https://peertube.co.uk/videos/watch/55eece8c-2d6c-4da3-8c8c-...
This prototype version is definitely not ready for mass market due to (1) known overheating issue (so far I've observed it get quite warm sometimes, but not uncomfortably hot), (2) a bunch little software things to work on. But it's really exciting to be able to `ls` and `cd` and `ssh` on a phone, and know that the software updates are coming.
Purism's accomplishment already is pretty incredible on both a hardware and software level. For me, well worth the price. Congrats to them even if there is a ways to go yet.
It's strange that SailfishOS has not caught more marketshare on the hacker/tech enthusiast community, because it's (almost) everything people wants about Purism : you lose a bit in the free software and open hardware side, but you win in terms of price (used phone + 50$ license), availability and usability (Right now, it's the only alternative to Android and iOS I can safely recommend).
If only Jolla devs had kept their promises of open-sourcing more of their code.
I think that's a big part of the answer to why it hasn't caught among techies. When I tried using it (shortly after release), there were numerous issues in their default apps that nobody could fix because they are proprietary and Jolla didn't seem to have the resources to handle all the bugs.
I'd wager that if it had been open source, the early adopters would have put some time in to fix a lot of the bugs.
In retrospect I'm pretty pissed at them for not being honest and upholding their promises. In my book they're basically con artists that just tried to get the Linux community's money by saying "open source" without actually meaning it.
Can't you do that on any other Android phone with terminal software installed?
I'm so fed up with software that tries to anticipate what I want. Computers running Linux do what you ask in spite of what you want, but phones running modern phone operating systems do what they think you want in spite of what you need. And that is deeply frustrating to power users.
I guess now I just need to decide when to jump into this.
Sure I'm comparing apples to lemons here, but the first iPhone was $500, twelve years ago, and much more functional.
From what I can see, this is untrue:
Calculator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esYJSNZrQWc
Notes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34XhhVlmYTU and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEzRgjHaIZo
It would surprise me if there wasn’t a calendaring program in there, too
We'll see what makes the cut by the time Evergreen rolls out.
adjusts glasses, shuffles papers
Gotta be missing some pages here...
https://www.vox.com/2018/1/23/16923832/global-smartphone-pri...
You need to get out more often. Look, I am a KiCAD supporter, too. But KiCAD is repeating the mistakes of commercial ECAD systems of the 1980’s. Am I glad it exists? Surely. But set your sights higher. KiCAD has much room for improvement.
But as much as I like it, it's still years if not decades away from catching up to the big industry tools like Altium, Cadence, Mentor. They have $$$$$/seat pricing, but if you need them, you need them.
If only. I suspect that only tech enthusiasts are aware of these issues. In the meantime, non-technical people only give you weird disbelieving looks when you mention this to them, and then continue ignoring it.
It’s psychological. People can’t believe things which would make it too hard for them to stay the person they currently are. It’s almost impossible for anyone to do anything but ignore and repress such information. If you ask them later about it, they probably would deny even hearing it or having the conversation, because they wouldn’t actually remember it.
Ask anyone who tried to convince a sweeping societal change based on logical arguments. See what happened to Ignaz Semmelweis. You simply can’t convince people of hard things with logic.
I personally think security has been spoiled by unrealistic advice. "Use PGP" is the worst, but it's not alone. A few years ago a mass-market device (tens of millions sold) asked me to enter my password three times within two minutes in order to carry out one single operation, and it demanded that the password be secure enough that I needed two kinds of mode-shift to enter it on that device's keyboard. Who takes that vendor's ideas about security seriously after experiencing shit like that?
Why do you think people's identity is tied to the auditability of complex computer systems?
I didn't realize how true this was until just last week. My partner was having a conversation with her friends (non-techies) about phones. One person mentioned that they are skeptical about whether Android is secure because it is open source. And that's why they stuck with their iPhone.
