9 ms·

So for me, this is roughly what I want in a phone. But the thing is, I bought a phone over two years ago, with better specs for $100 less. That same phone today

So for me, this is roughly what I want in a phone. But the thing is, I bought a phone over two years ago, with better specs for $100 less. That same phone today is priced at $200-$300. The way I see it the real value add for this phone is the software, and this whole mainline Linux, FOSS, run whatever you want approach is very attractive to me. But is it worth $700? Is it worth $700 when my current phone is in great condition and most likely will be usable for several more years? I feel bad, because I do want to support this kind of thing, I'm just not sure that buying __this__ phone is the right decision for me.

smnplk 7y ago
I think it's the best decision for future you.
jraph 7y ago
From an environmental perspective, it makes sense to keep your current phone as long as possible. I'd love to get rid of this thing full of proprietary stuff though.
- wiz21c 7y ago
  Same dilemma for me. But I think environment priority is more important because freedom can't exist without environment. (now, it just could happen that my current phone breaks for a very unfortunate, totally unplanned, "accident" :-))
  - swiley 7y ago
    Making the moral decision requires freedom. Look at where the modern PC ecosystem is right now with windows: huge chunks of unusable plastic,fiberglass, and metal with serious software flaws that turn them into useless trash shortly after people buy them. When the community (much less, the individual consumer) can’t deal with broken software that’s tied to their (unupgradable) hardware it all just accumulates in landfills. People accept that you have to buy new phones and laptops every couple years because they have no other practical choice. I’m not sure I could say one should have a higher priority than the other, in fact I’m almost certain I could say they can’t.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    If you sell or give away your current device to someone who would have bought a new phone you aren't adding to waste.
- jimhefferon 7y ago
  > From an environmental perspective You don't have to toss it, you could sell it.
- rchaud 7y ago
  Hard to do when Apple intentionally slows down the phone with new firmware updates and Android OEMs abandon replaceable batteries for a soldered on unit whose ability to hold a charge drops off precipitously after 2 years.
  - lvl4x 7y ago
    I've never seen a cellphone with a soldered battery, and most of the slowdown in iPhones is caused by the OS slowing down to make up for reduced battery capacity. With apple and other manufacturers having to replace batteries in their own phones, I seriously doubt we'll ever see soldered batteries.
camjohnson26 7y ago
If you want good software you simply have to pay more. These are small teams with no prior experience trying to do something huge, it makes sense to expect to pay even 5 times more if the direction of the project is good. Hopefully future versions will be cheaper as they learn and gain experience.
- ThreeFx 7y ago
  That was my motivation as well when I prepurchased the phone. Even though you might not get a $600 phone, Purism and the entire Linux community gain a lot of experience about the difficulties of designing hand-held hardware, applications and operating systems. In my opinion their progress has been fantastic, and I am quite excited for the future of Linux smartphones.
  - TylerE 7y ago
    It isn't close to a $600 phone. The $180 Nokia 4.1 has near identical specs....except it has an 8 core, 2ghz CPU and not a 4 core, 1.5ghz cpu You can actually get under $100 if you compromise the specs just a little.
    - sverige 7y ago
      How much does it cost to keep everyone who wants to from gathering your personal data from that $100 phone, though?
      - joenathanone 7y ago
        Free if you know how to use ADB and Fastboot.
        voltagex_ 7y ago
        So I checked, and there are no "official" current LineageOS builds for any Nokia phones (unless I'm missing something on https://download.lineageos.org https://download.lineageos.org) There don't seem to be any builds anywhere for the 4.1 (is it an uncommon phone?) For argument's sake, let's say you bought the 6.1, now your option is to download an "unofficial" ROM from some pseudo-anonymous person with an anime avatar from XDA, hosted on whatever free file hosting they can find today. Don't get me wrong, I used Lineage when it was called Cyanogenmod, and it saved one phone from landfill which is great. But I'm older now, and I need my phone to work and work well - I really don't have time for problems like https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?s=76595163ac856ff689bfa6cfcac15e4e&p=78883626&postcount=7 https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?s=76595163ac85.... For some people, that's worth the money. Edit: here's all the proprietary blobs that'd need to be reversed to be audited to make sure they're not selling you out, too - https://github.com/nokia-dev/proprietary_vendor_nokia/tree/android-9.0/sdm660-common/proprietary/lib64 https://github.com/nokia-dev/proprietary_vendor_nokia/tree/a.... Props to HMD for publishing them, though.
ahmedalsudani 7y ago
That’s ok. You don’t need to buy it. The smartphone market is filled with phones subsidized by information harvesting money and where the economies of scale side with entities in a race to the bottom. I’m personally happy to pay a premium for a product with different priorities.
- rchaud 7y ago
  Exactly. Specialized tools in any industry cost more than regular consumer-grade tools. Why would we expect this to be different?
cal5k 7y ago
Does anyone know if the Librem 5 has some sort of secure element for storing encryption keys?
- ThreeFx 7y ago
  The specs mention a sim-card sized slot for some hardware token, such as a smart card. Is this what you mean? Edit: [1]: https://postimg.cc/G9FVvQgm https://postimg.cc/G9FVvQgm
ptx 7y ago
Your phone hardware might work for many years, but you will probably stop getting security patches for the software soon, so it won't be in great condition security-wise. Newer applications might start using features in newer version of the OS. The software, frozen in time, will make it gradually less and less usable even though the hardware is fine. By contrast, my PC is over 10 years old and runs the latest up-to-date versions of the kernel, drivers and other software. I'm hoping the Librem 5 will be similar.
