15 ms·

The Librem 5 Development Roadmap and Progress

218 points by petethomas 9y ago

knob 9y ago
GO! Super happy to see the progress in this project. I was one of the early backers (as soon as I saw the news link). Keep at it everyone. Doesn't matter what Google announces or Apple... keep at it. This is going great places. =)
- craftyguy 9y ago
  Agreed! I can't wait to receive my development kit next year, and phone a few months after! I have but one regret: that I don't have more money to throw at this campaign.
seba_dos1 9y ago
When it comes to used SoC, booting GNU/Linux on it isn't really groundbreaking. I'm much more interested in i.mx6/i.mx8m's power consumption and heat generation. Those chips are often targeted for and used in automobile industry, with bulkier power supply and good cooling, so putting them in a phone might pose some big challenges. Nevertheless, as a guy who used to be active part of Openmoko, OpenPhoenux and Neo900 communities, I wish them luck!
- Brakenshire 9y ago
  What smartphone SoC has open drivers? If they can make a workable smartphone which runs on the mainline kernel, that seems like dramatic progress.
  - seba_dos1 9y ago
    It's not hard to boot plenty of SoCs on mainline kernel, plenty of open devices use TI OMAPs, for instance, that's pretty well supported. What's hard is to provide proper GPU acceleration, support for all included hardware and power management tailored for particular device. Seems like i.mx6/8 are good with the first one (sadly, OMAP sucks there), that's nice. However, regarding the rest - you don't expect that Librem 5 will be really usable as a phone on mainline Linux on launch and some time (possibly years) after launch, do you? GTA04 project has had (and still has) a massive aspiration to upstream all the kernel changes and drivers, but they're still not done after many years (although close), because a lot of things that actually make the mobile device usable are device specific hacks that rarely are accepted upstream. Now it boots on upstream kernel (or not, it changes from release to release), but if you really want to use it as a phone, you still have to use Goldelico kernel. Which is of course completely open, just not mainline. Earlier, with Neo Freerunner, the situation was similar, aside of the fact that amount of non-upstreamable hacks were much higher and there was no stuff like device tree back then, so nobody made any serious progress on upstreaming. Also, booting is one thing. Getting everything in shape to be usable as a every-day device with small battery is another. The road from "booting on mainline" to "workable smartphone on mainline" isn't doable in a year or two, when you also have to design and produce the device during that time. However, that's not a big issue at all. Mainline eventually will get better and better, and if you have active community and try to minimize the deviation from mainline, rebasing isn't that hard. What can be an issue is power and thermal requirements of used chipset. I don't know about any mobile device that has used it before (but that's doesn't mean it doesn't exist), and I've already seen projects rejecting them as "not for mobile", that's why I'm eagerly waiting for more info about this SoC's performance.
    - Brakenshire 9y ago
      Thanks for the answer, I'm intrigued by what you're saying about the hardware being unsuitable for mobile, surely these are fairly standard components? The range of CPU's they're discussing use off the peg A72 Cortex cores designed by ARM, mixed with some lower power cores in various configurations, using big.Little. All mobile chips massively over-run their thermal capacity, and have to throttle after some minutes running at full power. Work on keeping within the thermal envelope, managing the array of cores and parceling out tasks, seems more to do with software than hardware, and work which has to be done anyway for Linux to be able to function in that environment, and also to be a relatively generalizable problem. That seems to be why you'd support a project like this. Why do you need device specific hacks, and what about the hardware is inappropriate? Genuinely interested to know.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - _pmf_ 9y ago
      > What's hard is to provide proper GPU acceleration I'm still looking for a non-commercial BeagleBone Black image that includes the TI HW accelerated GPU drivers.
- xoroshiro 9y ago
  For those of us who just want Linux on the phone, but don't know much about hardware and low level stuff: What can we expect? How powerful are these going to be? I guess asking how they compare to current phones performance-wise is not the point of this phone, but it would be nice to know where this stands. Also, if it's not too early to make predictions, how long will the thing last battery-wise? Iirc the laptop situation in Linux had some stuff like powertop which helps, but it's still tricky.
- popopo1 9y ago