I like it because the hardware is all well-supported under linux. I run a fairly stripped-down Debian. I am no linux wizard, and I was able to make everything I needed functional. Bluetooth required a non-free firmware package.
Additionally, I got to support a company working toward more-open, more-free hardware. I would love for movement in that direction to be more common, so I put my money where my mouth is. If you don't care about that, you could get a laptop of equivalent performance, or better, for less money.
I don't know much about hardware performance or what the latest-and-greatest is. I don't play games or do anything that performance intensive locally. It is more than performant enough for my needs. The battery life seems good, but I've never timed it. I have an M.2 SSD in it.
The trackpad and keyboard are both relatively nice. The trackpad is a clicky pad, like the one on a macbook. I have it configured to use the "clickfinger" click method of libinput and two-finger-scrolling. The keyboard is backlit and has decent travel (not nearly as good as the old thinkpad keyboards, though).
There are hardware kill switches. One for wifi and bluetooth, and one for the camera and microphone. I generally just leave the camera/microphone off, and the wifi/bluetooth on. The switches protrude a bit so it is possible to accidentally move them.
The screen is a matte 1920x1080 IPS panel. I hate glossy screens because I like to use my laptop outside, so this is perfect for me.
It has a decent complement of ports. No ethernet port, though.
I have also seen many review claiming the track pad is great and even one say it is as good as a macbook track pad.
However, one problem with them is that they are not refreshed often and use older Intel ships (currently 7th gen).
One of the thing I suspect prevents them from refreshing the laptops is they do not have enough resources (people) to do some while developing the librem 5.
But the world's moved on since those reports were made. It's FUD: https://www.reddit.com/r/CopperheadOS/comments/6wtul0/on_sen...
The baseband is permanently attached to a public network. Not having control over whether that connection actually is up is a huge security hole. The entire baseband software stack runs in supervisor mode. There are no non-executable pages, there's no stack protection.
EDIT-1: Qualcomm baseband chips have location tracking baked in. Even with a clean OS and no tracking apps, the baseband does it. The tracking data is commercially available: https://web.archive.org/web/20180514003056/https://www.qualc...
General design failures/bugs from assumed acting-in-good-faith silicon/sw designers vs not-acting-in-good-faith silicon/sw designers.
Assuming the radio's are the primary threat to privacy then I'd prefer a design from a privacy activist company who explicityly designs the hw so that the less trustable parts are forced behind physcial and defined interface "firewalls".
> Complex parts like the cellular modem or the WiFi can access the very same RAM that is used at runtime to store your most private data, but at the same time they are controlled by binary-only firmware that no one except the manufacturer of that chip has access to.
For the cellular modem, in your run-of-the-mill iPhone or Android phone nowadays, it is simply false that the cellular modem can access arbitrary data in RAM. Can't tell you about WiFi, but I expect a similar situation.
There's a lot of room for improvement in secure smartphone architectures, but the "baseband can read your photos" trope is simply false.
We're already in a world were we can't quite trust our CPUs, so why trusting baseband chips?
If it does make the design more complicated, it may also reduce the potential attack surface.
On the other hand, the baseband processor is mostly unknown, black box hardware, running unknown black box software, that completely controls the transmission of cellular data. Of course it would be horrible if there was no separation between the CPU and baseband. You shouldn't trust that setup. But as it turns out, separation does exist!
an increase in complexity would rule out reduction of attack surface. in fact attack surface would be guaranteed to increase
My understanding is that integators buy the baseband module (with FCC and other licenses) and add it to their device so as to not incur the patent fees and oversight required by developing the radio device into every regional handset.
There should be a market for electronics that goes against planned obsolescence. Build a device that runs a good enough OS, with low specs, that doesn't require fast hardware, make it sturdy and last at least 3 years, and I would buy it.
I refuse to spit more than $200 for any of those devices. People say "but I used it everyday, it is my main computer", well with all due respect you are addicted to your phone.
