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I work for Purism. I have no control over the marketing, but rest assured that the development team is well familiar with Openmoko, Maemo, Tinkerphones and plen

I work for Purism. I have no control over the marketing, but rest assured that the development team is well familiar with Openmoko, Maemo, Tinkerphones and plenty of other projects and communities that layed the groundwork for GNU/Linux on mobile. I have personally been one of the core developers of SHR and used my Neo Freerunner as my daily driver for years until I finally switched to Nokia N900. I don't agree with your stance about "replicating the mistakes 10 years later". The issues GTA02 had managed to make it past four earlier hardware revisions and reached the mass production (and there was even GTA01 before that!). Librem 5 isn't even mass produced yet - you had to opt in for an early development batch to receive one already. It's currently at its third revision, with the fifth one being scheduled to be the mass produced one. To be frank, so far, having the Neo Freerunner in the back of my head, I'm pretty happy with the progress on the hardware. Classifying things like power management into "repeated mistakes from the past" isn't really fair IMO. Those things just take a lot of time and effort, and taking the notes from past experiences can only smooth some edges, but won't make that work magically done for you. The hardware is capable of decent power management, as the NXP's kernel tree can show, but the mainline Linux has its power management still at its infancy. It's going to get better with time, but it's going to take that time - we can't magically skip that. There are also business constraints to consider there - it's easy to say "you should have waited with release until everything is fleshed out", but it's harder to actually finance a team of developers when you don't deliver anything for extended period of time ;)

m4rtink 7y ago
Cool, it's nice to see FreeRunner legacy is part of the Librem project, even if it doesnt't really look that way from the marketing side. :) As for being hard and needing multiple revisions to catch critical bugs - definitely agrew with that as well, even major manufacturers are no immune to hardware issues - Sailfish OS hit on Xperia X and likely 10 as well an issue with the proximity sensor becomming unreliable if turned on for too long. While it could still be a driver issue, given that official Android firmware has the same issues it looks more like a hardware problem Sony failed to catch. Still, even if all the current issues woth the Librem 5 can be fixed in the final revisions, we are still hitting on marketing issues in how Purism "sold" the initial batches - eq. I don't think the expectations have ever been set as getting an expensive hand warmer, rather having just a minor issues here and there and possibly a less nice chassis. In my opinion, these hardware revisions simply should not have been released to paying customers even if it would mean another delay.
- seba_dos1 7y ago
  To be honest, I think the only people who had incorrect assumptions about those early batches were people who didn't actually get one. We made sure to make it clear what those batches are and gave people multiple chances to change their decision and wait for Evergreen instead - and some people who initially opted for early batches actually used that chance, in fact. Nobody got their Birch or Chestnut against their clear will.

m4rtink 7y ago

Cool, it's nice to see FreeRunner legacy is part of the Librem project, even if it doesnt't really look that way from the marketing side. :) As for being hard and needing multiple revisions to catch critical bugs - definitely agrew with that as well, even major manufacturers are no immune to hardware issues - Sailfish OS hit on Xperia X and likely 10 as well an issue with the proximity sensor becomming unreliable if turned on for too long. While it could still be a driver issue, given that official Android firmware has the same issues it looks more like a hardware problem Sony failed to catch. Still, even if all the current issues woth the Librem 5 can be fixed in the final revisions, we are still hitting on marketing issues in how Purism "sold" the initial batches - eq. I don't think the expectations have ever been set as getting an expensive hand warmer, rather having just a minor issues here and there and possibly a less nice chassis. In my opinion, these hardware revisions simply should not have been released to paying customers even if it would mean another delay.

seba_dos1 7y ago
To be honest, I think the only people who had incorrect assumptions about those early batches were people who didn't actually get one. We made sure to make it clear what those batches are and gave people multiple chances to change their decision and wait for Evergreen instead - and some people who initially opted for early batches actually used that chance, in fact. Nobody got their Birch or Chestnut against their clear will.