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Librem 5 Phone Progress Report
- 24gttghh 9y agoI sincerely hope this project continues to forge ahead! But, I'm wondering if any thought is being given to the development of 5G devices by Purism, or is that milestone for the market still a ways off?
- voltagex_ 9y agoAre there any 5G chipsets available for purchase in the quantaties Purism can afford? Are there any networks around yet?
- 24gttghh 9y agoI have no idea that's why I am asking HN.
- thg 9y ago> Are there any networks around yet? Estonia has one. https://www.ericsson.com/en/news/2017/9/5g-goes-live-in-the-port-of-tallinn https://www.ericsson.com/en/news/2017/9/5g-goes-live-in-the-... And Verizon announced that they want to build 5G networks in up to 5 US cities this year. https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-launch-5g-residential-broadband-services-5-markets-2018 https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-launch-5g-residen...
- andrepd 9y ago5G isn't even standardized, let alone having networks and devices ready for production. That's a ludicrous thing for the Librem 5 team to be concerned about.
- 24gttghh 9y agoLudicrous? It was just a question guys... In my own words: > or is that milestone for the market still a ways off?
- mangecoeur 9y ago> collaboration with GNOME and KDE Free software, or "why do anything once when you can do it twice for twice the cost and half as good?"
- lightdot 9y agoIf you want to make a committee and decide for everybody what should or shouldn't be worked on, by all means, go ahead. Or agitate against projects online, that works too. Should be a fun for you and funny for most others. Or you could just contribute to a project you find suitable, for whatever reason. Should be fun for everyone.
- hedora 9y agoThis startup isn’t going to prevent things from being worked on by others, but if they can’t decide basic things like which gui toolkit to use, then they’ll burn through their (extremely limited) funding well before they have a working, let alone competitive, product. The mistake of “support every option in the community for version 1.0” has happened before. I suggest reading an OpenMoko postmortem (especially if you are somehow involved with this project). For this product to succeed they need to minimize the amount of time and resources they spend getting to a phone that works as a daily driver. Someone else can port qt/gtk/elightenment/etc to it after that happens. Otherwise, there will be no sustainable hardware platform to port those things to.
- andrepd 9y agoYeah, who needs choice! Let's appoint someone to decide for everyone. Are you available?
- mangecoeur 9y agoNot that this singular comment is going to help reform free software culture anytime soon, but this business of choice needs to be examined a bit. Simply adding more choices is not an advantage by itself. Have 10 choices which are all bad is not better than having 1 bad option. In the case of free software, there is a limited resource of people's time and skills. Adding more choices means spreading that resource more thinly - you basically make things worse by having more choices. Sadly the community is more fractious even than most political landscapes, so the probability of convergence and de-duplication of effort is basically zero and the linux desktop will always be a bit half-baked.
- revelation 9y agoFrom our contact from the Etnaviv developers we know that they are heavily working on the i.MX8M support so we can expect that Etnaviv will be working on it within the year. What exactly are people funding Librem for if not to actually work on the most crucial component, the GPU driver? I guess it doesn't really matter because if they want to have any hope of delivering they will be knee deep into Mesa and DRM before they know it. This isn't a blob you just copy into /vendor. But their lax attitude kind of spells doom for the chances of this crowdfunding project. Edit: whoops, they don't even want to use Android! But judging from their mockup renders they expect to have something just as good.
- kuschku 9y ago> Edit: whoops, they don't even want to use Android! But judging from their mockup renders they expect to have something just as good. Their mockup renders were with actual software – the KDE and Gnome desktops already support mobile natively, and there’s more and more software for these environments available as well.
- craftyguy 9y ago> Edit: whoops, they don't even want to use Android! But judging from their mockup renders they expect to have something just as good. By not using Android, they automatically have something better.
- wyager 9y agoI bought my purism laptop back in mid October and it still hasn’t been shipped yet. I can’t imagine the timeline for something that doesn’t have a processor picked out yet.
- meuk 9y agoThat sucks. What did they state about the shipping up front? How has their communication been?
