16 ms·

The Librem 5: A Matrix-Native FLOSS Smartphone

421 points by Arathorn 9y ago

mrhigat4 9y ago
I support the whole idea, but I think it's premature. The Riot app in my experience has a pretty unwelcoming UI/UX experience and is still insanely buggy. Things like Jitsi integration, widgets and a phone partnership should be after a solid, stable 1.0 MVP IMHO. Encryption is still opt-in and beta. So super supportive of the environment, the momentum and a native matrix phone partnership is the right move eventually, but please get it stable, fast and polished first before branching out too far.
- Aaronn 9y ago
  Matrix is really struggling on funding so they need these kinds of partnerships to allow them to continue making the software better. For those who are reading this and would like to help out please see the following blog post: https://matrix.org/blog/2017/07/19/status-update/ https://matrix.org/blog/2017/07/19/status-update/
- Arathorn 9y ago
  We're working as hard as we can on improving Riot's UI/UX and getting crypto out of beta. As others have said, partnerships like this help fund the team to get the core stuff in place. After all, this project (assuming the campaign is successful) is 2 months away anyway.
  - carussell 9y ago
    What's the value proposition of building a whole new client? If your goal is to give people a client for your cool new protocol, why would you waste any development resources on squashing fiddly UI bugs of your own doing, rather than, say, providing a reference implementation by forking the Signal app and swapping out the pieces until it's talking Matrix instead of TextSecure? I see this mistake constantly. The ring.cx folks did the same thing. Inevitably, everyone ends up commenting how poor the app is—some of them even saying how much they'd like to be able to use it and would if it weren't for the UI. It wouldn't be so silly if there weren't plenty of essentially ready-made solutions for the problem.
    - Arathorn 9y ago
      1. Signal doesn't have a native Linux app (other than Electron) 2. The hope is to piggyback on one of the existing native Matrix SDKs or clients rather than write a whole new one. 3. One of the biggest complaints we hear about Matrix is that there is no native desktop app with parity to Riot yet. So this is our chance to fix that.
      - carussell 9y ago
        > Signal doesn't have a native Linux app (other than Electron) How is that an explanation for directing (apparently limited) resources into riot-android? > there is no native desktop app with parity to Riot yet Huh? The comparisons I made in my comment were to Signal and Ring, which are predominantly mobile messaging apps. The person you originally responded to was discussing Matrix on mobile. Why do you keep mentioning desktop? If there were any confusion, this is a thread about an announcement for a new smartphone.
        Arathorn 9y ago
        Riot/Android doesn't run on Linux, so directing limited resources into it is fairly irrelevant. The point of this campaign is to fund us to work on a native app which can benefit desktop and handset users alike - whilst also supporting the core team so we can also work on the React, Android and iOS SDKs which power Riot. I keep mentioning desktop because this is a significant benefit of the campaign. The idea of somehow ripping out the core of the Signal or Ring apps and trying to bolt their UI onto Matrix SDKs is an interesting one, but in practice both protocols have significant differences to Matrix, and at best this would be a pretty big impedance mismatch. Of course, someone in the community is welcome to try to do it. Meanwhile, we'll keep plugging away at trying to make Riot kick ass (via the underlying Matrix SDKs), and add a native app to the pantheon too :)
        confounded 9y ago
        > this is a thread about an announcement for a new smartphone The smartphone in question runs Debian.
      - 9y ago
- tacoman 9y ago
  >The Riot app in my experience has a pretty unwelcoming UI/UX experience and is still insanely buggy. I've setup my own Synapse server on a VPS and have my extended family of 12 people including an 85 year old grandmother using it on an iPad. It gets used daily for chat and picture sharing. I've come across a few minor problems on iOS, but overall I don't agree with that characterization.
- orblivion 9y ago
  > Encryption is still opt-in and beta This is the part that concerns me. https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ Moxie lays out a challenge to federation enthusiasts to prove him wrong that federated chat can be secure and have good usability. I would respectfully note that Matrix seems to be responding to the challenge with a chat client that is neither. Instead they seem to be doubling down on federation and integrations. Usability can be fixed, but the federation and multiple clients makes it a challenge. Security on the other hand is, again, concerning because it feels tacked on. It's not on by default because, again, it makes it complicated when you have multiple clients. Last time I tried, you could put in your password on the web client (browser encryption!) and join an existing conversation, and see all future posts by the people in the conversation, because suddenly they've accepted your new public key. I had to dig a little bit in the configs to find the current public keys for the clients in the conversation. Either they have to make a UX-friendly way of warning everybody that there's a new client, or accept that stealing an account password will let you snoop on conversations. I really appreciate their enthusiasm, and I hope someone gets federation right, but it just seemed like a mess. By contrast, I think that Signal recognized that you can work around the security vs usability tradeoff by trading off on a third vector: feature set. I think that we won't get a federated system until someone heeds Moxie's warnings and does some careful, creative thinking.
  - Arathorn 9y ago
    > It's not on by default because, again, it makes it complicated when you have multiple clients This is simply not true. The reason it's not on by default is because we're still developing it and it's in beta. It's not tacked on; we've designed in E2E from the outset - but implementing it well in a decentralised manner is a huge amount of work; probably 5-6x more than in a centralised system like Signal. We're not going to enable it by default until we are 99.999% sure that it won't cause regressions over the non-e2e client. > Either they have to make a UX-friendly way of warning everybody that there's a new client I think you must have tried it a (very long) while ago - we've had the UnknownDeviceDialog since February. It looks like this (https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/matrix.org/mOOjVegIyiNaqJdLapRgfref https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/matrix.org/mOOj...), and warns you every time a new device is added to the room, and gives you the option of blacklisting it from receiving your messages if you don't trust it. Now, totally agreed that this UX is ugly and needs work, but this is NOTHING to do with the decentralised or federated nature of the protocol. It's simply that we currently are very resource constrained currently for working on web front-end issues. That said, if your ONLY priority is security, then Moxie's "the ecosystem is moving" probably has a point. After all, in an open ecosystem like Matrix, it's possible someone will fire up a buggy/malicious client and inadvertently compromise a room. However, if you value freedom as well as privacy, Matrix or OMEMO are basically your only choices.
- drdaeman 9y ago
  I think, homeserver software is also still somewhat immature. I'm waiting for Dendrite. I'm evaluating Synapse (as all the other servers say they're pre-alpha incomplete) for the last week or so, but one immediate issue I had is that when I had set it up, on my home low-power NAS it required more than 15 minutes (and 0.7GiB of memory out of 1GiB I've allocated to the container) at fully-saturated single CPU core to join #matrix:matrix.org. And it took no less than a minute to join a room with just 200 participants. Sure, that's just for the first time, but it still feels way too resource-heavy, compared to other chat systems. The machine has 10-year old Atom 330 CPU - which makes it an ancient relic, but hey, it has more than enough power to run XMPP (w/various transports), mail and web servers, and it just sits on a shelf in a kitchen, with a barely audible humming.