antisemiotic 7y ago
Pinephone is supposed to be cheaper once it's released.
flattone 7y ago
im an in debt, highschool dropout, unemployed, and ill biy this on credit just to take a stand. i cant wait to set my google phone on fire. will be like finally ridding myself of a disease. get it together man. priorities. the value of an old phone stands up to forcing cash in meaningful directions? forget my wallet/welfare/bills, badd things have to stop at any cost.
- Tepix 7y ago
  What's wrong with installing Lineage OS on your google phone? If you stick to F-Droid you're pretty good in terms of open source. There are still a few binary blobs that you can't avoid of course. Those may contain some backdoors or bugs that will make you vulnerable, however you will no longer send your data to Google etc. all the time. Which is a huge difference.
  - pizzazzaro 7y ago
    Lineage dropped support for a LOT of phones in the last 6 months. When you show up, looking to do the legwork for a specific model, the community directs you to the donate button instead... If Librem can keep their repos current? Im down to switch from a Lineage-deprecated phone. Besides, a phone running a kernel that isn't 3 years old and terribly out of date? Vulnerable to Spectre, Rowhammer, and a host of other script-kiddie-hackable holes? So what if its "mine" for $200 less when it isnt mine and patched? Apple did one thing well with iPhone that Android didnt - they kept themselves as a single point of accountability for how the phone runs, how it updates, how security patches get distributed. A FLOSS phone needs to mimick that success.
- google2342 7y ago
  Don't do that to yourself. Better to take care of yourself than buying a new phone.
- inawarminister 7y ago
  For us, I think it's better to buy a PinePhone instead. It's targeted to be $200. Not as full-featured as Librem5 is, not as developmentally supported. But that's what the open source ecosystem is for, no? [0] https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
Tepix 7y ago
I agree that the price is very painful especially when compared to Chinese Android phones that offer phenomenal value (just not in terms of privacy). I hope the open source phones succeeds regardless.
pizzazzaro 7y ago
I hope that Librem is still around to sell me a hat/shield to turn a decent & specific single-board computer into a phone. I hope their around long enough for that sbc to be RISC-V based. I am happy that they made the LTE connection an M.2 card that can be easily upgraded. But without a discernible upgrade path for the rest, this feels like it might not be enough for long enough. With some rough finances, Im gonna have to save up. This phone will be nice enough at$700, and a Category ~15-ish M.2 LTE module should run around $100-$200. I do want to see some reviews and tutorials though. A configurable web-app sandbox is absolutely necessary.
jammygit 7y ago
For me, I need authy, anki, and a couple of other apps or else I need a second phone. Luckily, anki is open source too and hopefully somebody ports the linux version for the smaller screen.
- curioussavage 7y ago
  There is an Authy alternative ready for it.
  - jdillaaa 7y ago
    There are also a ton of CLI tools to generate TOTP if thats what you're using authy for. https://github.com/WhyNotHugo/totp-cli https://github.com/WhyNotHugo/totp-cli
flukus 7y ago
Assuming it's not an iphone, the phone you bought will likely be getting few/no more security updates and is obsolete, that's why it's so cheap now and in part why it was so cheap then. As you said, the value add here is in running mainline linux and that means your phone really will be usable for several years. Some of the other big pluses over android are ease of development, no java bloatware, more FOSS and no spyware. Those things are just eating your specs anyway.
- codedokode 7y ago
  I wouldn't call Java a bloatware. Native Java apps work without any lags on my $150 phone.
- willtim 7y ago
  Yes Java has many issues, but writing complex GUI apps in plain C in this day and age is the wrong thing to do. The early Gnome founders learned this the hard way which led to Mono, which at least had automatic memory management. I fear this OS is destined to become like Samsung Tizen, which is riddled with security holes. It's not as if we don't have excellent libre languages, e.g. Rust and OCaml. I applaud the open nature of this phone, but using the Gnome stack looks to me like a mistake.
  - flukus 7y ago
    Couldn't disagree more, writing apps in C is a breath of fresh air compared anything in java but especially android. I can start with a simple C file and write hello world in a few lines of C (dated examples: http://zetcode.com/gui/gtk2/firstprograms/ http://zetcode.com/gui/gtk2/firstprograms/) and run it on my desktop, IME the complexity curve remains quite flat. AFAIK mono never gained much acceptance (and was highly controversial at the time) and most of the gnome ecosystem is written in C, I'd be surprised if there was more C# code than JS and python in gnome today. > I fear this OS is destined to become like Samsung Tizen, which is riddled with security holes. Is the gnome desktop riddled with security holes? I don't know much about tizen but they seem to have written a lot more of their own stuff, the vast majority librem is battle hardened. > It's not as if we don't have excellent libre languages, e.g. Rust and OCaml. Rust is not mature enough, especially in it's UI libs and is virtual unheard of outside the HN bubble. The most mature UI available appears to be the GTK bindings though so it's mostly the same stack that you think is a mistake. OCaml despite being older is even more unknown and from a quick google it's most mature UI library seems to also be an out of date GTK (https://github.com/garrigue/lablgtk https://github.com/garrigue/lablgtk). Betting on either of those would be the death of the project. > I applaud the open nature of this phone, but using the Gnome stack looks to me like a mistake. Gtk and Qt are the only serious options as of today without having to sink in years of dev work. If anyone really wants to avoid C then there's the GObject system that lets you write code in js/python/xml/others, but I'm hoping this turns out to be the phone ecosystem that respects users and doesn't sacrifice their time and battery for the developers convenience.

