7 ms·

Librem 5 general development report – October

121 points by ProfDreamer 8y ago

nsomaru 8y ago
The last news I read on this, the Librem 5 was slated to launch in April of 2019. Is this still the case? Is it usual for an ambitious project like this to be doing this sort of development (i.e. core dev, not polish) within 6 months of release? I'm really looking forward to this phone and will almost certainly move over if there is are decent mail, Whatsapp and Signal clients. Despite the cost and early adopter pains I'm likely to face :)
- pulsarpietro 8y ago
  Me too. I need safe cyber-space to be in :-)
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  > Is it usual for an ambitious project like this to be doing this sort of development (i.e. core dev, not polish) within 6 months of release? It's not usual to be doing a project like this at all. How many such projects can you point to? So nobody knows.
- 9712263 8y ago
  This phone is basically a Gnome Phone, so mail client will be Geary, which is decent enough. The anbox project is able to port Android apps into GNU/Linux. Though last time I tried, not very stable and crash very often. Whatsapp could be installed. Hope at release the project could be more stable and able to port to Librem 5.
  - beatgammit 8y ago
    WhatsApp isn't open source, and they don't have a client for that chip AFAIK, so getting WhatsApp working would require work from Facebook. Apps like Signal that are open source will likely be available.
- jhasse 8y ago
  Don't get your hopes up for WhatsApp.
gehsty 8y ago
I really worry about the sustainability of this company? Is it a sustainable business model? How secure will your phone be if they can't afford to pay developers or go under? Who do I contact if there is a hardware issue? So many questions. Also why do they have 'Buy now' links that take you to their kickstarter page, where you can 'pre-order' a phone that may or may not ship in Q3 2019? Seems a little shady. Also price jump of $800 for a compatible 24"monitor and a keyboard + mouse is insane... Does anyone think this has any market appeal outside of its kickstarter audience?
- gue5t 8y ago
  The point of the Librem 5 is not to make the most popular possible phone, it's to make a better phone than what is currently available. Markets only matter to capitalists. Real hackers share with each other to make things happen that markets do not comprehend. Whether this project will be a success, only time will tell, but it has nothing to do with the market.
  - xoa 8y ago
    >The point of the Librem 5 is not to make the most popular possible phone That's a strawman of GP's words. "The most popular" is absurd, but "minimally viable" is not particularly since security in a major Librem selling point and security is an active process, not a one-off. In turn sustainability matters, and for a hardware project that requires significantly more capital then a pure software project. It's not at all unreasonable to question that or attacking the company, Librem should have good answers there regardless. >Markets only matter to capitalists. Real hackers share with each other to make things happen that markets do not comprehend. What a ridiculous load of bunk. The Librem is not powered by good intentions and hacker ethos it's powered by silicon manufactured in an expensive capitalist fabricator, battery which is the same, etc. Ongoing development will need some capital, as will repairs and replacements and infrastructure. Nothing like a huge company but it's there, and it's rightfully utilizing the wider world. "Real hackers" are hacking, they're doing cool stuff utilizing things for purposes beyond what was intended, pushing the limits in ways not imagined perhaps even by the original designers. Sometimes this has no wider effect beyond a subsect, sometimes it subverts markets, sometimes it creates entire new markets. It's symbiotic with the wider world not cutoff from it! This can be true of not just tech but even law. When RMS and co worked out copyleft, they didn't just rage against the sheer existence of IP and seek to destroy it all or somehow fruitlessly deny that it existed, they hacked it to their own ends instead.
newnewpdro 8y ago
The decision to develop the first GNOME phone while also developing a hacker-friendly privacy-respecting physical device is going to be the death of this project. I don't understand why they didn't just focus on the hardware, make it very hackable for the community to develop the GNOME (or any other) OS for it. Isolate the baseband from the application processor and all the other privacy-respecting hardware decisions, land all the changes required for a mainline kernel to support everything upstream, and release it with AOSP running on it. Then invest in the community to replace AOSP (and sell more of your hardware to said community as it grows).
- craftyguy 8y ago
  > I don't understand why they didn't just focus on the hardware, make it very hackable for the community to develop the GNOME (or any other) OS for it. Probably because the "do everything yourself hackerz" are not the only target audience.. This company has a history of selling quality laptops with their PureOS distro on it, while also supporting the ability to put on other distros for those that want to.
- kop316 8y ago
  I purchased both an OpenPandora (https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/ https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/) and a Novena (https://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena_Main_Page https://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena_Main_Page). The OpenPandora came out with a fairly good OS to start out with, and they have continually supported it, so it has still been useful even 7 years after it was released. If it wasn't for the fact that I can no longer find it, I have no doubt that I would still be using it. I am a supporter for the Dragonbox Pyra, and I am hoping it will have the same support. I cannot say that I regret buying my Novena (as I learned a lot from it), but I rarely use it. I have to manually update the kernel and bootloader myself, and it is stuck on Linux 4.4, as the support and community just aren't there to help. I was able to figure out how to update it to the newest Debian, but there is no official support for it, so I imagine most folks are still on the previous version. As it stands, it marginally functions, but if I need to use a laptop again heavily, I will simply just buy a new laptop. I relate these two stories because I think the Librem 5 will need to show that it has a polished software stack day one to gain traction and grow a community. The Open Pandora was successful in that, and that allowed the creator to make two iterations of the Open Pandora and create the Pyra. The Novena did not have that nearly has much, and as a result, I am very doubtful that there will be a Novena + 1, and frankly after seeing the support it got, I am hesitant to purchase any other products made by Bunnie.
shmerl 8y ago
They should have used Plasma Mobile and Qt. Not Gnome/GTK.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  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...
  - shmerl 8y ago
    Sure, but I'm talking lack of resources concentration because of all these parallel efforts. Things will move slowly or too slowly.