  - Arathorn 9y ago
    Synapse's readme does try to spell out that it requires at least 2GB of RAM and a recent CPU. It is absolutely resource heavy, but not showstoppingly so in general. The comparison with XMPP is dubious as the protocols are completely different: it's like comparing a local filesystem with a distributed database and complaining that the DB is slower. That said, Dendrite should improve things a lot; we should have more stats in the near future but it seems to idle around 150MB of RAM and should run much better on ancient hardware. We are not bothering optimising synapse much further in favour of focusing on finishing Dendrite. Needless to say, we expect Dendrite to be finished well in time for the Librem 5 to go live, 18 months from now!
moosingin3space 9y ago
Their UI looks like it's based on Gnome -- I wonder if they wrote some extensions to make Gnome more phone-friendly. IMO great idea to use Matrix as the communication layer -- especially when double-ratchet is stable, it'll be able to provide the good UX of things like Signal on Android, iMessage, Google Duo, and FaceTime, but built on an open platform. Hope it does well!
- swiley 9y ago
  A Decade ago there was a sort of gnome for PDAs. I don't know if that's what this is.
  - micheljones 9y ago
    Qtopia?
    - swiley 9y ago
      That's QT not GTK. Also QT is still used while the toolkit I'm thinking of isn't.
      - hedora 9y ago
        You might be talking about Enlightenment (not dead yet) or the openmoko gtk ui, though I forget its name too.
      - micheljones 9y ago
        Ah ok, I misread your comment.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - megous 9y ago
    Maemo?
AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
https://matrix.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/purism5.png https://matrix.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/purism5.p... Is this what the actual phone will look like? Some kind of context photo with a reference hand would be great, because the dimensions and shape otherwise suggest this would be comparable to holding a Kindle or Nexus 7 next to my head!
- robto 9y ago
  The details are available on the Purism[0] site. I really like that they are adding physical switches to control the microphone, camera, baseband, and bluetooth. And that they are giving a lot of thought to separating the baseband procecessor from the cpu. And that it will be an ip-based phone handset, which means I can use a regular linux os that respects my freedom. I'll have to learn more about PureOS! With matrix's e2e encryption based on the OWS system, we may see the first reasonable take on a privacy conscious smartphone. I was looking at the Dragonbox Pyra, but this seems even better. I'm pretty excited, I may actually upgrade from a dumbphone for the first time now if this comes out. [0]https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
  - nathcd 9y ago
    > I was looking at the Dragonbox Pyra, but this seems even better. I've been following the Dragonbox Pyra for a while too -- I actually just sent a link to a co-worker this morning. The Librem 5 does seem really awesome, but what I really like about the Pyra is the physical keyboard. If I could have the Librem 5-alike in a Blackberry KeyOne or Pyra-like form factor, I would be one happy camper. In other words, I really want a device that could replace both my laptop and phone, in terms of productivity. It seems like the Dragonbox Pyra is more closely aligned to that ideal than the Librem 5.
    - robto 9y ago
      Well the nice thing about that is that this project will bring a nice telephony stack to all of linux, so if they succeed you can do exactly that!
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jph 9y ago
Massive props to you all -- thank you for this step for freedom. Purism is doing some of the most exciting work in the field of personal privacy and consumer computing. The tech blog is terrific, the laptops are coming along nicely, and the team is making inroads deeper into the chipsets and drivers. Librem 5 crowdfunding: https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ Matrix on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/matrixdotorg https://www.patreon.com/matrixdotorg Purism blog posts: https://puri.sm/posts/ https://puri.sm/posts/
- aloisdg 9y ago
  Matrix on Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/matrixdotorg/ https://liberapay.com/matrixdotorg/
Accacin 9y ago
That looks really interesting. Their funding target seems quite high so I'm not entirely convinced that they'll be able to meet it. I will definitely try and support this project as I'd love to be able to move to a more open phone. Link to their crowd funding page: https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
- bradfa 9y ago
  I'm surprised you think that the funding target seems high. I personally believe their funding target is in the range of 10-20x too small to actually make a smart phone, especially when they plan to make all their own software and not simply reuse Android/Sailfish/Ubuntu as a starting point. I expect that just the certifications for the radios, both for various countries/government agencies and various phone carriers, to cost them many hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that cost has nothing to do with actually designing any of the hardware or software.
  - bantunes 9y ago
    Don't think the phone is 100% in house. They're using a base OEM model from someone that happens to have opensource drivers for everything (which makes me think it's an older model). But even just for the software, it seems low.
    - bradfa 9y ago
      They say the hardware will use an i.MX6 or i.MX8 SoC, which I assume implies they are using the Freescale/NXP SoCs. i.MX6 isn't really intended for use in phones (afaik) and I don't know of any recent phones which use i.MX6 in them. i.MX8 isn't publicly available yet, but possibly they could leverage some other vendor's hardware phone design using i.MX8. However, based on the schedule they show in the pledge info, they already have the "PureOS I (CPU)" step mostly completed and they plan to be booting the hardware before the end of 2017, so this seems to make i.MX8 unlikely imho.
      - swiley 9y ago
akavel 9y ago
Do I understand correctly that it would be purely VoIP over GSM/2G/.../LTE? Where the particular VoIP implementation of choice is this "Matrix" protocol/ecosystem? Which potentially at some point (with enough financing?) may get some gateways enabling calls between Matrix phones like this one, and regular GSM/2G/... mobile phones?
- Arathorn 9y ago
  The phone will have normal GSM in it, as well as being Matrix native when on IP (i.e. shipping a native Matrix.org client as the default dialler/messaging app, which will work whenever you have IP connectivity). A stretch goal is to also provide Matrix<->PSTN connectivity, so that if you're on IP but don't have GSM (or don't have a SIM in the phone), then you could also place/receive calls with the PSTN from Matrix. (Obviously this would then be also available to the rest of the Matrix ecosystem too). (Source: I work on Matrix)
  - ThatGeoGuy 9y ago
    For those of us less informed: assuming a Matrix <-> PSTN bridge exists, does that mean that one would be able to send and receive phone calls and SMS to existing GSM numbers via a dedicated VOIP number? I don't understand PSTN at all, but wouldn't giving all matrix users dedicated VOIP numbers be difficult and costly?
    - Arathorn 9y ago
      Yup, that's the idea. Given this was the Matrix team's dayjob before getting sucked into Matrix, it's something relatively easy to do - although yes, we'd have to pass through the call/SMS and numbering costs. Now, if only Matrix had a payments ecosystem... https://matrix.org/blog/2017/08/22/thoughts-on-cryptocurrencies/ https://matrix.org/blog/2017/08/22/thoughts-on-cryptocurrenc...
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    Is there a way to receive and send phone calls from my SIM card's phone number?
swiley 9y ago
If it really can run fully open GNU/Linux it's worth what they're asking.
- ramshorns 9y ago