- orblivion 9y agoSimilar story for me, I think November. I checked back in I think in December and they told me they had run out of stock. I was told early January (well, here we are, still waiting). On the other hand my friend ordered just before me and she got hers pretty quick. I guess she got the last one, hah.
- wyager 9y agoI ordered before they had them in stock. They estimated mid november to start shipping. They started shipping some late nov/early December. I asked for a TPM to be installed on my laptop, which they are apparently doing by hand. This is what they attributed the extra ~6 weeks and counting delay on top of the original delay to. Last I heard after I reached out to them (December) they hoped to ship “second half of January”. They did not mention this when I added the TPM to my order. Not super happy about this obviously :/
- nabeards 9y agoI'm excited to see how this goes. I've been lamenting to friends of late how I don't feel there is anyone out there innovating on hardware/software to compete with the likes of Apple/MS/Google, but I see a ray of hope in puri.sm.
- bryanlarsen 9y agoIMO, Purism's biggest innovation is their business plan, they're profitable selling a small number of phones. The Ubuntu Edge failed their crowdfunding campaign with $12M pledged; the Purism succeeded with $2.5M. The business plans of Nokia, OpenMoko, Firefox and Ubuntu all depended on selling millions of phones. Built on the ashes of those efforts, Purism appears to have a viable business plan making good profits selling many thousands.
- nextos 9y agoNokia's N770-N9 Maemo/Meego saga was profitable despite being a side-project and having little to no marketing. It's the best mobile platform I've ever tried. After all, it was just a tweaked Debian distro. It's exciting to see Purism might head the pure Linux stack way, not just a de-Googled Android route. I also wish Jolla eventually open sources Sailfish, or gets bought by someone who does this.
- shmerl 9y agoI think what's helping here is also gradual commoditization of mobile hardware components.
- seba_dos1 9y agoNokia (Maemo) - not really, it was more of a side project that worked pretty well for them and still would with such volumes as it got. They had a chance to turn it into something bigger, but waited for too long, playing internal battles between Maemo and Symbian teams, so eventually Microsoft came and pulled out the plug. OpenMoko - not really, it was major mismanagement in other areas (and some poor luck) that killed it, but AFAIR production volume was actually being predicted quite well. Firefox OS, Ubuntu Edge - sure.
- IshKebab 9y agoWait, so they're not using Android? They're going to try and make their own phone OS?! Yeah good luck with that.
- shmerl 9y agoThat's the point. No Android. They aren't going to make a whole new OS, they are using Linux but with conventional glibc and graphics stack (Mesa / Wayland). They are relying on Etnaviv: https://github.com/etnaviv https://github.com/etnaviv That's a good thing. There is more than enough Android around already, we need proper Wayland based mobile Linux with open drivers, that also works on a decent usable device (and that it's privacy respectful is a huge bonus too). Jolla for example never opened up their SailfishOS despite multiple promises (it's just too hard and not a priority for them). So Librem 5 can be that option at last.
- Fnoord 9y agoWould love to see OSes based on KDE Mobile or whatever it is called these days. Qt is a solid framework. Fairphone Open [1] for FP2 is based on Android but completely open source. You can run it with GCM (which isn't open source) or without. You can run LineageOS (with or without microG), and there are unofficial ports of Ubuntu Touch and SailfishOS. The phone is also modular though the hardware is slightly out of date for 2018 standards. [1] https://code.fairphone.com/projects/fairphone-2-official-releases.html https://code.fairphone.com/projects/fairphone-2-official-rel...
- shmerl 9y ago> Would love to see OSes based on KDE Mobile or whatever it is called these days. Purism said, they are working with KDE developers to support Plasma Mobile on Librem 5. I wish though Plasma Mobile would get rid of those archaic on screen buttons, and would adopt SailfishOS style swipes navigation. Or at least they should make that an option. KDE is after all well known for customization.