121 points by ProfDreamer 8y ago

The last news I read on this, the Librem 5 was slated to launch in April of 2019. Is this still the case? Is it usual for an ambitious project like this to be doing this sort of development (i.e. core dev, not polish) within 6 months of release? I'm really looking forward to this phone and will almost certainly move over if there is are decent mail, Whatsapp and Signal clients. Despite the cost and early adopter pains I'm likely to face :)

pulsarpietro 8y ago
Me too. I need safe cyber-space to be in :-)
AsyncAwait 8y ago
> Is it usual for an ambitious project like this to be doing this sort of development (i.e. core dev, not polish) within 6 months of release? It's not usual to be doing a project like this at all. How many such projects can you point to? So nobody knows.
9712263 8y ago
This phone is basically a Gnome Phone, so mail client will be Geary, which is decent enough. The anbox project is able to port Android apps into GNU/Linux. Though last time I tried, not very stable and crash very often. Whatsapp could be installed. Hope at release the project could be more stable and able to port to Librem 5.
- beatgammit 8y ago
  WhatsApp isn't open source, and they don't have a client for that chip AFAIK, so getting WhatsApp working would require work from Facebook. Apps like Signal that are open source will likely be available.
jhasse 8y ago
Don't get your hopes up for WhatsApp.

gehsty 8y ago

I really worry about the sustainability of this company? Is it a sustainable business model? How secure will your phone be if they can't afford to pay developers or go under? Who do I contact if there is a hardware issue? So many questions. Also why do they have 'Buy now' links that take you to their kickstarter page, where you can 'pre-order' a phone that may or may not ship in Q3 2019? Seems a little shady. Also price jump of $800 for a compatible 24"monitor and a keyboard + mouse is insane... Does anyone think this has any market appeal outside of its kickstarter audience?

gue5t 8y ago
The point of the Librem 5 is not to make the most popular possible phone, it's to make a better phone than what is currently available. Markets only matter to capitalists. Real hackers share with each other to make things happen that markets do not comprehend. Whether this project will be a success, only time will tell, but it has nothing to do with the market.
- xoa 8y ago
  >The point of the Librem 5 is not to make the most popular possible phone That's a strawman of GP's words. "The most popular" is absurd, but "minimally viable" is not particularly since security in a major Librem selling point and security is an active process, not a one-off. In turn sustainability matters, and for a hardware project that requires significantly more capital then a pure software project. It's not at all unreasonable to question that or attacking the company, Librem should have good answers there regardless. >Markets only matter to capitalists. Real hackers share with each other to make things happen that markets do not comprehend. What a ridiculous load of bunk. The Librem is not powered by good intentions and hacker ethos it's powered by silicon manufactured in an expensive capitalist fabricator, battery which is the same, etc. Ongoing development will need some capital, as will repairs and replacements and infrastructure. Nothing like a huge company but it's there, and it's rightfully utilizing the wider world. "Real hackers" are hacking, they're doing cool stuff utilizing things for purposes beyond what was intended, pushing the limits in ways not imagined perhaps even by the original designers. Sometimes this has no wider effect beyond a subsect, sometimes it subverts markets, sometimes it creates entire new markets. It's symbiotic with the wider world not cutoff from it! This can be true of not just tech but even law. When RMS and co worked out copyleft, they didn't just rage against the sheer existence of IP and seek to destroy it all or somehow fruitlessly deny that it existed, they hacked it to their own ends instead.

newnewpdro 8y ago

The decision to develop the first GNOME phone while also developing a hacker-friendly privacy-respecting physical device is going to be the death of this project. I don't understand why they didn't just focus on the hardware, make it very hackable for the community to develop the GNOME (or any other) OS for it. Isolate the baseband from the application processor and all the other privacy-respecting hardware decisions, land all the changes required for a mainline kernel to support everything upstream, and release it with AOSP running on it. Then invest in the community to replace AOSP (and sell more of your hardware to said community as it grows).

craftyguy 8y ago
> I don't understand why they didn't just focus on the hardware, make it very hackable for the community to develop the GNOME (or any other) OS for it. Probably because the "do everything yourself hackerz" are not the only target audience.. This company has a history of selling quality laptops with their PureOS distro on it, while also supporting the ability to put on other distros for those that want to.
kop316 8y ago
I purchased both an OpenPandora (https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/ https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/) and a Novena (https://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena_Main_Page https://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena_Main_Page). The OpenPandora came out with a fairly good OS to start out with, and they have continually supported it, so it has still been useful even 7 years after it was released. If it wasn't for the fact that I can no longer find it, I have no doubt that I would still be using it. I am a supporter for the Dragonbox Pyra, and I am hoping it will have the same support. I cannot say that I regret buying my Novena (as I learned a lot from it), but I rarely use it. I have to manually update the kernel and bootloader myself, and it is stuck on Linux 4.4, as the support and community just aren't there to help. I was able to figure out how to update it to the newest Debian, but there is no official support for it, so I imagine most folks are still on the previous version. As it stands, it marginally functions, but if I need to use a laptop again heavily, I will simply just buy a new laptop. I relate these two stories because I think the Librem 5 will need to show that it has a polished software stack day one to gain traction and grow a community. The Open Pandora was successful in that, and that allowed the creator to make two iterations of the Open Pandora and create the Pyra. The Novena did not have that nearly has much, and as a result, I am very doubtful that there will be a Novena + 1, and frankly after seeing the support it got, I am hesitant to purchase any other products made by Bunnie.

shmerl 8y ago

They should have used Plasma Mobile and Qt. Not Gnome/GTK.

craftyguy 8y ago
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...
- shmerl 8y ago
  Sure, but I'm talking lack of resources concentration because of all these parallel efforts. Things will move slowly or too slowly.