The smartphone industry is bizarre. Of course you can accuse Apple and google ecosystems, but still.
“How about you make a cheaper product without software bloat” To me this was very clearly answered with we broke new ground building the right system from the ground up and that was expensive.
And we used our existing OS as the base and we’ve achieved true mobile <> PC converance.
Give the article a full read and please consider editing this comment.
The reason for the cost was literally what was covered in the article.
Well, that's an entirely arbitrary line in the sand you've drawn there. It's an entertainment platform. Am I addicted because I pay extra for a high quality TV, stereo, or gaming computer? What if it was spending extra money on a jigsaw for my woodworking hobby?
Non-smart phones in the old days had to use either WAP (a simplified version of XHTML) which you probably won't find much content available on today, or a thin client for a server-side browser (e.g. Opera Mini) which is not great for privacy/security.
So they may support a single old version because the effort of upstreaming the support would be expensive.
The blog post says that the Librem paid 15 developers full time for 2 years on the project.
That's a huge expense and most of all the customers of the SoC won't be demanding upstream support.
Of course also what happens is that you get into a rabbit hole of patching your fork until it becomes a huge task to reintegrate.
- Doing a hard fork of the software stack for every product family/generation/platform, because it's assumed up front that hardware differences/bugs and changes in product definition will require non-portable changes throughout the stack (e.g. things like GUI element sizes and line lengths are often hardcoded to fit the layout to a particular screen, various GPIO pins/buttons/LEDs/connectors change identity/significance, hardware gains/loses capabilities needed for a feature so UI elements related to that feature need to be added/removed/altered)
- Expecting the vast majority of development effort to be on shipping new products because already-shipping products are "in the can" and the big deals have already been closed
- Management belief that hardware is hard and software is easy (which is arguably sometimes rational from the perspective of managing product-dooming risks)
- Upstream vendors wasting developers' time with shenanigans around stuff like documentation (oh, you wanted the real manual that actually says what the registers do?) and firmware (some vendors apparently forget to mention that there is firmware until you ask your SE/FAE why something isn't working)
- Uncertainty around whether a given problem ought to be fixed in hardware or software
For the first tier customers they get a custom solution developed for them, and have access to all the specs under the NDA, but since that is the case, they cannot develop stuff for mainline and just produce blobs.
> Well, here we are, we are shipping with GNOME / GTK+
...this point is I think quite unfortunate. I tried to write a GTK+ program a few years ago and it was completely impossible. Using GNOME / GTK+ will surely limit its attractiveness of a development platform. It's too bad they couldn't have done something based on Qt instead.
EDIT: Rather than downvoting, why don't you post your contrary experience with GTK+?
My experience with GTK has been fine its been far from impossible to use - with python, rust, and C. At least on linux, but that is the context of the issue.
Plasma mobile exists and apps will use QT so we can see how both turn out.
Strictly speaking, everything I wrote was about my own personal opinions and experience. I did try writing an app; I did find trying to figure out was was going on impossible (and switching to web development much more fruitful). So it's natural for me to think that lots of people will have similar experiences, and that if they do, it will limit the growth of the platform.
I knew that what I wrote might be controversial, and I'm willing to take my downvotes like a man. But I'd rather be shown other perspectives.
"Quantities matter [in China] and getting only dozen or couple of hundred orders per month doesn't really help. That said, the Librems are heavily overpriced but that is because Purism seemingly never tried to get better deal and the South San Francisco partner abused this so that is why Purism Librems are double the price they should be. I believe that if we had more realistic prices, it would be much better for Purism not only financially but also more talking about it, more of it in wild which in turn means much more orders, more happy customers etc. The innovation is not really that hard in this space because big players don't try to really innovate as they have strong positions, so it wouldn't be that hard to be good or better then most of big players even, but quantity leverage is hard to pass by."
