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Comment by neilv

5 months ago

> My biggest question is if they use Halium/libhybrys at all,

That would be a showstopper for now, IMHO. Doing it with maintainable open source Linux drivers is the hard part of having a viable device, from everything I've seen.

Another concern are that I can't find who the developers are, nor even definitively what country they're based in. (I don't see it on their About Us page, ~~and the GitHub repo contributors are hidden.~~ I saw a reference to Sydney, but unclear.) (Edit: my mistake regarding GitHub contributors; they aren't hidden)

Also, it would be nice to have the option of a better hardware provenance than a generic whitebox(?) phone from some unidentified manufacturer in China. Even for individual hobbyist users, and certainly for corporate ones. (This is why I'd like hardware options combinations like Purism for the premium device, and a cheaper device that runs the same software but is still from a brand that at least has a reputation to preserve, like Pine64 or (ha) Google.)

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neilv

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Klonoar  5 months ago

It is not nor should it be a showstopper. A functioning device that can be widely used helps build eg an app ecosystem. That part needs to exist and it doesn’t really matter if it’s Hallium or not.

This isn’t an all or nothing situation.

  • neilv  5 months ago

    I guess I might agree, so long as that ecosystem is shared with Purism Librem 5 (a potentially sustainable device, if not affordable), and so long as a more affordable but also sustainable device (which means non-Hallium) will actually appear in response to this ecosystem stimulus.

    At all times during the ecosystem stimulus, someone has to be keeping an eye on the real goal. Which is getting those affordable, trustworthy, sustainable hardware devices to become available.

    (I've seen Linux handheld/phone projects fail for ~25 years, wasted lots of time and money on them, and would be happy to see something solve the hard problem of open drivers.)