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The ultimate goal of Purism is to expand the market, but (opinion me) when I look at Purism's products in general I don't see them ever themselves moving out of
by danShumway 6y ago
The ultimate goal of Purism is to expand the market, but (opinion me) when I look at Purism's products in general I don't see them ever themselves moving out of niche categories.
If you buy a Purism laptop today, you'll already pay a premium over companies like Dell. I suspect that Purism is happy to see companies like Pine existing, and I know that they want Linux smartphones in general to be a broader market, I don't know that they're seriously thinking about trying to launch $100-200 competitors. To me, it just doesn't match their other products, I don't see anything else they're offering that would fall into that same category.
And while people would like to see Linux completely take over the desktop/mobile space, I think there's a much broader category of people who just want the market to be big enough for us and to be big enough that it is able to meet our needs. Past that it's not the end of the world if it doesn't get larger.
This is also part of what's frustrating about stuff like the "year of the Linux desktop" joke -- in many ways, the year of the Linux desktop already happened a while ago. Linux got good enough that you can pretty easily mainline it instead of Windows without serious issues or downsides. I have not booted into a Windows computer in multiple years, I don't even have a backup install anywhere. It just doesn't come up anymore. In terms of software, Linux support is something that a sizable portion of the indie games market now talks about, and between Steam/Proton and the recent architectural/policy changes happening on Mac you're now about as likely to be able to run a game on Linux (if not more likely) than you are to be able to run it on a modern Mac device. Meanwhile, 'mainstream' Linux OSes finally got polished enough that it's completely reasonable to put a tech-unfriendly kid or parent on a Linux machine without worrying that you'll get tech support requests every week. There's still a little ways to go with some legacy/holdout software in more niche professional fields like graphic design, but if you're a relatively normal user, then at some point Linux stopped being a struggle to run.
So in the same way, when I talk about the success of the Linux phone market in general, I'm not necessarily aiming for "we monopolize the entire space and nothing else exists." I think it's completely plausible that the Linux phone market might grow, not put Apple out of business, but still grow enough that there is a reasonably priced, usable alternative for people who value privacy and freedom.
In them meantime, it's niche. As far as I know, the front camera on the recent Pinephones still doesn't have software support. So yeah, it's currently a niche market for people who have very specific wants and needs. It seems kind of premature to me for people to be complaining about price and hardware when we're still celebrating things like camera support; commoditization is something that happens to mature markets, not new ones -- and that all takes time.
- fsflover 6y ago> As far as I know, the front camera on the recent Pinephones still doesn't have software support. It works well since October: https://www.pine64.org/2020/10/15/update-new-hacktober-gear/ https://www.pine64.org/2020/10/15/update-new-hacktober-gear/.
- danShumway 6y agoNice! I hadn't seen that update. Regardless, the point still stands that if we've had camera support for ~3 months, we're probably not at the point where we need to seriously worry about whether we're currently offering the highest value-to-money hardware choices to consumer demographics that have never opened up a command line before.
- pjmlp 6y agoDepends on the point of view. Asus 1215B released in 2011 with AMD Radeon HD 6250. Windows and original proprietary AMD drivers, OpenGL 4.1 and DirectX 11 Open source AMD driver replacement, OpenGL 3.3 So in 9 years no one bothered to match the previous proprietary AMD drivers capabilities, while Asus keeps the Windows ones available in the latest Windows versions.