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.
PeerTube.co.uk admin here. Your video alerted me to the fact that my view stats aren't working properly - I've had over 1000 visits today, usual is less than 100. Most of those have your video as the entry point, but those numbers aren't reflected on your view count. Thanks for being the first video that's been popular enough to highlight this!
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I use a Sailfish phone, and Meego before that. I suppose a lot of geeks are exactly the sort of people that actually want to use all possible functionality of and software for their phone, "power users", and are most handicapped by an ideological device. Most of the Jolla and Nokia N9 users I know are not technical geeks but rather want to support a cause.
is it strange? when I read their website it seems like they're targeted at corporations. It takes a lot of scrolling to find 'Sailfish OS X' that I can install on one of 3 phones from a company that I never considered a solid phone manufacturer.
Android has a tiny BusyBox clone (ToyBox IIRC) in the default installation that can be accessed over USB with the right commands. It isn't particularly useful for anything besides poking around, and definitely doesn't support SSH, but it does do ls and cd.
Exciting to see it's real. I was getting very worried about the controversy, but it's beginning to fade away.
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.
I too am glad I didn't cancel my order. I'm sure my batch won't be out until probably late next year, but I do feel good about supporting a project like this.
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...
From what I heard it was far more complex than just picking some parts from a catalogue. They had to find parts that could all run on open source drivers and I think they even had to convince some vendors to open source the drivers first. It also depends on what level you call from scratch. No one designs anything from scratch with your definition. All phones use 3rd party parts.
They are an SPC not aln LLC. Does anyone know what is the difference between a Washington SPCs and LLCs? Is it true that as mentioned here[0] that:
> 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.
the failure to publish an SPR could result in law suits against purism. Fixing this wouldn't cost much and only be a net positive (for new financial backers). Failing to publish a report was probably not malicious (just laziness). Still it's negligent (IMHO). And if the rumor is true that they are having liquidity problems (as conjectured by the author of the blog post), then they do not deserve the trust given to them by their current financial backers on kickstarter or the tech community who evangelize them.
We urgently need alternatives and I do want Purism to succeed.
"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."
If the price were 20% less it would demand some more eyeballs.
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.
This great Dev Kit design is available for everybody: https://kicad-pcb.org/made-with-kicad/librem_5_dev_kit/ Amazing piece of open source hardware. While I am not interested in cellphones, I might use for robotics project.
Here I must praise KiCad. It is one of the best pieces of FOSS software out there. It beats almost all other (commercial or non-commercial) software in PCB design, hands down.
> It beats almost all other (commercial or non-commercial) software in PCB design, hands down.
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.
It's sure the best thing for hobby users today. It firmly beats probably all of the sub $1000 "pro-sumer" or "maker" tools like eagle.
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.
Same, compared to some other free alternatives (for example CircuitMaker) it's a complete blessing. I think I haven't seen a worse piece of software then CircuitMaker.
Thanks for explaining all the work your team is doing to create this innovative privacy phone, truly groundbreaking, I eagerly anticipate mine arriving in March. Meanwhile Hewlett Packard, with $5bn in net income and 50k employees, is advertising their latest innovation on my YouTube feed: a physical switch connected to the camera.
I love how their values-based pitch allows them to miss operational deadlines and still maintain their user appeal
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.
"Trust in closed non-auditable complex computer systems is something everyone has learned the hard way we should not have. The news is full each day of zero day bugs and exploits throughout the stack–from applications to operating systems and even down to the very silicon the whole stuff runs on."
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.
> 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.
How many crackpots have there been there for each Ignaz Semmelweiss, though? Ignoring weird people pays off if it saves having having to spend time on their far-out theories, even if Ignaz was right as well as weird.
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?
They just do the naive cost-benefit analysis: everyone uses it, successful people use these things, yet no bad things happen to them, why should I really care?
Have you ever assumed it's not some weird psychological effect but rather that people aren't interested enough in technology? It's like trying to preach GPL to the average programmer; who cares really?
> 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.
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 don't think they've released their full hardware schematic, right? I imagine they're waiting until they at least hit full production, and perhaps get closer to the next rev.
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.
You don't by the phone just for the actual device. You buy it mainly to support the start of actually open source phones. If you wanted a cheap phone you could just by a second hand android phone for dirt cheap
It would all make sense to me, if they wouldn't charge $800 and $1000 for 24" and 30" monitors (with keyboard and mouse) respectively. Are they designing the monitors from ground up as well?
