Buy one of these phones because you
- Want a 'free' phone to exist in the future
- Want an open source phone to exist in the future
- Want a secure phone to exist in the future
It may not be up to your standards now, but without your support (money) it will never exist.
If you have the money to spend, then spend it. Consider it a donation to the cause.
Disclaimer: Views expressed are my own and do not have anything to do with my employer.
Part of the backlash against purism is that they market themselves as a fully libre platform when they are not. Many viewed that as trying to cash in on the desire for a truly libre laptop.
From their website
> Purism’s Librem products are the only modern high-end devices where you are in control and have complete visibility into the operating system, all bundled software, and the deeper levels of your computer.
Emphases added. This is false, or at best misleading. You don't have complete visibility into the Intel Management Engine. Only after their initial release have they managed to strip the ME down to a fraction of its original size, but its still there doing who knows what.
Purism started during a time when concerns behind management engines were gaining a lot of traction. They capitalized on those fears by marketing a laptop with "complete visibility" without actually delivering on that.
They are a step in the right direction, but they don't market themselves as that. It makes things harder for people like Raptor Computer Systems who actually deliver "completely visible" machines as from the marketing its easy to assume that their products are equally free/libre, so why pay extra for the Raptor products?
> If you have the money to spend, then spend it. Consider it a donation to the cause.
If you have money to spend, spend it on a Raptor machine that is _actually_ completely visible, or donate it to a reverse engineer working on libre drivers, or a hardware engineer working on libre designs.
Windows Phones and countless other smartphone environments floundered over the years even though they were backed by behemoths. What chances does Purism have?
So while I have absolutely no hostility towards the project I just don't think it's worth donating money to what I consider to be a lost cause. I'd rather donate money to other Open Source projects who I think will make better use of it.
I would be very glad to be proven wrong however, the current smartphone ecosystem is an absolute nightmare if you value privacy and having control on your hardware. If it turns out that the Librem 5 is not dead on arrival like I presume it will be (assuming that it even manages to arrive in the first place) I'll definitely consider buying one.
I doubt the Purism folks are unaware of this, but I think this running a standard GNU/Linux stack as opposed to what Ubuntu Touch/Firefox OS were doing, gives it at least a shot.
I'm sure Microsoft would've no problem making profitable phones, but if their goal is to obtain as many users as possible, as fast as possible, by spending millions upon millions on marketing and other endeavors then it becomes a lot more difficult.
I like the project with some minor reservations, but there is not much to discuss at this point. I'm not gonna cheerlead. My biggest regret is price and size. I'm waiting for more information on Necuno Mobile [0] as I believe it will be in my price range, however with worse hardware. But they both can share software and that's great.
As for Purism I will wait for when it's cheaper or I will have more money to spend. I would buy one if it would be in a notebook or netbook form though. That's also what I'm hoping for - an iMX8M laptop.
I've got an Acer R11 which I put GalliumOS on (definitely use 2.1 / 2.2, 3.0 has issues). If you really want ARM, there are options there, though I'm not sure about regular Linux support on those.
The R11 is small and handy, with a decent keyboard. Battery life isn't quite as good as with ChromeOS, but still sufficient.
8M is really weak. That would be pretty much a Pinebook with Vivante graphics.
The i.MX 8 QuadMax at least has two A72 cores, similar to Rockchip RK3399.
Also donating some time and money to postmarketOS and ubports(the community continuation of the ubuntu phone) because I really want any or all of these to be successful.
Sorry it's not very portable, beyond whatever subnotebook sized x86-64 system you can run it on. Where your phone calls meet ss7 and the pstn is still going to be totally closed source and opaque to you.
I ask because I wanted to buy a Firefox OS phone and it was impossible. There were preorders and non-official compatible terminals, but the official, all hardware working, reasonably featured ones were impossible to get.
Apparently the phone is due in Q2 2019, though I find that unlikely.
I do have one of their laptops. I paid and got it a week later, so they have shipped things.
It most likely will never make it to production. At this point in time, if the creators were being honest, they would either have announced an OEM sign up, or have announced that it has already been delayed beyond Spring 2019.
As much as I like donations to causes, donations to doomed causes who aren't honest about the probability they'll ever come close to a reality are useless.
They advertise lifetime updates for a product they don't even have a supply chain lined up? Really? And the money spent will serve to (according to them) support the development process? So who will actually pay for the phones ordered?
Wishful thinking is nice, but it is nothing beyond wishful.
in this case however, they do sell laptops. so, they aren’t completely incapable of supply chain.
depending on if the laptop is really an in-house design, or not, they may be certainly going from a very basic to an extremely sophisticated supply chain.
or it could be that it’s not an in-house design fully and someone else is doing the supply chain and general design of the hardware.
the date is extremely optimistic or the handset hardware is much farther along than is obvious from the content on the site.
having said that i am a backer and can’t wait. vote with your dollar i suppose.
