> It’s as easy as loading the distro onto an SD card, and then booting the phone. You don’t even have to flash anything to the internal eMMC in order to run it!
FWIW while the Librem 5 can't run the bootloader straight from the SD card, the kernel can use the rootfs from SD card just fine - I have multiple distros installed on SD card there this way.
The Librem 5 also supports booting via fastboot (uuu), which personally I find to be a more convenient option for emergency fallbacks than having to juggle with SD cards like you have to do on the PinePhone.
FYI - the reason why L5 doesn't boot straight from the SD card is that the SD card reader is on the USB interface behind a hub, because both SDIO interfaces available on i.MX8MQ are already taken (one by eMMC and other by WiFi).
Shame though, because among all the Pine devices I have (Pinebook Pro, Pinephone) I've gotten very used to booting from the SD card to swap things out.
Have you written / do you have any links to documentation for how to use fastboot?
FWIW while the Librem 5 can't run the bootloader straight from the SD card, the kernel can use the rootfs from SD card just fine - I have multiple distros installed on SD card there this way.
The Librem 5 also supports booting via fastboot (uuu), which personally I find to be a more convenient option for emergency fallbacks than having to juggle with SD cards like you have to do on the PinePhone.
FYI - the reason why L5 doesn't boot straight from the SD card is that the SD card reader is on the USB interface behind a hub, because both SDIO interfaces available on i.MX8MQ are already taken (one by eMMC and other by WiFi).