  The imx6 and imx8 are for the automobile industry but not the imx8m . Librem really wanted to use the M for the reason it used less power ,that's what they said anyway. I believe they will use the quad core A53 variant http://media.nxp.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=254228&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2233904 http://media.nxp.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=254228&p=irol-newsArtic...
microcolonel 9y ago
Man, if they can make a straightforward phone with a reasonably sized screen for people with normal hands (like my beloved Motorola Atrix HD from 2012!), and do it with only upstream kernels and free drivers and infrastructure, I'm in. I love the idea of running Arch Linux on my phone, it would vastly simplify the harsh divide between my workstation and my smartphone. There's also a distinct possibility of running OpenBSD on my phone in the future, which is where I'm increasingly going. The thing could probably run Android applications anyway, if it really needs to. There are projects out there that let you do this on desktop Linux today.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  > There's also a distinct possibility of running OpenBSD on my phone in the future How would this happen? Is OpenBSD working on it? Is someone porting OpenBSD to the Librem 5?
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    If there's enough information to have Linux on it, porting OpenBSD to it involves less intensive reverse engineering. The Mesa drivers run in userspace, so if a compatible OpenBSD KMS driver for the Vivante is made, you can run the same userspace graphics stack. i.MX6 support was added in September 2013. I don't think there's i.MX8 support yet, but it's probably not a herculean task to get it running.
- endgame 9y ago
  That's a lot of hoops for them to jump through, and I wish they succeed. At what point do you say "this is at least a step forward and I'll buy their stuff even though it might not be perfect"?
  - emXdem 9y ago
    I hope they succeed too. I tried to buy a laptop from them and it was a terrible experience from order to refund (and months waiting). Despite that I'm still rooting for them.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
CaptSpify 9y ago
I'm super excited to get a real linux phone. The Ubuntu phone is the only smart-phone I've had that I didn't hate. I really hope this takes off.
martin1975 9y ago
curious why not just go with Tizen as their baseline .... what else besides Android or iOS is polished enough w/an app ecosystem to have a fighting chance of survival? I so want this project to succeed.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Tizen isn't fully open source, makes you beholden to Samsung, which has little reason to fully commit since their entire business operates on Android phones, etc.
  - martin1975 9y ago
    Thanks - I was under the impression it is entirely open source - except maybe for proprietary blobs/drivers (in my mind, that's open source enough I suppose). Better Samsung than Google if you ask me... Canonical/Ubuntu tried something like this and failed miserably. I'm not sure how this is going to be different ... without some major backing down the line. Starting things and prototyping things is fine and dandy... but making this a viable competitor to the established players... that's a whole different ball game.
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      It depends what you call viable. Who's your market? How many do you need to sell to break even? If you're Microsoft or Amazon, you need your mobile product to take market share from Google and Apple, but if you can make a profit making a couple thousand phones for some people who want to buy them, that may be a perfectly successful business model. In my case, I want my phone to make calls, send texts, and browse the web. It'd be nice if it had some apps, but I probably don't need more than a dozen or two. If you don't need a giant rival ecosystem as your definition of success, it's much easier to succeed on a smaller scale.
      - pjmlp 9y ago
        As proven by Windows Phone, WebOS, FirefoxOS, Jolla, Blackberry,....
Jeaye 9y ago
For those interested in pledging, here's a quick link: https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ We just passed the $1M mark!
- benevol 9y ago
  Yes, please show the Ubuntu guy that he was wrong to abandon his mobile OS.
turblety 9y ago
So impressed with Purism's hard work and ethics. I'm so glad it looks like this will reach it's funding goal. I'm very surprised that the phone will have an open GPU. I've been looking for a laptop replacement for ages that has an open CPU and GPU. While I can avoid Intel like the plague and go straight for an ARM CPU, the GPU always tends to be a closed source binary blog. If Purism can crack this and get a full open source phone, I hope they build a lightweight laptop using the same sort of specs. This could mean avoiding the whole ME cleaner requirement for their Librem laptop range, removing the spyware [1] from all Intel chips. 1. https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel
- microcolonel 9y ago
