Customization and no bloatware. I also love tinkering and finding problems to solve, so Arch was the distro I went with.

Has been. The store is still open. Though it’s not as popular as it used to be. People have learned how to get pirated content online.

The truth is, if it wasn’t for data collection, these phones would be more expensive than this. So yeah, they are cheap compared to their price if companies didn’t collect user data.

Big companies sell their expensive phones for cheap because they’ll get their money selling your data and showing you ads. A phone like this won’t get any money out of you other than the money you give when buying the phone. So it makes sense that it’s pricey.