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.
Remember these were and are offered as part of a fundraising effort to be able to develop the phones. So I think those prices are targeted at people who want to make a serious donation to the cause as well as getting the hardware.
Indeed. After reading the blog entry, I feel like buying a Librem 5 even though I don't want a large phone (am on an old small dumb phone that lasts 3 weeks on a charge).
We've seen so many NIH (on the software side) phones over the years, and then finally this. It bodes well for the future.
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.
They're expensive for what they are, but I want one anyway. The only reason I haven't so far is because they only have US keyboards. If I'm going to spend that much on a laptop, I want my £ key!
I do not own one but from what I gather their laptops are great.
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.
Well, they could say that it's expensive but at least you get to really own the phone, not the other way around. Technical wording works best with technical people.
Got mine yesterday, posted a top-level comment. It's definitely at a prototype stage, but the hardware seems awesome and high-quality, looking forward to more apps being developed!
This blogpost propagates what I'd like to describe as an urban legend about baseband processors and main memory. The story originates from old times where even fancy phones allowed the baseband to write everywhere in main memory. The myth then becomes that you need the baseband physically separated from your main application processor.
the claims on this link to the CopperheadOS reddit post dismisses the importance of baseband security which is pretty insane.
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.
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 can't fully trust the correctness of modern complicated CPU designs, leading to problems like <insert all speculative bypasses that have affected Intel CPUs the past 2 years>. But despite their complexity, CPUs and the CPU part of a smartphone SoC are usually extremely well understood (relatively speaking). The reason is that you actually need to run your software on these CPUs, so they need to be understood rather well. With better understanding comes better trust.
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!
Aren't the baseband components typically separated because they are a different regulatory domain?
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.
I'm glad they put out this article - I've been thinking about picking one of these up, but the price surprised me. I wonder if the same reasoning holds true for their laptops? They're really nice, but the $1400 starting price is pretty steep considering the specs.
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?
I don’t think a $700 phone is terribly expensive. I mean, yes, it is, but as long as they stay below iPhone pricing I don’t see how anyone can complain.
Also, "initial shipment" is a bit odd since everything before batch Evergreen (next year) could be considered a "preview release" since they're still finalizing some of the hardware. The iPhone didn't release in batches, it was a complete product on launch.
We'll see what makes the cut by the time Evergreen rolls out.
The real cost in my view is not the price of the phone, it’s in the clunkiness. It’s really thick and looks from the outside like a device from 2005 compared to current phones from Apple and Samsung. I have a hard time believing they will sell enough of them to cover the development cost.
Unless you plan not to pay taxes on it. For me it would be $860 phone. Comparable phones, like Lenovo K9 for example, cost $125-$150 around here, taxes incl.
Naive question, but with a commercial product like the i.MX8M from NXP Semiconductors, is there really not enough in it for them to develop Linux support for their product, rather than leaving it to other parties? Presumably some OS supported things like the i.MX8M’s accelerometer from the launch date, or are these chips shipped to OEMs on the basis that the low level functions work, but all OS support has to be created by someone else?
From what I understand they would give you a bunch of binary blobs or either have a fork of the Linux kernel with a lot of patches to get the device working.
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.
For some reason, every hardware company, without exception, it terrible at software development. They just can’t do it right. It’s probably a cultural difference, somehow, with the developent style and/or NDA requirements possibly having their impact.
I'm not really a hardware guy (just a hobbyist), but I've worked with a few. As far as I can tell it's typically a mix of things, largely related to managing unique difficulties of hardware bringup and treating software development as part of the hardware product development cycle instead of really having its own planning/management authority. For example:
- 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
I asked myself that very question often, but the reality is that only customers that take a small number of those chips (<1.000.000) care about mainline support.
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.
The i.MX8M as I understand is a chip for car navigation/entertainment systems. I wonder whether the shift towards OTA updates will encourage manufacturers to care about mainline support. Think about all the models and versions that a car company has, they’re going to have to be maintained for a decade or more, and doing that with fractured code bases and kernel patches sounds like an immense pain.
You can definitely make a cookie cutter 65nm SoC under $1m.
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.
I cant speak for them, but Gnome is far ahead on UI polish and general tidiness. I keep checking in on Plasma Mobile every few months and how nobody has fixed the god awful interface proportions yet is beyond me.
