Rooting or flashing a modern phone is pain in the ass. Ideally the battery needs to be replaced with a 3.7V PSU (and BMS must be salvaged without cutting the battery accidentally). And for old phones it either old linux kernel, partially unsupported hardware or fork maintained by handful of hackers for free.

I guess laptops are way easier: more upgradeable and repairable, don't require unlocking mostly, battery can just be thrown away and it works with its native PSU. Just need to make sure power won't go out. And it is bulkier, though maybe less susceptible to overheating.

The main reason is that they are one of the few ARM computers sold with a pre-installed officially supported GNU/Linux distribution, at affordable prices.

Even with the prices increases that the PI has suffered, there no systems of vendors like Tuxedo, or System 76, at similar price point, with ARM support.

Well that's because for the Pi you have GPIO. If you just want to run homelabs or software only stuff, why not go for ITX motherboard with just in time components

Nice thing about RPI is gpio, that can be used to configure the rpi with jumpers. All you need is a script that checks gpio state on boot and run scripts depending on jumpers placement. So you can get desired services started, configs applied etc without even connecting to the rpi.

Because big tech decides what you are allowed to run on your phones

Recently did this with a few old Android phones I had lying around, now they are three k3s nodes added to my existing homelab, 24 cores and 30ish GB of RAM, battery limited to 80%, running vanilla debian apart from the custom kernel build

https://github.com/crazynucfan/phone-nodes

I recently used Termux on a 7 year old low-end android to run a WordPress site with sqlite db and a golang sse pubsub service at a conference, via cloudflare tunnel, with dozens of people connected and doing some realtime collaborative stuff. Worked perfectly.

It was vastly more powerful than the old RPi 3 that i have, and significantly easier to work with given the screen, keyboard, wifi etc...

This isnt new and has a major flaw. Phones are not made to be continously charged. You have to find or tinker your own solution to power it without battery which is more cumbersome than just getting off the shelf used hardware in the raspberry range.

Pis are too expensive. I just picked up a new Bosgame AMD 5300U 4/8 core 8 GB 256GB SATA SSD, 2.5 Gbx2 NICs, 2x SSD slots, for $199 on Amazon. Great OpenWRT/Proxmix/Mini-NAS. 8 watts idle.

Depending on what you are trying to do one of the biggest problems with repurposing old mobile stuff (including laptops) is that when they are repowered they need manual intervention to get back to business.

In other words if the power goes out you need to physically be there to get the device running your always on stuff.