smnplk 7y ago

I think it's the best decision for future you.

jraph 7y ago

From an environmental perspective, it makes sense to keep your current phone as long as possible. I'd love to get rid of this thing full of proprietary stuff though.

wiz21c 7y ago
Same dilemma for me. But I think environment priority is more important because freedom can't exist without environment. (now, it just could happen that my current phone breaks for a very unfortunate, totally unplanned, "accident" :-))
- swiley 7y ago
  Making the moral decision requires freedom. Look at where the modern PC ecosystem is right now with windows: huge chunks of unusable plastic,fiberglass, and metal with serious software flaws that turn them into useless trash shortly after people buy them. When the community (much less, the individual consumer) can’t deal with broken software that’s tied to their (unupgradable) hardware it all just accumulates in landfills. People accept that you have to buy new phones and laptops every couple years because they have no other practical choice. I’m not sure I could say one should have a higher priority than the other, in fact I’m almost certain I could say they can’t.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  If you sell or give away your current device to someone who would have bought a new phone you aren't adding to waste.
jimhefferon 7y ago
> From an environmental perspective You don't have to toss it, you could sell it.
rchaud 7y ago
Hard to do when Apple intentionally slows down the phone with new firmware updates and Android OEMs abandon replaceable batteries for a soldered on unit whose ability to hold a charge drops off precipitously after 2 years.
- lvl4x 7y ago
  I've never seen a cellphone with a soldered battery, and most of the slowdown in iPhones is caused by the OS slowing down to make up for reduced battery capacity. With apple and other manufacturers having to replace batteries in their own phones, I seriously doubt we'll ever see soldered batteries.

camjohnson26 7y ago

If you want good software you simply have to pay more. These are small teams with no prior experience trying to do something huge, it makes sense to expect to pay even 5 times more if the direction of the project is good. Hopefully future versions will be cheaper as they learn and gain experience.