  Any of the Qualcomm DragonBoards will perform considerably better than any i.MX8 chipset board AFAIK. Freedreno (Qualcomm Adreno driver in Mesa) is a lot farther along than Etnaviv for the time being. There's also v4l2-based hardware video decode in upstream kernels for (supported) Qualcomm chipsets. If you want a non-Intel desktop, you could also look to any of the high-performance AArch64 or Power boards with PCIe slots in them, and slot Radeon in.
  - craftyguy 9y ago
    I would rather support a chip maker with open hardware, even if currently not the most performant, than one which does nothing and relies on a crowd of volunteers to make it work.
- someinfoforyou 9y ago
  > If Purism can crack this and get a full open source phone, I hope they build a lightweight laptop using the same sort of specs. The chip they're using is from the i.MX line with Vivante GPU. The reason this chip has open source drivers is because of the etnaviv project, which was funded by bunnie and the backers for his Novena project. So in a sense, the laptop you want already exists and in fact came first. It's just a little pricey and kind of rough around the edges.
- tom_mellior 9y ago
Casseres 9y ago
Awesome, and I just discovered Puri.sm now accepts Monero as payment. I'll be placing my order in a few hours using Monero (this changed my mind from "maybe" to "definitely"), but I have a question: In the hopefully-unlikely case that the goal isn't met, how will you refund people who paid with either Bitcoin or Monero?
- throwaway1256 9y ago
  Regarding refunds: I funded the Librem 5 using Bitcoin, but the transaction didn't go through in time. I contacted them via mail, gave them a Bitcoin address, and got refunded. Unlike some other vendors I have dealt with in the past, they actually understand Bitcoin. So I'm optimistic this will work.
xvilka 9y ago
Too bad still closed source wireless: lte/3g/gsm modem, wifi firmware, bluetooth firmware, etc. If limit the support just to LTE, it would be much easier to port an existing LTE FOSS implementations. WiFi is a different beast, but easier to implement anyway, than LTE and Co.
- fabrice_d 9y ago
  What are the LTE FOSS implementations available? I could not find anything that seems usable.
khrm 9y ago
One of the organizations endorsing them is in need of funds also. https://matrix.org/blog/2017/07/07/a-call-to-arms-supporting-matrix/ https://matrix.org/blog/2017/07/07/a-call-to-arms-supporting...
- Arathorn 9y ago
  not for long, hopefully :)
  - aloisdg 9y ago
    Thank you for using liberapay by the way
freedomben 9y ago
Like many, I strongly hope this succeeds. My biggest concern is that the lack of apps and app ecosystem will doom the project to either low market adoption and/or failure. It would be fantastic if there were a way to run Android apps. Even if they need to be rebuilt for the platform, at least not requiring developers to re-write their app would be a huge start. Also getting support into things like React Native would be good. Most developers I know (including myself) are willing to build apps for different platforms, but aren't necessarily willing to make big code changes or do rewrites/ports that involve lots of effort. Whatever can be done to help make it easy for devs to get their apps running would likely be a good investment. Developers, developers, developers!
- 482794793792894 9y ago
  There's https://anbox.io/ https://anbox.io/. I don't know, though, if there's any limitation that prevents using this on the Librem 5.
  - freedomben 9y ago
    That definitely does look promising. On their website under "Convergent:" > Anbox scales across different form factors similar like Android does. It works on a laptop and a mobile phone. Additionally in the README.md on their Github page (https://github.com/anbox/anbox https://github.com/anbox/anbox): > Anbox ... can be used on mobile operating systems like Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish OS or Lune OS too. So conceivably something like this could be a great start.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  I wonder if we'll see Plasma support.
  - oelmekki 9y ago
    Highly probable : https://dot.kde.org/2017/09/14/plasma-mobile-and-purisms-librem-5-free-smartphone https://dot.kde.org/2017/09/14/plasma-mobile-and-purisms-lib... Although, it's obviously not done yet.
arca_vorago 9y ago
Please note the puri.sm team is looking for people to join their team and assist with things like UX/PureOS/Kernel stuff. Not affiliated, I justed recently learned about Librem 5 and got all excited and saw it on their website.
cJ0th 9y ago
Looking forward to this very much. The only downer: $599 for a phone is a lot of money. I understand that they have to cover many expenses. However, I hope they'll also offer phones for poorer people. In the end, privacy should not be a luxury.
- Tepix 9y ago
  If you need something cheaper and sooner, get a Nexus 5X and install Copperhead OS on it.
Tepix 9y ago
In this update they now consider it highly likely that the phone will get the i.mx8 CPU. Releasing the $599 Librem 5 phone with the outdated i.mx6 CPU (quad core Cortex A9, ARMv7-A from 2011, like the Samsung Galaxy S3) would be a disaster.
mariushn 9y ago
EU should fund this, besides complaining about Google/Apple monopolies and US companied not paying EU tax