- 9y ago
- shmerl 9y agoI wish them success. I didn't back it personally though, since hardware projects are very risky. Even Jolla tablet failed, and as a backer I'm still waiting for my money back. Mobile handsets are a whole level harder to make than tablets. But I'll surely buy Librem 5 once it will come out. On a side note, when will they add etnaviv to Mesa's features.txt? So far it can't be shown in Mesa matrix: https://mesamatrix.net https://mesamatrix.net
- bonsai80 9y agoI'm similarly worried about it not working out in the end (perhaps because they have my money now!), but the part that most gives me hope is that these guys have already worked out how to run a successful open hardware business at lower quantities. Given the terrible track record of others trying this route, that business knowledge seems very valuable. I remain hopeful and excited :)
- meuk 9y agoThe i.MX6 CPU is, by the way, the CPU that is used in the opensource Novena laptop. Apparently it is a reasonably powerful processor, but more importantly, it doesn't require an NDA to access the datasheet. I am not sure how things will be for the i.MX8, but I certainly hope that they will continue this practice.
- revelation 9y agoThere are no datasheets for the Vivante GPU that NXP integrate as a silicon blob.
- jesse_m 9y agohttps://www.nxp.com/docs/en/reference-manual/IMX8MDQLQRM.pdf https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/reference-manual/IMX8MDQLQRM.pdf Seems like it is available
- meuk 9y agoNice, I actually looked for it in December but it wasn't there yet. Looks like I just missed the boat.
- j_s 9y agoAnyone able to comment on how Spectre is being addressed for this processor and/or even in general by its manufacturer? https://community.nxp.com/thread/467234 https://community.nxp.com/thread/467234 (2018-01-11) basically says NXP will work with customers privately and end users should contact their OEMs. https://puri.sm/posts/purism-patches-meltdown-and-spectre-variant-2-both-included-in-all-new-librem-laptops https://puri.sm/posts/purism-patches-meltdown-and-spectre-va... appears to only cover Intel CPUs.
- bradfa 9y agoi.MX6 uses Cortex-A9 cores so is affected by spectre. ARM has some good info on how to deal with it: https://developer.arm.com/support/security-update https://developer.arm.com/support/security-update i.MX8M will use Cortex-A53 cores so is not affected by spectre. EDIT: Clarified that i.MX8M only has Cortex-A53 cores. Some i.MX8 parts will have Cortex-A72 cores which are affected by spectre. i.MX8M is the version discussed by Purism's post.
- jancsika 9y agoHas Purism allocated the resources necessary to both reverse-engineer the Vivante GC7000Lite and provide a fully working set of free software drivers for it?
- grizzles 9y agoThey are likely to fail because they are under capitalized for what they are trying to do. The manufacturing processes to produce a decent phone are fiendishly complex. The cost of equipment to do basic quality assurance of the hardware stretch into the millions of dollars. If (and it's a HUGE if) they are able to ship, it's because they will have put all their trust into their manufacturer, and the manufacturer that built the product for them delivered. > One of the big tasks of our software and design teams, working with our partners (GNOME, KDE, Matrix, Nextcloud, and Monero), will be to create a proper User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) for a phone screen. No it's not. They should lay off all those people and spend all the money on QA / testing hw iterations. The strategy should be to try to spend the $2M as miserly as possible, until they have something that looks like a phone and passes a crapload of software QA tests. For what they have and because their prospects of raising vc cash are dim, burning 150K/month on ui & framework building is not a good strategy.
- O_H_E 9y agoThoughtful quality insight, hope it turns out wrong :)
- grizzles 9y agoI hope so too for their backers sake. There is another dimension to this too that I thought of after my last post. Their potential partners can be grouped into two categories. Companies that have produced phones before and companies that haven't but may claim related expertise. The former group are competitors to Purism and have a strong economic incentive to stop the commodification of the phone platform, esp for a relatively small payday. For the latter group, they would be essentially funding another company's R&D process. Imo it would be a fatal mistake to choose a fabricator that hasn't produced a phone before. It's so crazy that the latter idea should be dismissed entirely.
- woodandsteel 9y agoSeems to me there would be lots of organizations out there, like corporations, that are deathly afraid of spying and hacking, and would love to be able to buy something like this.