  It sounds like they haven't decided whether there will be free WiFi and Bluetooth drivers or not, and that would make a huge difference for me at least. Everything else seems to be totally free and open source, except for the baseband, which is separated from the system, can be disabled, and doesn't really have an open source option.
grizzles 9y ago
I wish these guys would just use android from the get go. It's already running on i.mx6, so by switching now they would at least have a chance of making a decent product. They are literally throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars of excellent work that has been put into power optimization for no good reason. I've told the ceo there this like at least 3x but he is stubborn. > “Android is so frustrating! Trying to remove Google’s privacy invasion bit-by-bit removes functionality bit-by-bit, and you end up with a non-working phone. Purism will solve this by putting your privacy protection and security first.” — Zlatan Todorić, CTO This quote is nonsense. There are at least 3 projects (replicant,copperhead & another) that are shipping trees like this. It will be so much harder for them to create a phone that stays alive for more than an hour or two running a full linux desktop.
- fredsir 9y ago
  Appeal to futility... You can always just use the same old same old, but you aren’t gonna create something new - the thing of your dreams - by doing that. They might succeed in this, and if they do, it might be awesome!
  - CharlesW 9y ago
    > You can always just use the same old same old, but you aren’t gonna create something new - the thing of your dreams - by doing that. One could argue the opposite — that you can build the thing of your dreams far better and faster by leveraging non-differentiating work done by others. For example: Even a decade in, iPhones use lots of materials and components from other vendors.[0][1] Maybe Android isn't the perfect OS choice. But building a phone without access to an ecosystem of apps relegates it to a curiosity for most, which seems like a shame. [0] http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/apple/where-are-apple-products-made-3633832/ http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/apple/where-are-apple-prod... [1] https://images.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Supplier-List.pdf https://images.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-S...
    - fredsir 9y ago
      To build a phone on top of Android, you would have to believe Android is a good system to build upon. I don't believe that is a fact though. There are lots of problems with Android. Sure, your phone gets access to a lot of apps from day one, but 99% of those apps are shit, so why bother. We've got so few mobile consumer OSs in use today, and I don't think any of them are particularly great, although I believe one of them are much better than the other. I welcome completely new approaches to it instead of the way it is today where we have Apples stuff, and then we have numerous companies that makes shitty Android stuff, and a few that makes some okay great Android phones. Lets get new stuff on the table, please.
XorNot 9y ago
Gotta say, I would buy this. Android is android, but a phone which ran Linux and Gnome I'd happily switch to at this point.
- dwhabcdefg 9y ago
  /me raises a glass to the dearly departed N900
  - knewter 9y ago
    best mobile experience of my life. saved many a flailing server from mine while my now-wife was in the bathroom, avoiding destroying the date atmosphere. the n9 debacle cemented my hatred for ms
theEXTORTCIST 9y ago
This seems like a really cool device. One that I would certainly purchase. What weird stretch goals they have. I wonder if these are jokes? "$8m = Signatures of entire team printed inside the phone case $10m = Free encrypted VPN tunnel service for all backers for 1 year $20m = Candy Crush (clone) available for free"
- mixedCase 9y ago
  Jokes that I'm certain they would fulfill if they were to receive that much funding. I'm pretty sure they're simply not expecting those numbers.
xoroshiro 9y ago
As much as I want a FLOSS phone to succeed, I have my doubts. Then again, I'm not sure how all the Matrix stuff works, but if I can't simply give someone my phone number and expect it to just work, I don't see how this can happen. Can someone explain it more simply? Does it completely forego SIM cards? Will it 'just work', or is it more of a 'we made progress in this area, but not a lot of people are going to find it practical' thing like Replicant?
- icebraining 9y ago
  In the crowdsourcing page, they say it can be used with a regular carrier number, or with mobile data plan + VoIP, or just WiFi + VoIP (see section "A No-Carrier Phone?").
jancsika 9y ago
> The CPU will be an i.MX6/i.MX8, where we can separate the baseband modem from the main CPU, digging deeper and deeper to protect your privacy and isolate components for a strong security hardware stack. I'd like to know more about this separation. For example--can the phone boot without the baseband being powered on?
- ryukafalz 9y ago
  >Hardware Kill Switches for Camera, Microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and Baseband Sounds like they're planning a hardware kill switch for the baseband, so I would be surprised if the device couldn't boot without it.
- ansible 9y ago
  It isn't hard to design a phone with a completely separate baseband processor and wireless subsystem. People don't do it because it is more expensive than the integrated solutions. It also takes up more precious real estate on the PCBs. And uses more power. So if you're willing to compromise on all that, it can be done.
  - JoshTriplett 9y ago
    > It also takes up more precious real estate on the PCBs. There's no fundamental reason you have to use any more space to have the correct architecture (baseband as subordinate peripheral with no access to host); it's just a lot harder than buying a stock modem peripheral.
    - adamweld 9y ago
      The fundamental reason is that no chipset mfn is going to separate the modem from host on a single IC. Thus you are adding a second complex BGA package and interconnects that take up space.
  - petecox 9y ago
    On power drain, it's an internet phone, the GSM/LTE module only needs to be active when you're not in range of wifi. Which for certain use cases such as being at home in an office, much of the day it can be switched off. In urban areas, one might connect to wifi hotspots such as Fon (which in my country is branded by one of the telcos as Telstra Air).
pfooti 9y ago
I am sort of troubled by the crowdfund page. It is obviously designed to look like a kickstarter page, but it is in fact not a kickstarter. Say what you will about kickstarter, but I have questions. Will the campaign charge you even if it doesn't reach its goal? There is no indication one way or the other on this page. What are the refund / delivery guarantee policies here? KS ones are potentially controversial, but they at least are written down. Are those pictures of the phone actual pictures or renders / mockups? KS has explicit policies about that, but this context makes that unclear.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Will the campaign charge you even if it doesn't reach its goal? There is no indication one way or the other on this page. Just scroll down.. "What if you don’t reach the funding target? It will show that there is not enough interest in producing a device that focuses on security, privacy, and digital rights, which will be a tremendous social disappointment. If we don’t reach our target then all contributions will be fully refunded."
  - cyberpunk0 9y ago
    It might also just mean enough people who do care did not see it. This is the first time I'm hearing about any of these things
    - avaer 9y ago
      Or it could mean there is plenty of interest, but people don't agree this project is the right way to fund it. That answer rubs me the wrong way.
  - pfooti 9y ago
    Hmm, interesting. I will admit I missed that (as it was halfway through the FAQ, and I've got to say: passive aggressive). That said, they make it sound like you get charged up front when you back, and will get a refund if it fails to fully fund. This is a pretty significant departure from traditional crowdfund platforms (ks, igg) where you're charged when the campaign ends, only if it succeeds. Adding an extra two months of lockup to your money and "we promise we'll refund" just feels ... sketchy. I mean: I like what the purism people are doing, don't get me wrong. I'm a fan of their librem stuff, ever since the crowdsupply days. But like: is there a reason they're not doing this on crowdsupply? Again, it just feels like a dark pattern to use these visual cues to suggest kickstarter while not adhering to standard crowdfund policy.