218 points by petethomas 9y ago

knob 9y ago

GO! Super happy to see the progress in this project. I was one of the early backers (as soon as I saw the news link). Keep at it everyone. Doesn't matter what Google announces or Apple... keep at it. This is going great places. =)

craftyguy 9y ago
Agreed! I can't wait to receive my development kit next year, and phone a few months after! I have but one regret: that I don't have more money to throw at this campaign.

seba_dos1 9y ago

When it comes to used SoC, booting GNU/Linux on it isn't really groundbreaking. I'm much more interested in i.mx6/i.mx8m's power consumption and heat generation. Those chips are often targeted for and used in automobile industry, with bulkier power supply and good cooling, so putting them in a phone might pose some big challenges. Nevertheless, as a guy who used to be active part of Openmoko, OpenPhoenux and Neo900 communities, I wish them luck!

Brakenshire 9y ago
What smartphone SoC has open drivers? If they can make a workable smartphone which runs on the mainline kernel, that seems like dramatic progress.
- seba_dos1 9y ago
  It's not hard to boot plenty of SoCs on mainline kernel, plenty of open devices use TI OMAPs, for instance, that's pretty well supported. What's hard is to provide proper GPU acceleration, support for all included hardware and power management tailored for particular device. Seems like i.mx6/8 are good with the first one (sadly, OMAP sucks there), that's nice. However, regarding the rest - you don't expect that Librem 5 will be really usable as a phone on mainline Linux on launch and some time (possibly years) after launch, do you? GTA04 project has had (and still has) a massive aspiration to upstream all the kernel changes and drivers, but they're still not done after many years (although close), because a lot of things that actually make the mobile device usable are device specific hacks that rarely are accepted upstream. Now it boots on upstream kernel (or not, it changes from release to release), but if you really want to use it as a phone, you still have to use Goldelico kernel. Which is of course completely open, just not mainline. Earlier, with Neo Freerunner, the situation was similar, aside of the fact that amount of non-upstreamable hacks were much higher and there was no stuff like device tree back then, so nobody made any serious progress on upstreaming. Also, booting is one thing. Getting everything in shape to be usable as a every-day device with small battery is another. The road from "booting on mainline" to "workable smartphone on mainline" isn't doable in a year or two, when you also have to design and produce the device during that time. However, that's not a big issue at all. Mainline eventually will get better and better, and if you have active community and try to minimize the deviation from mainline, rebasing isn't that hard. What can be an issue is power and thermal requirements of used chipset. I don't know about any mobile device that has used it before (but that's doesn't mean it doesn't exist), and I've already seen projects rejecting them as "not for mobile", that's why I'm eagerly waiting for more info about this SoC's performance.
  - Brakenshire 9y ago
    Thanks for the answer, I'm intrigued by what you're saying about the hardware being unsuitable for mobile, surely these are fairly standard components? The range of CPU's they're discussing use off the peg A72 Cortex cores designed by ARM, mixed with some lower power cores in various configurations, using big.Little. All mobile chips massively over-run their thermal capacity, and have to throttle after some minutes running at full power. Work on keeping within the thermal envelope, managing the array of cores and parceling out tasks, seems more to do with software than hardware, and work which has to be done anyway for Linux to be able to function in that environment, and also to be a relatively generalizable problem. That seems to be why you'd support a project like this. Why do you need device specific hacks, and what about the hardware is inappropriate? Genuinely interested to know.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - _pmf_ 9y ago
    > What's hard is to provide proper GPU acceleration I'm still looking for a non-commercial BeagleBone Black image that includes the TI HW accelerated GPU drivers.
xoroshiro 9y ago
For those of us who just want Linux on the phone, but don't know much about hardware and low level stuff: What can we expect? How powerful are these going to be? I guess asking how they compare to current phones performance-wise is not the point of this phone, but it would be nice to know where this stands. Also, if it's not too early to make predictions, how long will the thing last battery-wise? Iirc the laptop situation in Linux had some stuff like powertop which helps, but it's still tricky.
popopo1 9y ago
The imx6 and imx8 are for the automobile industry but not the imx8m . Librem really wanted to use the M for the reason it used less power ,that's what they said anyway. I believe they will use the quad core A53 variant http://media.nxp.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=254228&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2233904 http://media.nxp.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=254228&p=irol-newsArtic...