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.
In desktop case, Plasma is ahead of Gnome in features and functionality. Not sure what you refer to in regards to padding, but Gnome has its own UI issues like lack of server side decorations for SDL windows and such, due to Mutter being very limited.
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.
How about you make a cheaper product without software bloat? I don't think a smartphone requires 3GB ram to work. Those smartphones are not high end, but they have incredible specs and yet I don't see any logic that justifies them.
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.
Excuse my comment if I’m incorrect, but did you read the article?
“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.
> 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.
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?
You need fairly powerful hardware to browse the web these days, which is an important use case.
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.
Phones generally run with zero swap space, due to concerns about endurance of the inbuilt eMMC storage. This applies to both Android and iOS, btw. Given that constraint, 3GB is not "high-end"; it's just about enough unless you want applications to OOM all the time.
> 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+?
I can see why GTK would be a good choice, it has lots of bindings, and gnomes style guide is pretty well suited to enjoyable phone sized experience.
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.
I think you're being downvoted due to the broad, unsubstantiated, statement that it's impossible to write code with gtk. It's obvious that gtk is a very successful platform. If you want to make such an extraordinary claim, the burden of proof is on you. It requires more than "I tried to write an app a few years ago"
Thank you for the explanation. It's not so much that I don't understand why I'm being downvoted, or even complain about it per se; it's just that it's not terribly informative, either for me, or to anyone reading.
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.
I have several gtk apps in progress for the phone. If you tried a few years ago then i understand the sentiment. It could still be much better, especially when it comes to documentation. That said it’s pretty easy to get a basic app started and even ready to distribute with the gnome builder ide. It has a wysiwig for ui and project templates for all the most popular supported languages. The flatpak support is great too. The people working on it must be machines with the pace they are making improvements.
Sidenote: I got my Librem 5 in the mail yesterday! Below is a video of unboxing.
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.
PeerTube.co.uk admin here. Your video alerted me to the fact that my view stats aren't working properly - I've had over 1000 visits today, usual is less than 100. Most of those have your video as the entry point, but those numbers aren't reflected on your view count. Thanks for being the first video that's been popular enough to highlight this!
Yeah, but it stopped playing for me half way through the video, right when the number of peers dropped to 1.
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> 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.
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.
> 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.
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I use a Sailfish phone, and Meego before that. I suppose a lot of geeks are exactly the sort of people that actually want to use all possible functionality of and software for their phone, "power users", and are most handicapped by an ideological device. Most of the Jolla and Nokia N9 users I know are not technical geeks but rather want to support a cause.
is it strange? when I read their website it seems like they're targeted at corporations. It takes a lot of scrolling to find 'Sailfish OS X' that I can install on one of 3 phones from a company that I never considered a solid phone manufacturer.
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You seem to be forgetting LineageOS
> But it's really exciting to be able to `ls` and `cd` and `ssh` on a phone
Can't you do that on any other Android phone with terminal software installed?
Android has a tiny BusyBox clone (ToyBox IIRC) in the default installation that can be accessed over USB with the right commands. It isn't particularly useful for anything besides poking around, and definitely doesn't support SSH, but it does do ls and cd.
not properly. android is about as full-blown a linux environment as that plastic router on which your ISP left the telnet open.
Barely, although termux makes it a lot more reasonable. It's more a package management issue.
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Not without the risk that the phone vendor, Google (or some Android hacker) is looking over your shoulder.
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Exciting to see it's real. I was getting very worried about the controversy, but it's beginning to fade away.
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.
I too am glad I didn't cancel my order. I'm sure my batch won't be out until probably late next year, but I do feel good about supporting a project like this.
Good to see that backers are starting to receive theirs. I know there was some previous controversy over them only shipping to Purism employees.
just to be pedantic, she didn't say she's not a purism employee
"But it's really exciting to be able to `ls` and `cd` and `ssh` on a phone..."
Can you boot to a shell without starting GNOME?
I wouldn't rule it out but I don't know how to. I guess you would need a keyboard connected via USB to be able to input in that scenario
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"We had to design the hardware from scratch"
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...
From what I heard it was far more complex than just picking some parts from a catalogue. They had to find parts that could all run on open source drivers and I think they even had to convince some vendors to open source the drivers first. It also depends on what level you call from scratch. No one designs anything from scratch with your definition. All phones use 3rd party parts.