mrhigat4 9y ago
I have doubts, but I've been waiting for a phone like this for a long time. I hope it works out and gets enough funding. I'm glad they didn't make compromises on the OS, hardware switches, etc. I wish more companies would cater to passionate yet non-mainstream markets. It's crazy a truly hackable linux phone doesn't exist today.
Nelkins 9y ago
Just pre-ordered one. These folks have done a great job on their Librem laptop line, and I have wanted a "FLOSS-ier" phone for a while now. And if it goes nowhere I get my money back! (allegedly)
- granitosaurus 9y ago
  > These folks have done a great job on their Librem laptop line Really? I've heard nothing but bad things about it. Starting from not being floss to just being a bad laptop with a bad linux distro.
unknown2374 9y ago
I couldn't find the single most important piece of information for me, the battery life. Is that not decided yet or has it been omitted for marketing convenience? I was thinking of signing up to get one but with that missing bit I don't want to take the risk.
- jug5 9y ago
  Battery life is the biggest unknown for me as well. I can't imagine it can be long enough.
- Brakenshire 9y ago
  They don't know the SoC / processor yet, no way they could say battery life at this stage.
skierscott 9y ago
The details: https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ > that can also become a full desktop computer with an option for a compatible keyboard, mouse, and monitor ... It can be a desktop computer and phone all-in-one. I'm interested to see their solution. How useable will the interface be?
- flashdance 9y ago
  Probably pretty good because it comes with GNOME
ZenoArrow 9y ago
I can't really afford a new phone right now, but I really want this to be a thing, and I think we're running out of chances for a FLOSS phone to take off, so I ordered one. I really hope it meets its target.
INTPenis 9y ago
I remember jumping on the N900 bandwagon. Hardware wise, for its time maybe, it was perfect with its full qwerty keyboard. Software was so bad it was tragic. You couldn't even trust phone calls to work. Clearly I want a FOSS phone to work but the market is miniscule and therefore the product quality will likely remain on a hobbyist level. Furthermore I tried the Jolla phone and that wasn't exactly FOSS but the small team could be compared to what you might see in a FOSS phone. And again it was barely useful. I also tried the ZTE Firefox OS phone, it felt like a toy and the OS was crippled.
- Arathorn 9y ago
  I think the plan here is to be hyperfocused on private/secure Comms and Browser and do that well. Many more apps can come from the wider Linux ecosystem as time goes on, but this is a very different proposition to another me-too FOSS alternative to iOS or Android.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- JoshTriplett 9y ago
  I used an N900 for years as my primary phone. It worked very well for me, including for calls. I eventually gave it up, solely because I wanted the ability to run specific Android applications. But honestly, if I had the power of a full Debian-based system, I wouldn't need that.
- eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  Maemo worked very well actually.
morganvachon 9y ago
If this campaign is as sketchy as their laptop was, no thanks. I already don't trust them because of their misdirection in that project, they have a ton of goodwill and trust to rebuild before they can be taken seriously. https://hackerfall.com/story/the-truth-about-purism-why-librem-is-not-the-same https://hackerfall.com/story/the-truth-about-purism-why-libr... http://www.pcworld.com/article/2960524/laptop-computers/why-linux-enthusiasts-are-arguing-over-purisms-sleek-idealistic-librem-laptops.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2960524/laptop-computers/why-...
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  Let's put it like this... many laptops can run a FLOSS operating system, but how many smartphones can you say the same about? There's only a handful I can think of, and most of those are no longer produced. Even if not every binary blob is removed, the opportunity to kickstart a FLOSS-based phone ecosystem is not one that comes along that often.
  - rtpg 9y ago
    Android is Apache licensed. There's a whole thing about the Play Services absorbing more of the features, and I feel like it's a great indicator of the difficulties with open source. A lot of people enjoy replacing the lowest level of the system with OSS. But consumers only notice that afterwards they have nothing on the highest level. I think the Raspberry Pi took the right approach here accepting the binary blob GPU but having the software stack otherwise be free. They got adoption because things were useful! And now they "just" have to solve the GPU problem, instead of a "rewrite all software " problem. I would be very excited by people who could offer a "skin " over Android (with its own set of apps) so the higher level stuff could be tackled. Once that part of the stack is nice, swapping out the backend will be an even easier pitch. The counterpoints I can think of: - If you do not trust the backend, hard to have proper security. - People are doing what they want to do! Lots of people like writing kernel-y code more than a dialer UI
    - ZenoArrow 9y ago
      > "There's a whole thing about the Play Services absorbing more of the features, and I feel like it's a great indicator of the difficulties with open source." Let's imagine a hypothetical scenario where Play Services were open source. How would this hold back Google from maintaining/growing their market share? As for developing for Android and swapping out the backend later, by that point your apps would be tied into the Android API calls, unless you intentionally make your apps cross-platform, at which point what do you gain from running Android? If it's just for the drivers then libhybris is an option. If you want the ability to run Android apps whilst you build up your own, this is something you can do with Sailfish OS, which you'll almost certainly be able to run on the Librem smartphone if it's released.
everheardofc 9y ago
>The whole idea of the phone is to provide unprecedented privacy, security and autonomy by running an entirely FOSS Debian-based GNU/Linux stack (even including CPU & GPU drivers!) Call me pessimistic but I don't think we will see a FOSS GPU driver anytime soon.
- petecox 9y ago
  The reason for choosing i.MX is that it can boot with a mainstream Linux kernel. https://github.com/etnaviv https://github.com/etnaviv
toolibre 9y ago
The first shots of the phone in the video have it surrounded by logos for Fedora, Arch, Suse, PureOS, etc. First sentence of second paragraph of text: "based on Debian" Why are you promoting the phone with a bunch of unrelated logos?
- Arathorn 9y ago
  I think the whole point of the phone is that it's a FLOSS-friendly hardware platform which can run whatever Linux you like (even if the default supported one is PureOS, based on Debian).
white-flame 9y ago
This phone's software may not track you, but the cellular network itself still does.
- robto 9y ago
  What's nice is you can turn off the baseband processor and make voip calls if you're on a wireless connection, so you can work around that.
recorpse 9y ago
That's pretty exciting considering the Blackphone is proprietary and Replicant isn't available for newer phones.
Hasknewbie 9y ago
> "The specifications are continuing to get pinned down, and will not be finalized until after the campaign ends" Big red flag right there. In my opinion it is unethical to ask for money via crowdfunding when you haven't even bothered with finalizing the spec first.
- fosco 9y ago
  as other sibling threads have commented I agree. I am really rooting for them and hope they get this right, being able to hack my phone like a desktop/laptop has been a dream of mine. I really look forward to what the end result is and I hope they knock this out of the park!