microcolonel 9y ago

Man, if they can make a straightforward phone with a reasonably sized screen for people with normal hands (like my beloved Motorola Atrix HD from 2012!), and do it with only upstream kernels and free drivers and infrastructure, I'm in. I love the idea of running Arch Linux on my phone, it would vastly simplify the harsh divide between my workstation and my smartphone. There's also a distinct possibility of running OpenBSD on my phone in the future, which is where I'm increasingly going. The thing could probably run Android applications anyway, if it really needs to. There are projects out there that let you do this on desktop Linux today.

forapurpose 9y ago
> There's also a distinct possibility of running OpenBSD on my phone in the future How would this happen? Is OpenBSD working on it? Is someone porting OpenBSD to the Librem 5?
- microcolonel 9y ago
  If there's enough information to have Linux on it, porting OpenBSD to it involves less intensive reverse engineering. The Mesa drivers run in userspace, so if a compatible OpenBSD KMS driver for the Vivante is made, you can run the same userspace graphics stack. i.MX6 support was added in September 2013. I don't think there's i.MX8 support yet, but it's probably not a herculean task to get it running.
endgame 9y ago
That's a lot of hoops for them to jump through, and I wish they succeed. At what point do you say "this is at least a step forward and I'll buy their stuff even though it might not be perfect"?
- emXdem 9y ago
  I hope they succeed too. I tried to buy a laptop from them and it was a terrible experience from order to refund (and months waiting). Despite that I'm still rooting for them.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

CaptSpify 9y ago

I'm super excited to get a real linux phone. The Ubuntu phone is the only smart-phone I've had that I didn't hate. I really hope this takes off.

martin1975 9y ago

curious why not just go with Tizen as their baseline .... what else besides Android or iOS is polished enough w/an app ecosystem to have a fighting chance of survival? I so want this project to succeed.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Tizen isn't fully open source, makes you beholden to Samsung, which has little reason to fully commit since their entire business operates on Android phones, etc.
- martin1975 9y ago
  Thanks - I was under the impression it is entirely open source - except maybe for proprietary blobs/drivers (in my mind, that's open source enough I suppose). Better Samsung than Google if you ask me... Canonical/Ubuntu tried something like this and failed miserably. I'm not sure how this is going to be different ... without some major backing down the line. Starting things and prototyping things is fine and dandy... but making this a viable competitor to the established players... that's a whole different ball game.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    It depends what you call viable. Who's your market? How many do you need to sell to break even? If you're Microsoft or Amazon, you need your mobile product to take market share from Google and Apple, but if you can make a profit making a couple thousand phones for some people who want to buy them, that may be a perfectly successful business model. In my case, I want my phone to make calls, send texts, and browse the web. It'd be nice if it had some apps, but I probably don't need more than a dozen or two. If you don't need a giant rival ecosystem as your definition of success, it's much easier to succeed on a smaller scale.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      As proven by Windows Phone, WebOS, FirefoxOS, Jolla, Blackberry,....

Jeaye 9y ago

For those interested in pledging, here's a quick link: https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ We just passed the $1M mark!

benevol 9y ago
Yes, please show the Ubuntu guy that he was wrong to abandon his mobile OS.

turblety 9y ago

So impressed with Purism's hard work and ethics. I'm so glad it looks like this will reach it's funding goal. I'm very surprised that the phone will have an open GPU. I've been looking for a laptop replacement for ages that has an open CPU and GPU. While I can avoid Intel like the plague and go straight for an ARM CPU, the GPU always tends to be a closed source binary blog. If Purism can crack this and get a full open source phone, I hope they build a lightweight laptop using the same sort of specs. This could mean avoiding the whole ME cleaner requirement for their Librem laptop range, removing the spyware [1] from all Intel chips. 1. https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel

microcolonel 9y ago
Any of the Qualcomm DragonBoards will perform considerably better than any i.MX8 chipset board AFAIK. Freedreno (Qualcomm Adreno driver in Mesa) is a lot farther along than Etnaviv for the time being. There's also v4l2-based hardware video decode in upstream kernels for (supported) Qualcomm chipsets. If you want a non-Intel desktop, you could also look to any of the high-performance AArch64 or Power boards with PCIe slots in them, and slot Radeon in.
- craftyguy 9y ago
  I would rather support a chip maker with open hardware, even if currently not the most performant, than one which does nothing and relies on a crowd of volunteers to make it work.
someinfoforyou 9y ago
> If Purism can crack this and get a full open source phone, I hope they build a lightweight laptop using the same sort of specs. The chip they're using is from the i.MX line with Vivante GPU. The reason this chip has open source drivers is because of the etnaviv project, which was funded by bunnie and the backers for his Novena project. So in a sense, the laptop you want already exists and in fact came first. It's just a little pricey and kind of rough around the edges.
tom_mellior 9y ago