They are an SPC not aln LLC. Does anyone know what is the difference between a Washington SPCs and LLCs? Is it true that as mentioned here[0] that:
> 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://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-puri...
the failure to publish an SPR could result in law suits against purism. Fixing this wouldn't cost much and only be a net positive (for new financial backers). Failing to publish a report was probably not malicious (just laziness). Still it's negligent (IMHO). And if the rumor is true that they are having liquidity problems (as conjectured by the author of the blog post), then they do not deserve the trust given to them by their current financial backers on kickstarter or the tech community who evangelize them.
We urgently need alternatives and I do want Purism to succeed.
What their former CTO had to say: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zlatan-T...
Great link.
"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."
If the price were 20% less it would demand some more eyeballs.
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.
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also comments when it was discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21303770
This great Dev Kit design is available for everybody: https://kicad-pcb.org/made-with-kicad/librem_5_dev_kit/ Amazing piece of open source hardware. While I am not interested in cellphones, I might use for robotics project.
Here I must praise KiCad. It is one of the best pieces of FOSS software out there. It beats almost all other (commercial or non-commercial) software in PCB design, hands down.
> It beats almost all other (commercial or non-commercial) software in PCB design, hands down.
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.
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It's sure the best thing for hobby users today. It firmly beats probably all of the sub $1000 "pro-sumer" or "maker" tools like eagle.
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 that were case, it would be used everywhere. There is a reason I shell out several $k for Altium.
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Same, compared to some other free alternatives (for example CircuitMaker) it's a complete blessing. I think I haven't seen a worse piece of software then CircuitMaker.
From what I have heard KiCad has significantly worse parts/footprint management than proprietary EDAs like Altium combined with Altium Vault.
How many layers does the mainboard have?
Would that allow a hobbyist to make their own version of the phone? If so, I could see that being a fun project.
Thanks for explaining all the work your team is doing to create this innovative privacy phone, truly groundbreaking, I eagerly anticipate mine arriving in March. Meanwhile Hewlett Packard, with $5bn in net income and 50k employees, is advertising their latest innovation on my YouTube feed: a physical switch connected to the camera.
I love how their values-based pitch allows them to miss operational deadlines and still maintain their user appeal
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.
"Trust in closed non-auditable complex computer systems is something everyone has learned the hard way we should not have. The news is full each day of zero day bugs and exploits throughout the stack–from applications to operating systems and even down to the very silicon the whole stuff runs on."
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.
> 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.
How many crackpots have there been there for each Ignaz Semmelweiss, though? Ignoring weird people pays off if it saves having having to spend time on their far-out theories, even if Ignaz was right as well as weird.
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?
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They just do the naive cost-benefit analysis: everyone uses it, successful people use these things, yet no bad things happen to them, why should I really care?
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Have you ever assumed it's not some weird psychological effect but rather that people aren't interested enough in technology? It's like trying to preach GPL to the average programmer; who cares really?
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> make it too hard for them to stay the person they currently are
Why do you think people's identity is tied to the auditability of complex computer systems?
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I guess it's similar to being fully aware of one's mortality. You can't live in that reality without suffering quite a bit.
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> 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.
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.
Most of the things that they say have caused the high cost are sunk costs in design.
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?
I don't think they've released their full hardware schematic, right? I imagine they're waiting until they at least hit full production, and perhaps get closer to the next rev.
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.
You don't by the phone just for the actual device. You buy it mainly to support the start of actually open source phones. If you wanted a cheap phone you could just by a second hand android phone for dirt cheap
Of course. This is the basic open source model, only better. You get support from the folks who made the design.
It would all make sense to me, if they wouldn't charge $800 and $1000 for 24" and 30" monitors (with keyboard and mouse) respectively. Are they designing the monitors from ground up as well?
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.
Remember these were and are offered as part of a fundraising effort to be able to develop the phones. So I think those prices are targeted at people who want to make a serious donation to the cause as well as getting the hardware.
Indeed. After reading the blog entry, I feel like buying a Librem 5 even though I don't want a large phone (am on an old small dumb phone that lasts 3 weeks on a charge).
We've seen so many NIH (on the software side) phones over the years, and then finally this. It bodes well for the future.
A bit OT, but I didn't know Librem made laptops - does anyone here have any experience with them, especially the 13" model?