421 points by Arathorn 9y ago

I support the whole idea, but I think it's premature. The Riot app in my experience has a pretty unwelcoming UI/UX experience and is still insanely buggy. Things like Jitsi integration, widgets and a phone partnership should be after a solid, stable 1.0 MVP IMHO. Encryption is still opt-in and beta. So super supportive of the environment, the momentum and a native matrix phone partnership is the right move eventually, but please get it stable, fast and polished first before branching out too far.

Aaronn 9y ago
Matrix is really struggling on funding so they need these kinds of partnerships to allow them to continue making the software better. For those who are reading this and would like to help out please see the following blog post: https://matrix.org/blog/2017/07/19/status-update/ https://matrix.org/blog/2017/07/19/status-update/
Arathorn 9y ago
We're working as hard as we can on improving Riot's UI/UX and getting crypto out of beta. As others have said, partnerships like this help fund the team to get the core stuff in place. After all, this project (assuming the campaign is successful) is 2 months away anyway.
- carussell 9y ago
  What's the value proposition of building a whole new client? If your goal is to give people a client for your cool new protocol, why would you waste any development resources on squashing fiddly UI bugs of your own doing, rather than, say, providing a reference implementation by forking the Signal app and swapping out the pieces until it's talking Matrix instead of TextSecure? I see this mistake constantly. The ring.cx folks did the same thing. Inevitably, everyone ends up commenting how poor the app is—some of them even saying how much they'd like to be able to use it and would if it weren't for the UI. It wouldn't be so silly if there weren't plenty of essentially ready-made solutions for the problem.
  - Arathorn 9y ago
    1. Signal doesn't have a native Linux app (other than Electron) 2. The hope is to piggyback on one of the existing native Matrix SDKs or clients rather than write a whole new one. 3. One of the biggest complaints we hear about Matrix is that there is no native desktop app with parity to Riot yet. So this is our chance to fix that.
    - carussell 9y ago
      > Signal doesn't have a native Linux app (other than Electron) How is that an explanation for directing (apparently limited) resources into riot-android? > there is no native desktop app with parity to Riot yet Huh? The comparisons I made in my comment were to Signal and Ring, which are predominantly mobile messaging apps. The person you originally responded to was discussing Matrix on mobile. Why do you keep mentioning desktop? If there were any confusion, this is a thread about an announcement for a new smartphone.
      - Arathorn 9y ago
        Riot/Android doesn't run on Linux, so directing limited resources into it is fairly irrelevant. The point of this campaign is to fund us to work on a native app which can benefit desktop and handset users alike - whilst also supporting the core team so we can also work on the React, Android and iOS SDKs which power Riot. I keep mentioning desktop because this is a significant benefit of the campaign. The idea of somehow ripping out the core of the Signal or Ring apps and trying to bolt their UI onto Matrix SDKs is an interesting one, but in practice both protocols have significant differences to Matrix, and at best this would be a pretty big impedance mismatch. Of course, someone in the community is welcome to try to do it. Meanwhile, we'll keep plugging away at trying to make Riot kick ass (via the underlying Matrix SDKs), and add a native app to the pantheon too :)
      - confounded 9y ago
        > this is a thread about an announcement for a new smartphone The smartphone in question runs Debian.
    - 9y ago
tacoman 9y ago
>The Riot app in my experience has a pretty unwelcoming UI/UX experience and is still insanely buggy. I've setup my own Synapse server on a VPS and have my extended family of 12 people including an 85 year old grandmother using it on an iPad. It gets used daily for chat and picture sharing. I've come across a few minor problems on iOS, but overall I don't agree with that characterization.
orblivion 9y ago
> Encryption is still opt-in and beta This is the part that concerns me. https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ Moxie lays out a challenge to federation enthusiasts to prove him wrong that federated chat can be secure and have good usability. I would respectfully note that Matrix seems to be responding to the challenge with a chat client that is neither. Instead they seem to be doubling down on federation and integrations. Usability can be fixed, but the federation and multiple clients makes it a challenge. Security on the other hand is, again, concerning because it feels tacked on. It's not on by default because, again, it makes it complicated when you have multiple clients. Last time I tried, you could put in your password on the web client (browser encryption!) and join an existing conversation, and see all future posts by the people in the conversation, because suddenly they've accepted your new public key. I had to dig a little bit in the configs to find the current public keys for the clients in the conversation. Either they have to make a UX-friendly way of warning everybody that there's a new client, or accept that stealing an account password will let you snoop on conversations. I really appreciate their enthusiasm, and I hope someone gets federation right, but it just seemed like a mess. By contrast, I think that Signal recognized that you can work around the security vs usability tradeoff by trading off on a third vector: feature set. I think that we won't get a federated system until someone heeds Moxie's warnings and does some careful, creative thinking.
- Arathorn 9y ago
  > It's not on by default because, again, it makes it complicated when you have multiple clients This is simply not true. The reason it's not on by default is because we're still developing it and it's in beta. It's not tacked on; we've designed in E2E from the outset - but implementing it well in a decentralised manner is a huge amount of work; probably 5-6x more than in a centralised system like Signal. We're not going to enable it by default until we are 99.999% sure that it won't cause regressions over the non-e2e client. > Either they have to make a UX-friendly way of warning everybody that there's a new client I think you must have tried it a (very long) while ago - we've had the UnknownDeviceDialog since February. It looks like this (https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/matrix.org/mOOjVegIyiNaqJdLapRgfref https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/matrix.org/mOOj...), and warns you every time a new device is added to the room, and gives you the option of blacklisting it from receiving your messages if you don't trust it. Now, totally agreed that this UX is ugly and needs work, but this is NOTHING to do with the decentralised or federated nature of the protocol. It's simply that we currently are very resource constrained currently for working on web front-end issues. That said, if your ONLY priority is security, then Moxie's "the ecosystem is moving" probably has a point. After all, in an open ecosystem like Matrix, it's possible someone will fire up a buggy/malicious client and inadvertently compromise a room. However, if you value freedom as well as privacy, Matrix or OMEMO are basically your only choices.
drdaeman 9y ago
I think, homeserver software is also still somewhat immature. I'm waiting for Dendrite. I'm evaluating Synapse (as all the other servers say they're pre-alpha incomplete) for the last week or so, but one immediate issue I had is that when I had set it up, on my home low-power NAS it required more than 15 minutes (and 0.7GiB of memory out of 1GiB I've allocated to the container) at fully-saturated single CPU core to join #matrix:matrix.org. And it took no less than a minute to join a room with just 200 participants. Sure, that's just for the first time, but it still feels way too resource-heavy, compared to other chat systems. The machine has 10-year old Atom 330 CPU - which makes it an ancient relic, but hey, it has more than enough power to run XMPP (w/various transports), mail and web servers, and it just sits on a shelf in a kitchen, with a barely audible humming.
- Arathorn 9y ago
  Synapse's readme does try to spell out that it requires at least 2GB of RAM and a recent CPU. It is absolutely resource heavy, but not showstoppingly so in general. The comparison with XMPP is dubious as the protocols are completely different: it's like comparing a local filesystem with a distributed database and complaining that the DB is slower. That said, Dendrite should improve things a lot; we should have more stats in the near future but it seems to idle around 150MB of RAM and should run much better on ancient hardware. We are not bothering optimising synapse much further in favour of focusing on finishing Dendrite. Needless to say, we expect Dendrite to be finished well in time for the Librem 5 to go live, 18 months from now!