ThreeFx 7y ago
That was my motivation as well when I prepurchased the phone. Even though you might not get a $600 phone, Purism and the entire Linux community gain a lot of experience about the difficulties of designing hand-held hardware, applications and operating systems. In my opinion their progress has been fantastic, and I am quite excited for the future of Linux smartphones.
- TylerE 7y ago
  It isn't close to a $600 phone. The $180 Nokia 4.1 has near identical specs....except it has an 8 core, 2ghz CPU and not a 4 core, 1.5ghz cpu You can actually get under $100 if you compromise the specs just a little.
  - sverige 7y ago
    How much does it cost to keep everyone who wants to from gathering your personal data from that $100 phone, though?
    - joenathanone 7y ago
      Free if you know how to use ADB and Fastboot.
      - voltagex_ 7y ago
        So I checked, and there are no "official" current LineageOS builds for any Nokia phones (unless I'm missing something on https://download.lineageos.org https://download.lineageos.org) There don't seem to be any builds anywhere for the 4.1 (is it an uncommon phone?) For argument's sake, let's say you bought the 6.1, now your option is to download an "unofficial" ROM from some pseudo-anonymous person with an anime avatar from XDA, hosted on whatever free file hosting they can find today. Don't get me wrong, I used Lineage when it was called Cyanogenmod, and it saved one phone from landfill which is great. But I'm older now, and I need my phone to work and work well - I really don't have time for problems like https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?s=76595163ac856ff689bfa6cfcac15e4e&p=78883626&postcount=7 https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?s=76595163ac85.... For some people, that's worth the money. Edit: here's all the proprietary blobs that'd need to be reversed to be audited to make sure they're not selling you out, too - https://github.com/nokia-dev/proprietary_vendor_nokia/tree/android-9.0/sdm660-common/proprietary/lib64 https://github.com/nokia-dev/proprietary_vendor_nokia/tree/a.... Props to HMD for publishing them, though.

ahmedalsudani 7y ago

That’s ok. You don’t need to buy it. The smartphone market is filled with phones subsidized by information harvesting money and where the economies of scale side with entities in a race to the bottom. I’m personally happy to pay a premium for a product with different priorities.

rchaud 7y ago
Exactly. Specialized tools in any industry cost more than regular consumer-grade tools. Why would we expect this to be different?

cal5k 7y ago

Does anyone know if the Librem 5 has some sort of secure element for storing encryption keys?

ThreeFx 7y ago
The specs mention a sim-card sized slot for some hardware token, such as a smart card. Is this what you mean? Edit: [1]: https://postimg.cc/G9FVvQgm https://postimg.cc/G9FVvQgm

ptx 7y ago

Your phone hardware might work for many years, but you will probably stop getting security patches for the software soon, so it won't be in great condition security-wise. Newer applications might start using features in newer version of the OS. The software, frozen in time, will make it gradually less and less usable even though the hardware is fine. By contrast, my PC is over 10 years old and runs the latest up-to-date versions of the kernel, drivers and other software. I'm hoping the Librem 5 will be similar.

antisemiotic 7y ago

Pinephone is supposed to be cheaper once it's released.

flattone 7y ago

im an in debt, highschool dropout, unemployed, and ill biy this on credit just to take a stand. i cant wait to set my google phone on fire. will be like finally ridding myself of a disease. get it together man. priorities. the value of an old phone stands up to forcing cash in meaningful directions? forget my wallet/welfare/bills, badd things have to stop at any cost.

Tepix 7y ago
What's wrong with installing Lineage OS on your google phone? If you stick to F-Droid you're pretty good in terms of open source. There are still a few binary blobs that you can't avoid of course. Those may contain some backdoors or bugs that will make you vulnerable, however you will no longer send your data to Google etc. all the time. Which is a huge difference.
- pizzazzaro 7y ago
  Lineage dropped support for a LOT of phones in the last 6 months. When you show up, looking to do the legwork for a specific model, the community directs you to the donate button instead... If Librem can keep their repos current? Im down to switch from a Lineage-deprecated phone. Besides, a phone running a kernel that isn't 3 years old and terribly out of date? Vulnerable to Spectre, Rowhammer, and a host of other script-kiddie-hackable holes? So what if its "mine" for $200 less when it isnt mine and patched? Apple did one thing well with iPhone that Android didnt - they kept themselves as a single point of accountability for how the phone runs, how it updates, how security patches get distributed. A FLOSS phone needs to mimick that success.
google2342 7y ago
Don't do that to yourself. Better to take care of yourself than buying a new phone.
inawarminister 7y ago
For us, I think it's better to buy a PinePhone instead. It's targeted to be $200. Not as full-featured as Librem5 is, not as developmentally supported. But that's what the open source ecosystem is for, no? [0] https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