I use a librem 13v3 as my main computer.
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 got the Librem 15" laptop about a year and a half ago. I am happy with it. I ran QubesOS for a couple of moths and NixOS since with no issues.
They're expensive for what they are, but I want one anyway. The only reason I haven't so far is because they only have US keyboards. If I'm going to spend that much on a laptop, I want my £ key!
It should not be too hard to add your own keyboard layout. Many are available already (but not UK): https://forums.puri.sm/t/translations-and-virtual-touch-keyb...
Can't you just map that in software?
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I do not own one but from what I gather their laptops are great.
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.
They have been using an exploit that allows you to wipe out the Intel backdoor. Maybe that prevents them from updating.
Well, they could say that it's expensive but at least you get to really own the phone, not the other way around. Technical wording works best with technical people.
Has anybody received them? Last time I checked, deliveries were suspiciously late.
This post from yesterday claims that they have actually started shipping them now:
https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-birch-shipping-announcement/
Got mine yesterday, posted a top-level comment. It's definitely at a prototype stage, but the hardware seems awesome and high-quality, looking forward to more apps being developed!
There is this guy on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/e2mqgb/i_have_my_li...
Am I reading this correctly? This is a $700 phone that doesn't have a working camera and can't make phone calls?
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This blogpost propagates what I'd like to describe as an urban legend about baseband processors and main memory. The story originates from old times where even fancy phones allowed the baseband to write everywhere in main memory. The myth then becomes that you need the baseband physically separated from your main application processor.
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 claims on this link to the CopperheadOS reddit post dismisses the importance of baseband security which is pretty insane.
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...
It's not FUD. It's about different threat models.
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".
No, it is FUD. Their threat model is explicit:
> 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.
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I know very little about the topic so bearing that in mind:
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.
We can't fully trust the correctness of modern complicated CPU designs, leading to problems like <insert all speculative bypasses that have affected Intel CPUs the past 2 years>. But despite their complexity, CPUs and the CPU part of a smartphone SoC are usually extremely well understood (relatively speaking). The reason is that you actually need to run your software on these CPUs, so they need to be understood rather well. With better understanding comes better trust.
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!
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> If it does make the design more complicated, it may also reduce the potential attack surface.
an increase in complexity would rule out reduction of attack surface. in fact attack surface would be guaranteed to increase
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Aren't the baseband components typically separated because they are a different regulatory domain?
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.
I'm glad they put out this article - I've been thinking about picking one of these up, but the price surprised me. I wonder if the same reasoning holds true for their laptops? They're really nice, but the $1400 starting price is pretty steep considering the specs.
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?
I don’t think a $700 phone is terribly expensive. I mean, yes, it is, but as long as they stay below iPhone pricing I don’t see how anyone can complain.
The Librem is $700 and, at launch, doesn't include basic functionality like calendars, calculators and notes.
Sure I'm comparing apples to lemons here, but the first iPhone was $500, twelve years ago, and much more functional.
> The Librem […] doesn't include basic functionality like calendars, calculators and notes.
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
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It also cant make phone calls: "audio is not routed (no voice heard or sent)" https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-birch-shipping-announcement/
You're comparing apples to gnomes.
Also, "initial shipment" is a bit odd since everything before batch Evergreen (next year) could be considered a "preview release" since they're still finalizing some of the hardware. The iPhone didn't release in batches, it was a complete product on launch.
We'll see what makes the cut by the time Evergreen rolls out.
Yes, the first iPhone was $500 12 years ago. And today, through the miracle of the free market an iPhone will only cost you... $599 with trade in.
adjusts glasses, shuffles papers
Gotta be missing some pages here...
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Doesn't it run Gnome and X/Wayland?
It's 2x the average phone price, so it's excluding the majority of the market.
https://www.vox.com/2018/1/23/16923832/global-smartphone-pri...
It's 2x other phones with superior specs, like a Moto G7. It's 3x other phones with similar specs.
The real cost in my view is not the price of the phone, it’s in the clunkiness. It’s really thick and looks from the outside like a device from 2005 compared to current phones from Apple and Samsung. I have a hard time believing they will sell enough of them to cover the development cost.
I think if you're worried about how it looks and not how it works, then you're not in their target market ;)
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Unless you plan not to pay taxes on it. For me it would be $860 phone. Comparable phones, like Lenovo K9 for example, cost $125-$150 around here, taxes incl.