moosingin3space 9y ago

Their UI looks like it's based on Gnome -- I wonder if they wrote some extensions to make Gnome more phone-friendly. IMO great idea to use Matrix as the communication layer -- especially when double-ratchet is stable, it'll be able to provide the good UX of things like Signal on Android, iMessage, Google Duo, and FaceTime, but built on an open platform. Hope it does well!

swiley 9y ago
A Decade ago there was a sort of gnome for PDAs. I don't know if that's what this is.
- micheljones 9y ago
  Qtopia?
  - swiley 9y ago
    That's QT not GTK. Also QT is still used while the toolkit I'm thinking of isn't.
    - hedora 9y ago
      You might be talking about Enlightenment (not dead yet) or the openmoko gtk ui, though I forget its name too.
    - micheljones 9y ago
      Ah ok, I misread your comment.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- megous 9y ago
  Maemo?

AdmiralAsshat 9y ago

https://matrix.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/purism5.png https://matrix.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/purism5.p... Is this what the actual phone will look like? Some kind of context photo with a reference hand would be great, because the dimensions and shape otherwise suggest this would be comparable to holding a Kindle or Nexus 7 next to my head!

robto 9y ago
The details are available on the Purism[0] site. I really like that they are adding physical switches to control the microphone, camera, baseband, and bluetooth. And that they are giving a lot of thought to separating the baseband procecessor from the cpu. And that it will be an ip-based phone handset, which means I can use a regular linux os that respects my freedom. I'll have to learn more about PureOS! With matrix's e2e encryption based on the OWS system, we may see the first reasonable take on a privacy conscious smartphone. I was looking at the Dragonbox Pyra, but this seems even better. I'm pretty excited, I may actually upgrade from a dumbphone for the first time now if this comes out. [0]https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
- nathcd 9y ago
  > I was looking at the Dragonbox Pyra, but this seems even better. I've been following the Dragonbox Pyra for a while too -- I actually just sent a link to a co-worker this morning. The Librem 5 does seem really awesome, but what I really like about the Pyra is the physical keyboard. If I could have the Librem 5-alike in a Blackberry KeyOne or Pyra-like form factor, I would be one happy camper. In other words, I really want a device that could replace both my laptop and phone, in terms of productivity. It seems like the Dragonbox Pyra is more closely aligned to that ideal than the Librem 5.
  - robto 9y ago
    Well the nice thing about that is that this project will bring a nice telephony stack to all of linux, so if they succeed you can do exactly that!

deleted 9y ago

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jph 9y ago

Massive props to you all -- thank you for this step for freedom. Purism is doing some of the most exciting work in the field of personal privacy and consumer computing. The tech blog is terrific, the laptops are coming along nicely, and the team is making inroads deeper into the chipsets and drivers. Librem 5 crowdfunding: https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ Matrix on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/matrixdotorg https://www.patreon.com/matrixdotorg Purism blog posts: https://puri.sm/posts/ https://puri.sm/posts/

aloisdg 9y ago
Matrix on Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/matrixdotorg/ https://liberapay.com/matrixdotorg/

Accacin 9y ago

That looks really interesting. Their funding target seems quite high so I'm not entirely convinced that they'll be able to meet it. I will definitely try and support this project as I'd love to be able to move to a more open phone. Link to their crowd funding page: https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

bradfa 9y ago
I'm surprised you think that the funding target seems high. I personally believe their funding target is in the range of 10-20x too small to actually make a smart phone, especially when they plan to make all their own software and not simply reuse Android/Sailfish/Ubuntu as a starting point. I expect that just the certifications for the radios, both for various countries/government agencies and various phone carriers, to cost them many hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that cost has nothing to do with actually designing any of the hardware or software.
- bantunes 9y ago
  Don't think the phone is 100% in house. They're using a base OEM model from someone that happens to have opensource drivers for everything (which makes me think it's an older model). But even just for the software, it seems low.
  - bradfa 9y ago
    They say the hardware will use an i.MX6 or i.MX8 SoC, which I assume implies they are using the Freescale/NXP SoCs. i.MX6 isn't really intended for use in phones (afaik) and I don't know of any recent phones which use i.MX6 in them. i.MX8 isn't publicly available yet, but possibly they could leverage some other vendor's hardware phone design using i.MX8. However, based on the schedule they show in the pledge info, they already have the "PureOS I (CPU)" step mostly completed and they plan to be booting the hardware before the end of 2017, so this seems to make i.MX8 unlikely imho.
    - swiley 9y ago

akavel 9y ago

Do I understand correctly that it would be purely VoIP over GSM/2G/.../LTE? Where the particular VoIP implementation of choice is this "Matrix" protocol/ecosystem? Which potentially at some point (with enough financing?) may get some gateways enabling calls between Matrix phones like this one, and regular GSM/2G/... mobile phones?

Arathorn 9y ago
The phone will have normal GSM in it, as well as being Matrix native when on IP (i.e. shipping a native Matrix.org client as the default dialler/messaging app, which will work whenever you have IP connectivity). A stretch goal is to also provide Matrix<->PSTN connectivity, so that if you're on IP but don't have GSM (or don't have a SIM in the phone), then you could also place/receive calls with the PSTN from Matrix. (Obviously this would then be also available to the rest of the Matrix ecosystem too). (Source: I work on Matrix)
- ThatGeoGuy 9y ago
  For those of us less informed: assuming a Matrix <-> PSTN bridge exists, does that mean that one would be able to send and receive phone calls and SMS to existing GSM numbers via a dedicated VOIP number? I don't understand PSTN at all, but wouldn't giving all matrix users dedicated VOIP numbers be difficult and costly?
  - Arathorn 9y ago
    Yup, that's the idea. Given this was the Matrix team's dayjob before getting sucked into Matrix, it's something relatively easy to do - although yes, we'd have to pass through the call/SMS and numbering costs. Now, if only Matrix had a payments ecosystem... https://matrix.org/blog/2017/08/22/thoughts-on-cryptocurrencies/ https://matrix.org/blog/2017/08/22/thoughts-on-cryptocurrenc...
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  Is there a way to receive and send phone calls from my SIM card's phone number?

swiley 9y ago

If it really can run fully open GNU/Linux it's worth what they're asking.

