Firstly please use a valid email address.
Whether Tow Boot or uboot is on the SPI flash isn't really
relevant to distros. The point is that distros shouldn't have to worry about shipping
uboot, just like Fedora doesn't ship UEFI firmware for x86-64. Tow Boot has some UX
advantages for mobile devices that may or may not be wanted in upstream uboot. Please read
Samuel's blog post if you haven't already:
https://samuel.dionne-riel.com/blog/2021/05/10/unveiling-tow-boot.html
We don't ship UEFI firmware for x86 devices but those vendors actively
support there devices and firmware in the case of Pine64 they don't
and I'd prefer to have something that I can verify rather than random
stuff thrown at a wall from someone else. In 12+ years of working on
Fedora arm its a lot less stress, but if Pine64 shipped their firmware
that was signed and verifyable to LVFS and I could verify the
signature etc and updatable with fwupd using UEFI capsule updates
which is what we're working on with a number of vendors I would not
build those firmwares in Fedora at all. We have a number of vendors
where it's just like x86 already.
Regarding imagefactory and oz, it looks like those are for cloud
images? I'm confused what that has to do with mobile phones. I'm talking about the
Workstation/Plasma/XFCE images on
https://alt.fedoraproject.org/alt/
They're not just for cloud images, they are a means of generating a
image whether it be virtual or real hardware. All the images you
reference are generated with ImageFactory. Believe me I set it up.
As for encryption, we could encrypt the filesystem in a loopback
image or with Tow Boot's USB Mass Storage mode if Plymouth could show an on screen
keyboard to decrypt it.
We will have solved this problem with ImageBuilder very shortly. Watch
F-37 features for IoT Edition as that will be the first adopter of
that, as for OSK for plymouth, someone will need to do that work.