I put money down more than a year ago. They didn't meet their MoQ, and so offered refunds or applying it to another product. I chose a refund almost two months ago, and I still have not received it despite many follow ups and shifting deadlines.
I'm concerned that Purism may be having cash flow issues?
The price rise, while making sense, also says to me that they're trying to gain access to more funds now rather than in the future.
Great that there is a company that wants to do this. Not great that they have 0 transparency around refunds and supplychain.
In my mind, securing users in 2018 means to have a decent password manager with an up-to-date browser, make sure that apps are sandboxed and prohibit the browser from accessing all my user's files. Do they tackle this?
I think it looks like an interesting project and will buy one. I especially like the hardware kill switches.
>Here are some benefits and key differentiators of the Librem 5, the world’s first ever IP-native mobile handset and the only user-respecting mobile phone product offering on the market:
- Privacy protection by default, instead your profile and data being products sold to the highest bidder.
- Does not use Android or iOS. The Librem 5 comes with the mobile version of our FSF-endorsed operating system PureOS by default, and is expected to be able to run most GNU+Linux distributions.
- CPU separate from baseband, isolating the blackbox that the modem may represent and allowing us to seek hardware certification of the main board by the Free Software Foundation.
- Hardware Kill Switches for camera, microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and baseband.
- End-to-end encrypted decentralized communications via Matrix over the Internet.
-We also intend the Librem 5 to integrate with the Librem Key security token in the future.
Also see here: https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-5-final-decision-about-kill-...
I acknowledge the efforts in hardware integration they do. I'd love to see the Linux desktop being upgraded to Android's standards.
Went through the website and many forums but haven't found any definitive.
For commandline applications all you need is to develop for GNU/Linux. It should work pretty fine on Librem 5 too. If you want to develop GUI applications see libhandy[0], a GTK+ widget library developed by Purism for Librem 5.
If you need to, you can get motivations from https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/app-mockups and HIG guide for GNOME is available at https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/
https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Apps/index.html
Looking at their guides, the app APIs usability is a joke from Android point of view, even Tizen has better docs.
https://developer.tizen.org/development/api-references/nativ...
Best of luck I guess.
b.) As long as you develop a standard GTK app for Linux, it should be easy to adopt it for Librem 5.
c.) Are you seriously comparing their WIP docs to someone who has put billions of dollars and over a decade into their platform and has a JetBrains powered IDE?
The main surprise for me is they're shipping it without the lcd panel working.
They can control the backlight. But no video.
Now I'm participating in the gamble that can be made to function without rework, I'd at least like complete details, not "we are talking to the panel vendor".
I didn't want to drop into overly technical detail as not everyone wants that. You are of course welcome to participate in the community forum that was setup to chat about the state of the dev kit.
What surprised me is until it's fixed, there's no certainty what the problem is. Eg, dsi lanes mixed up, polarity of dsi lane wired wrong, some semidocumented reset signal on the panel got forced to 0V or forced inactive but panel requires it strobed, psu to panel must come up in specific order, psu level or quality or wiring mismatch... there are many possible ways just from having no video it can be a hw rework issue to solve it. Of course dsi is also complex, it can easy be a sw-only config issue, or some combination.
It's not up to me as your paying customer to go ask on a 'support channel' why, it's up to you to explain the reasoning why you believe that's a software-only issue.
But hardware is never easy. Lets hope it works out.
But it will have a i.MX 8M SOC [1] and more than 2GB of ram [2].
The dev kit has a 720 x 1440 5.7" screen [3] (I assume this is the final screen).
[1] https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers...
[2] https://puri.sm/posts/june-1st-last-call-for-librem5-devkit/
PureOS is Debian based linux operating system.[1]
> I love OSX - could I not do the same with OSX by tightening it down?
It depends entirely on how and who you trust. If you implicitly trust Apple and that their goal now (and in the future!) and that their team can vet all the code going in to the degree that no single or small group of developers there working in tandem could get a backdoor in place in either software or hardware, then I doubt there's a better choice given Apple's ability to design their own hardware and their complete control of the software stack.
If you would rather trust in a large distributed group of people having public access to view and vet the source which is public and believe their vested interest in keeping the system is the better choice for continues security, choose an open source system wide wide use.
1: https://puri.sm/posts/what-is-pureos-and-how-is-it-built/
A big part of Librem 5's mission is to be secure and private, but perhaps even bigger part is to be FLOSS and hackable, so one could use any host and any stack to develop pretty much anything they could on a standard GNU/Linux distro.
Locking down iOS/macOS may improve security, but doesn't give you access to the source code, does not protect you from Apple and does not free you from the limitations they've put on you as a developer, or going via their-own distribution channels for that matter and having complete control over your future if you're an iOS developer.
So it all depends on why you're exited about the Librem5, but if openness, FLOSS, hackability are any part of it, then locking down Apple hardware wouldn't do it.