When I saw the price I assumed they were trying to position a premium product. I think this is a little bit of a mistake given that in the market of handsets, Apple owns the "premium" devices, and maybe samsung counts as #2? Nobody is crossing that Rubicon.
$700 isn't really bad but I don't like the look of it. Maybe if they can make this thing for 6 or 7 years. People who are worried about this have been aware of Essential phones which aren't the same, but end users aren't shopping these Freedom characteristics.
I predict another few years of nobody batting an eye to these devices. Great shame.
Given that the design is open, it should be possible for another company, who doesn't have these sunk costs, to deliver the same phone for less.
Does this mean that they have the price wrong? Can selling open designs ever recoup such design costs?
That being said, Pine64 has been able to make a similar device for far less also using their own design, so I'm a little skeptical that hardware design was such a large part of the price. I'm guessing the bulk of it was getting the SoC up and going since Pine64 had similar products that likely make it simpler to design a phone SoC.
Business around privacy is a thing going on for at least a decade. However, we often forget that our data flow is controlled, monitored, and stored by those who we try to protect our data from.
We've seen so many NIH (on the software side) phones over the years, and then finally this. It bodes well for the future.
What's the reason not to use Plasma Mobile though? I'd prefer investment of effort into that.
I see the same problems on desktop Plasma, wildly inconsistent padding, UI elements not lining up and bits of the interface crushed and cramped, while 100px below you have gigantic elements.
If you're going to take a swing at doing a FOSS phone right, you really need to avoid the wonky programmer art or you are not going to convince the average user that its any better or more polished than previous failed attempts.
Can't say about Plasma Mobile though, but that's the point why investing effort into that would be useful. The base is more promising than Gnome one.
Er, no. You bought a bunch of silicon off the shelf, and you had to integrate it. Several orders of magnitude less work.
Fifteen developers, and two years? Not mentioned, but this means you didn't write the telephony stack either.
iMX8M bringup, driver development, software integration. This is real work, but it's a tiny fraction of what goes into making your own phone.
Hoping you sell enough of these that you manage to attract adversarial attention. Because how you deal with that will be the true test of your commitment...
> I think the story is that Washington SPCs are LLCs in pretty much every aspect besides shareholder-board disputes.
and, why
> have they never made a Social Purpose Report available despite the fact that they've been an SPC for two and a half years?
from the bottom of the article[1]:
> It is also worth keeping in mind that Purism isn't actually incorporated as a typical LLC (Limited Liability Company). They are actually incorporated as a SPC (Social Purpose Corporation) in the state of Washington. The primary difference between an LLC and an SPC in Washington is that SPCs can do things that are in the best interests of their customers rather than always doing things that are in the best interests of their shareholders. It is also important to know that in Washington this status comes with some extra regulatory requirements ...
----
if formed as an SPC, shouldn't they be transparent in how they allocate budgets to internal projects (as proof that they do what is outlined in the Social Purpose Report (SPR))? It's a shame they don't produce a SPR which could be used to verify the claims about price in this post.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371573
[1] https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-puri...
We urgently need alternatives and I do want Purism to succeed.
or if there isn't anyone you want to buy from, you can try LocalBitcoin and then convert.
When android devices have a major public video permission hole, everyone exhales and mentally checks out. When purism is late, it sucks but it's not the same
Pre-sale customers are along for the ride. If the lesson for other startups is 'if you're really innovating, your users will be there when you're ready', I think that's a really good outcome.
Side note: this is the strangest font I've seen in a long time. Why is the lower-case "t" smaller than every other letter? It almost looks like one of those fonts designed for dyslexic readers, but with no variations in the width of the letter strokes, I don't think that's the case. Anyone know if it was just a really strange choice, or if it serves some greater purpose?
SoC has a gigantic cost advantage over discrete parts, let alone PCIE cards.
The only showstopper is the 4G radio. There are no IP vendors for it at all, and that is very much a result of things antitrust regulators should've been taking care of.