ramshorns 9y ago
It sounds like they haven't decided whether there will be free WiFi and Bluetooth drivers or not, and that would make a huge difference for me at least. Everything else seems to be totally free and open source, except for the baseband, which is separated from the system, can be disabled, and doesn't really have an open source option.

grizzles 9y ago

I wish these guys would just use android from the get go. It's already running on i.mx6, so by switching now they would at least have a chance of making a decent product. They are literally throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars of excellent work that has been put into power optimization for no good reason. I've told the ceo there this like at least 3x but he is stubborn. > “Android is so frustrating! Trying to remove Google’s privacy invasion bit-by-bit removes functionality bit-by-bit, and you end up with a non-working phone. Purism will solve this by putting your privacy protection and security first.” — Zlatan Todorić, CTO This quote is nonsense. There are at least 3 projects (replicant,copperhead & another) that are shipping trees like this. It will be so much harder for them to create a phone that stays alive for more than an hour or two running a full linux desktop.

fredsir 9y ago
Appeal to futility... You can always just use the same old same old, but you aren’t gonna create something new - the thing of your dreams - by doing that. They might succeed in this, and if they do, it might be awesome!
- CharlesW 9y ago
  > You can always just use the same old same old, but you aren’t gonna create something new - the thing of your dreams - by doing that. One could argue the opposite — that you can build the thing of your dreams far better and faster by leveraging non-differentiating work done by others. For example: Even a decade in, iPhones use lots of materials and components from other vendors.[0][1] Maybe Android isn't the perfect OS choice. But building a phone without access to an ecosystem of apps relegates it to a curiosity for most, which seems like a shame. [0] http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/apple/where-are-apple-products-made-3633832/ http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/apple/where-are-apple-prod... [1] https://images.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Supplier-List.pdf https://images.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-S...
  - fredsir 9y ago
    To build a phone on top of Android, you would have to believe Android is a good system to build upon. I don't believe that is a fact though. There are lots of problems with Android. Sure, your phone gets access to a lot of apps from day one, but 99% of those apps are shit, so why bother. We've got so few mobile consumer OSs in use today, and I don't think any of them are particularly great, although I believe one of them are much better than the other. I welcome completely new approaches to it instead of the way it is today where we have Apples stuff, and then we have numerous companies that makes shitty Android stuff, and a few that makes some okay great Android phones. Lets get new stuff on the table, please.

XorNot 9y ago

Gotta say, I would buy this. Android is android, but a phone which ran Linux and Gnome I'd happily switch to at this point.

dwhabcdefg 9y ago
/me raises a glass to the dearly departed N900
- knewter 9y ago
  best mobile experience of my life. saved many a flailing server from mine while my now-wife was in the bathroom, avoiding destroying the date atmosphere. the n9 debacle cemented my hatred for ms

theEXTORTCIST 9y ago

This seems like a really cool device. One that I would certainly purchase. What weird stretch goals they have. I wonder if these are jokes? "$8m = Signatures of entire team printed inside the phone case $10m = Free encrypted VPN tunnel service for all backers for 1 year $20m = Candy Crush (clone) available for free"

mixedCase 9y ago
Jokes that I'm certain they would fulfill if they were to receive that much funding. I'm pretty sure they're simply not expecting those numbers.

xoroshiro 9y ago

As much as I want a FLOSS phone to succeed, I have my doubts. Then again, I'm not sure how all the Matrix stuff works, but if I can't simply give someone my phone number and expect it to just work, I don't see how this can happen. Can someone explain it more simply? Does it completely forego SIM cards? Will it 'just work', or is it more of a 'we made progress in this area, but not a lot of people are going to find it practical' thing like Replicant?

icebraining 9y ago
In the crowdsourcing page, they say it can be used with a regular carrier number, or with mobile data plan + VoIP, or just WiFi + VoIP (see section "A No-Carrier Phone?").

jancsika 9y ago

> The CPU will be an i.MX6/i.MX8, where we can separate the baseband modem from the main CPU, digging deeper and deeper to protect your privacy and isolate components for a strong security hardware stack. I'd like to know more about this separation. For example--can the phone boot without the baseband being powered on?

ryukafalz 9y ago
>Hardware Kill Switches for Camera, Microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and Baseband Sounds like they're planning a hardware kill switch for the baseband, so I would be surprised if the device couldn't boot without it.
ansible 9y ago
It isn't hard to design a phone with a completely separate baseband processor and wireless subsystem. People don't do it because it is more expensive than the integrated solutions. It also takes up more precious real estate on the PCBs. And uses more power. So if you're willing to compromise on all that, it can be done.
- JoshTriplett 9y ago
  > It also takes up more precious real estate on the PCBs. There's no fundamental reason you have to use any more space to have the correct architecture (baseband as subordinate peripheral with no access to host); it's just a lot harder than buying a stock modem peripheral.
  - adamweld 9y ago
    The fundamental reason is that no chipset mfn is going to separate the modem from host on a single IC. Thus you are adding a second complex BGA package and interconnects that take up space.
- petecox 9y ago
  On power drain, it's an internet phone, the GSM/LTE module only needs to be active when you're not in range of wifi. Which for certain use cases such as being at home in an office, much of the day it can be switched off. In urban areas, one might connect to wifi hotspots such as Fon (which in my country is branded by one of the telcos as Telstra Air).

pfooti 9y ago

I am sort of troubled by the crowdfund page. It is obviously designed to look like a kickstarter page, but it is in fact not a kickstarter. Say what you will about kickstarter, but I have questions. Will the campaign charge you even if it doesn't reach its goal? There is no indication one way or the other on this page. What are the refund / delivery guarantee policies here? KS ones are potentially controversial, but they at least are written down. Are those pictures of the phone actual pictures or renders / mockups? KS has explicit policies about that, but this context makes that unclear.

icebraining 9y ago
Will the campaign charge you even if it doesn't reach its goal? There is no indication one way or the other on this page. Just scroll down.. "What if you don’t reach the funding target? It will show that there is not enough interest in producing a device that focuses on security, privacy, and digital rights, which will be a tremendous social disappointment. If we don’t reach our target then all contributions will be fully refunded."
- cyberpunk0 9y ago
  It might also just mean enough people who do care did not see it. This is the first time I'm hearing about any of these things
  - avaer 9y ago
    Or it could mean there is plenty of interest, but people don't agree this project is the right way to fund it. That answer rubs me the wrong way.
- pfooti 9y ago
  Hmm, interesting. I will admit I missed that (as it was halfway through the FAQ, and I've got to say: passive aggressive). That said, they make it sound like you get charged up front when you back, and will get a refund if it fails to fully fund. This is a pretty significant departure from traditional crowdfund platforms (ks, igg) where you're charged when the campaign ends, only if it succeeds. Adding an extra two months of lockup to your money and "we promise we'll refund" just feels ... sketchy. I mean: I like what the purism people are doing, don't get me wrong. I'm a fan of their librem stuff, ever since the crowdsupply days. But like: is there a reason they're not doing this on crowdsupply? Again, it just feels like a dark pattern to use these visual cues to suggest kickstarter while not adhering to standard crowdfund policy.

mrhigat4 9y ago

I have doubts, but I've been waiting for a phone like this for a long time. I hope it works out and gets enough funding. I'm glad they didn't make compromises on the OS, hardware switches, etc. I wish more companies would cater to passionate yet non-mainstream markets. It's crazy a truly hackable linux phone doesn't exist today.

