where did Linux touch you?