Casseres 9y ago

Awesome, and I just discovered Puri.sm now accepts Monero as payment. I'll be placing my order in a few hours using Monero (this changed my mind from "maybe" to "definitely"), but I have a question: In the hopefully-unlikely case that the goal isn't met, how will you refund people who paid with either Bitcoin or Monero?

throwaway1256 9y ago
Regarding refunds: I funded the Librem 5 using Bitcoin, but the transaction didn't go through in time. I contacted them via mail, gave them a Bitcoin address, and got refunded. Unlike some other vendors I have dealt with in the past, they actually understand Bitcoin. So I'm optimistic this will work.

xvilka 9y ago

Too bad still closed source wireless: lte/3g/gsm modem, wifi firmware, bluetooth firmware, etc. If limit the support just to LTE, it would be much easier to port an existing LTE FOSS implementations. WiFi is a different beast, but easier to implement anyway, than LTE and Co.

fabrice_d 9y ago
What are the LTE FOSS implementations available? I could not find anything that seems usable.

khrm 9y ago

One of the organizations endorsing them is in need of funds also. https://matrix.org/blog/2017/07/07/a-call-to-arms-supporting-matrix/ https://matrix.org/blog/2017/07/07/a-call-to-arms-supporting...

Arathorn 9y ago
not for long, hopefully :)
- aloisdg 9y ago
  Thank you for using liberapay by the way

freedomben 9y ago

Like many, I strongly hope this succeeds. My biggest concern is that the lack of apps and app ecosystem will doom the project to either low market adoption and/or failure. It would be fantastic if there were a way to run Android apps. Even if they need to be rebuilt for the platform, at least not requiring developers to re-write their app would be a huge start. Also getting support into things like React Native would be good. Most developers I know (including myself) are willing to build apps for different platforms, but aren't necessarily willing to make big code changes or do rewrites/ports that involve lots of effort. Whatever can be done to help make it easy for devs to get their apps running would likely be a good investment. Developers, developers, developers!

482794793792894 9y ago
There's https://anbox.io/ https://anbox.io/. I don't know, though, if there's any limitation that prevents using this on the Librem 5.
- freedomben 9y ago
  That definitely does look promising. On their website under "Convergent:" > Anbox scales across different form factors similar like Android does. It works on a laptop and a mobile phone. Additionally in the README.md on their Github page (https://github.com/anbox/anbox https://github.com/anbox/anbox): > Anbox ... can be used on mobile operating systems like Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish OS or Lune OS too. So conceivably something like this could be a great start.
djsumdog 9y ago
I wonder if we'll see Plasma support.
- oelmekki 9y ago
  Highly probable : https://dot.kde.org/2017/09/14/plasma-mobile-and-purisms-librem-5-free-smartphone https://dot.kde.org/2017/09/14/plasma-mobile-and-purisms-lib... Although, it's obviously not done yet.

arca_vorago 9y ago

Please note the puri.sm team is looking for people to join their team and assist with things like UX/PureOS/Kernel stuff. Not affiliated, I justed recently learned about Librem 5 and got all excited and saw it on their website.

cJ0th 9y ago

Looking forward to this very much. The only downer: $599 for a phone is a lot of money. I understand that they have to cover many expenses. However, I hope they'll also offer phones for poorer people. In the end, privacy should not be a luxury.

Tepix 9y ago
If you need something cheaper and sooner, get a Nexus 5X and install Copperhead OS on it.

Tepix 9y ago

In this update they now consider it highly likely that the phone will get the i.mx8 CPU. Releasing the $599 Librem 5 phone with the outdated i.mx6 CPU (quad core Cortex A9, ARMv7-A from 2011, like the Samsung Galaxy S3) would be a disaster.

mariushn 9y ago

EU should fund this, besides complaining about Google/Apple monopolies and US companied not paying EU tax