Naive question, but with a commercial product like the i.MX8M from NXP Semiconductors, is there really not enough in it for them to develop Linux support for their product, rather than leaving it to other parties? Presumably some OS supported things like the i.MX8M’s accelerometer from the launch date, or are these chips shipped to OEMs on the basis that the low level functions work, but all OS support has to be created by someone else?
From what I understand they would give you a bunch of binary blobs or either have a fork of the Linux kernel with a lot of patches to get the device working.
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.
For some reason, every hardware company, without exception, it terrible at software development. They just can’t do it right. It’s probably a cultural difference, somehow, with the developent style and/or NDA requirements possibly having their impact.
I'm not really a hardware guy (just a hobbyist), but I've worked with a few. As far as I can tell it's typically a mix of things, largely related to managing unique difficulties of hardware bringup and treating software development as part of the hardware product development cycle instead of really having its own planning/management authority. For example:
- 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
Apple too?
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I asked myself that very question often, but the reality is that only customers that take a small number of those chips (<1.000.000) care about mainline support.
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.
The i.MX8M as I understand is a chip for car navigation/entertainment systems. I wonder whether the shift towards OTA updates will encourage manufacturers to care about mainline support. Think about all the models and versions that a car company has, they’re going to have to be maintained for a decade or more, and doing that with fractured code bases and kernel patches sounds like an immense pain.
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I love the software part in the article. Basic GTK apps just need a few changes and they start working seamless on both Desktop and smaller displays.
You can definitely make a cookie cutter 65nm SoC under $1m.
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.
> and that we would never make it with GNOME. Well, here we are, we are shipping with GNOME / GTK+
What's the reason not to use Plasma Mobile though? I'd prefer investment of effort into that.
I cant speak for them, but Gnome is far ahead on UI polish and general tidiness. I keep checking in on Plasma Mobile every few months and how nobody has fixed the god awful interface proportions yet is beyond me.
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.
In desktop case, Plasma is ahead of Gnome in features and functionality. Not sure what you refer to in regards to padding, but Gnome has its own UI issues like lack of server side decorations for SDL windows and such, due to Mutter being very limited.
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.
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Its only $699, why are they calling it expensive? I paid $1100 for unlocked iphone.
Because the specs are much lower. You can buy an Android phone with the same or better specs for $50.
I need bitcoin to purchase the phone
They take Monero, so you can try https://LocalMonero.co
or if there isn't anyone you want to buy from, you can try LocalBitcoin and then convert.
Great idea but man what a missed missed opportunity on the naming? I do not want to but a phone called librem.
How about you make a cheaper product without software bloat? I don't think a smartphone requires 3GB ram to work. Those smartphones are not high end, but they have incredible specs and yet I don't see any logic that justifies them.
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.
Excuse my comment if I’m incorrect, but did you read the article?
“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.
I doesn't warrant 3GB of ram, sorry.
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You should check out the Pinephone then: https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
> 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.
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?
"Stop liking things I don't like!"
You need fairly powerful hardware to browse the web these days, which is an important use case.
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.
Phones generally run with zero swap space, due to concerns about endurance of the inbuilt eMMC storage. This applies to both Android and iOS, btw. Given that constraint, 3GB is not "high-end"; it's just about enough unless you want applications to OOM all the time.
This is an amazing effort, but I think...
> 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+?
I can see why GTK would be a good choice, it has lots of bindings, and gnomes style guide is pretty well suited to enjoyable phone sized experience.
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.
I think you're being downvoted due to the broad, unsubstantiated, statement that it's impossible to write code with gtk. It's obvious that gtk is a very successful platform. If you want to make such an extraordinary claim, the burden of proof is on you. It requires more than "I tried to write an app a few years ago"
Thank you for the explanation. It's not so much that I don't understand why I'm being downvoted, or even complain about it per se; it's just that it's not terribly informative, either for me, or to anyone reading.
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.
I have several gtk apps in progress for the phone. If you tried a few years ago then i understand the sentiment. It could still be much better, especially when it comes to documentation. That said it’s pretty easy to get a basic app started and even ready to distribute with the gnome builder ide. It has a wysiwig for ui and project templates for all the most popular supported languages. The flatpak support is great too. The people working on it must be machines with the pace they are making improvements.