Tepix 7y ago

I agree that the price is very painful especially when compared to Chinese Android phones that offer phenomenal value (just not in terms of privacy). I hope the open source phones succeeds regardless.

pizzazzaro 7y ago

I hope that Librem is still around to sell me a hat/shield to turn a decent & specific single-board computer into a phone. I hope their around long enough for that sbc to be RISC-V based. I am happy that they made the LTE connection an M.2 card that can be easily upgraded. But without a discernible upgrade path for the rest, this feels like it might not be enough for long enough. With some rough finances, Im gonna have to save up. This phone will be nice enough at$700, and a Category ~15-ish M.2 LTE module should run around $100-$200. I do want to see some reviews and tutorials though. A configurable web-app sandbox is absolutely necessary.

jammygit 7y ago

For me, I need authy, anki, and a couple of other apps or else I need a second phone. Luckily, anki is open source too and hopefully somebody ports the linux version for the smaller screen.

curioussavage 7y ago
There is an Authy alternative ready for it.
- jdillaaa 7y ago
  There are also a ton of CLI tools to generate TOTP if thats what you're using authy for. https://github.com/WhyNotHugo/totp-cli https://github.com/WhyNotHugo/totp-cli

flukus 7y ago

Assuming it's not an iphone, the phone you bought will likely be getting few/no more security updates and is obsolete, that's why it's so cheap now and in part why it was so cheap then. As you said, the value add here is in running mainline linux and that means your phone really will be usable for several years. Some of the other big pluses over android are ease of development, no java bloatware, more FOSS and no spyware. Those things are just eating your specs anyway.

codedokode 7y ago
I wouldn't call Java a bloatware. Native Java apps work without any lags on my $150 phone.
willtim 7y ago
Yes Java has many issues, but writing complex GUI apps in plain C in this day and age is the wrong thing to do. The early Gnome founders learned this the hard way which led to Mono, which at least had automatic memory management. I fear this OS is destined to become like Samsung Tizen, which is riddled with security holes. It's not as if we don't have excellent libre languages, e.g. Rust and OCaml. I applaud the open nature of this phone, but using the Gnome stack looks to me like a mistake.
- flukus 7y ago
  Couldn't disagree more, writing apps in C is a breath of fresh air compared anything in java but especially android. I can start with a simple C file and write hello world in a few lines of C (dated examples: http://zetcode.com/gui/gtk2/firstprograms/ http://zetcode.com/gui/gtk2/firstprograms/) and run it on my desktop, IME the complexity curve remains quite flat. AFAIK mono never gained much acceptance (and was highly controversial at the time) and most of the gnome ecosystem is written in C, I'd be surprised if there was more C# code than JS and python in gnome today. > I fear this OS is destined to become like Samsung Tizen, which is riddled with security holes. Is the gnome desktop riddled with security holes? I don't know much about tizen but they seem to have written a lot more of their own stuff, the vast majority librem is battle hardened. > It's not as if we don't have excellent libre languages, e.g. Rust and OCaml. Rust is not mature enough, especially in it's UI libs and is virtual unheard of outside the HN bubble. The most mature UI available appears to be the GTK bindings though so it's mostly the same stack that you think is a mistake. OCaml despite being older is even more unknown and from a quick google it's most mature UI library seems to also be an out of date GTK (https://github.com/garrigue/lablgtk https://github.com/garrigue/lablgtk). Betting on either of those would be the death of the project. > I applaud the open nature of this phone, but using the Gnome stack looks to me like a mistake. Gtk and Qt are the only serious options as of today without having to sink in years of dev work. If anyone really wants to avoid C then there's the GObject system that lets you write code in js/python/xml/others, but I'm hoping this turns out to be the phone ecosystem that respects users and doesn't sacrifice their time and battery for the developers convenience.