Nelkins 9y ago

Just pre-ordered one. These folks have done a great job on their Librem laptop line, and I have wanted a "FLOSS-ier" phone for a while now. And if it goes nowhere I get my money back! (allegedly)

granitosaurus 9y ago
> These folks have done a great job on their Librem laptop line Really? I've heard nothing but bad things about it. Starting from not being floss to just being a bad laptop with a bad linux distro.

unknown2374 9y ago

I couldn't find the single most important piece of information for me, the battery life. Is that not decided yet or has it been omitted for marketing convenience? I was thinking of signing up to get one but with that missing bit I don't want to take the risk.

jug5 9y ago
Battery life is the biggest unknown for me as well. I can't imagine it can be long enough.
Brakenshire 9y ago
They don't know the SoC / processor yet, no way they could say battery life at this stage.

skierscott 9y ago

The details: https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ > that can also become a full desktop computer with an option for a compatible keyboard, mouse, and monitor ... It can be a desktop computer and phone all-in-one. I'm interested to see their solution. How useable will the interface be?

flashdance 9y ago
Probably pretty good because it comes with GNOME

ZenoArrow 9y ago

I can't really afford a new phone right now, but I really want this to be a thing, and I think we're running out of chances for a FLOSS phone to take off, so I ordered one. I really hope it meets its target.

INTPenis 9y ago

I remember jumping on the N900 bandwagon. Hardware wise, for its time maybe, it was perfect with its full qwerty keyboard. Software was so bad it was tragic. You couldn't even trust phone calls to work. Clearly I want a FOSS phone to work but the market is miniscule and therefore the product quality will likely remain on a hobbyist level. Furthermore I tried the Jolla phone and that wasn't exactly FOSS but the small team could be compared to what you might see in a FOSS phone. And again it was barely useful. I also tried the ZTE Firefox OS phone, it felt like a toy and the OS was crippled.

Arathorn 9y ago
I think the plan here is to be hyperfocused on private/secure Comms and Browser and do that well. Many more apps can come from the wider Linux ecosystem as time goes on, but this is a very different proposition to another me-too FOSS alternative to iOS or Android.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
JoshTriplett 9y ago
I used an N900 for years as my primary phone. It worked very well for me, including for calls. I eventually gave it up, solely because I wanted the ability to run specific Android applications. But honestly, if I had the power of a full Debian-based system, I wouldn't need that.
eeZah7Ux 9y ago
Maemo worked very well actually.

morganvachon 9y ago

If this campaign is as sketchy as their laptop was, no thanks. I already don't trust them because of their misdirection in that project, they have a ton of goodwill and trust to rebuild before they can be taken seriously. https://hackerfall.com/story/the-truth-about-purism-why-librem-is-not-the-same https://hackerfall.com/story/the-truth-about-purism-why-libr... http://www.pcworld.com/article/2960524/laptop-computers/why-linux-enthusiasts-are-arguing-over-purisms-sleek-idealistic-librem-laptops.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2960524/laptop-computers/why-...

ZenoArrow 9y ago
Let's put it like this... many laptops can run a FLOSS operating system, but how many smartphones can you say the same about? There's only a handful I can think of, and most of those are no longer produced. Even if not every binary blob is removed, the opportunity to kickstart a FLOSS-based phone ecosystem is not one that comes along that often.
- rtpg 9y ago
  Android is Apache licensed. There's a whole thing about the Play Services absorbing more of the features, and I feel like it's a great indicator of the difficulties with open source. A lot of people enjoy replacing the lowest level of the system with OSS. But consumers only notice that afterwards they have nothing on the highest level. I think the Raspberry Pi took the right approach here accepting the binary blob GPU but having the software stack otherwise be free. They got adoption because things were useful! And now they "just" have to solve the GPU problem, instead of a "rewrite all software " problem. I would be very excited by people who could offer a "skin " over Android (with its own set of apps) so the higher level stuff could be tackled. Once that part of the stack is nice, swapping out the backend will be an even easier pitch. The counterpoints I can think of: - If you do not trust the backend, hard to have proper security. - People are doing what they want to do! Lots of people like writing kernel-y code more than a dialer UI
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    > "There's a whole thing about the Play Services absorbing more of the features, and I feel like it's a great indicator of the difficulties with open source." Let's imagine a hypothetical scenario where Play Services were open source. How would this hold back Google from maintaining/growing their market share? As for developing for Android and swapping out the backend later, by that point your apps would be tied into the Android API calls, unless you intentionally make your apps cross-platform, at which point what do you gain from running Android? If it's just for the drivers then libhybris is an option. If you want the ability to run Android apps whilst you build up your own, this is something you can do with Sailfish OS, which you'll almost certainly be able to run on the Librem smartphone if it's released.

everheardofc 9y ago

>The whole idea of the phone is to provide unprecedented privacy, security and autonomy by running an entirely FOSS Debian-based GNU/Linux stack (even including CPU & GPU drivers!) Call me pessimistic but I don't think we will see a FOSS GPU driver anytime soon.

petecox 9y ago
The reason for choosing i.MX is that it can boot with a mainstream Linux kernel. https://github.com/etnaviv https://github.com/etnaviv

toolibre 9y ago

The first shots of the phone in the video have it surrounded by logos for Fedora, Arch, Suse, PureOS, etc. First sentence of second paragraph of text: "based on Debian" Why are you promoting the phone with a bunch of unrelated logos?

Arathorn 9y ago
I think the whole point of the phone is that it's a FLOSS-friendly hardware platform which can run whatever Linux you like (even if the default supported one is PureOS, based on Debian).

white-flame 9y ago

This phone's software may not track you, but the cellular network itself still does.

robto 9y ago
What's nice is you can turn off the baseband processor and make voip calls if you're on a wireless connection, so you can work around that.

recorpse 9y ago

That's pretty exciting considering the Blackphone is proprietary and Replicant isn't available for newer phones.

Hasknewbie 9y ago

> "The specifications are continuing to get pinned down, and will not be finalized until after the campaign ends" Big red flag right there. In my opinion it is unethical to ask for money via crowdfunding when you haven't even bothered with finalizing the spec first.

fosco 9y ago
as other sibling threads have commented I agree. I am really rooting for them and hope they get this right, being able to hack my phone like a desktop/laptop has been a dream of mine. I really look forward to what the end result is and I hope they knock this out of the park!