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I got my librem in the mail last week after waiting several years(!!) for shipping. It's complete trash. The software is shit, the battery is shit, it's expensi

I got my librem in the mail last week after waiting several years(!!) for shipping. It's complete trash. The software is shit, the battery is shit, it's expensive, low specs, completely unusable. I'm willing to compromise a lot in order to go with the free software approach, but my god, just do better. There's no excuse for how un-functional this thing is. Try harder. I had the same reaction with the pine phone a couple years ago. At least that one shipped sooner though.

BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
no excuse, merely a conspiracy explanation: it simply cannot be permitted. somebody realized PC market/platform made a huge "mistake", letting anybody make software for them and permitting random hardware. this 'mistake' was avoided on smartphones for very pointed, clear, intentions of social control. there exists NO homebrew smartphone hardware like for PCs.
- chongli 3y ago
  Your conspiracy explanation doesn’t pass the sniff test. There’s a much much simpler explanation: lack of demand. Heck, you’d think people on hacker news would be all over open source alternatives to proprietary hardware, software, and services. Yet take a brief wander over to one of the many (many) recent Reddit crisis threads and you’ll find countless naysayers talking about how lemmy and the like will never succeed, despite gaining hundreds of thousands of users in a week and a half.
  - BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
    it is really incredible, how could lack of demand be made to happen? but I'm not trying to imply anything. I merely wonder if such a thing (to create or destroy demand of something) is possible; and if it were, how would you do it? surely it involves marketing? but I also want to reflect on the market cap of convenience...
    - Arnavion 3y ago
      Linux phones are a niche within a niche. Marketing won't do anything to change that. Most people are satisfied with iPhones and Androids, and the few that aren't are mostly satisfied with degoogled Androids.
      - __d 3y ago
        That's the problem with the vision of a Linux phone as being "iOS/Android-like, but without the corporate control". For an open phone to be truly successful, it has to be better for its users, and in a way that's worth shifting ecosystems for.
  - Arnavion 3y ago
    >Heck, you’d think people on hacker news would be all over open source alternatives to proprietary hardware, software, and services. Yes, every PinePhone thread has people posting that it's unusable because it's not as good as a flagship iPhone or Android. Or the usual "not ready to be a daily driver" ... because the definition of "daily driver" is apparently a constant of the universe written by God so everyone is expected to have the same one. Meanwhile I've been "daily-driving" my PP for two years at this point because calls, SMS, voicemail, Firefox and the camera work well enough.
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      For me a mobile phone needs: phone; SMS; Web browser; maps/navigation. That’s 90% of what I do with my phone and I can live without the other 10%
    - not_your_vase 3y ago
      This is kind of my biggest gripe with Pine64 (beside the unusable modem in the Pinephones, which crashes all the time): the community. Every time I google something related a pine* product problem, there is at least 1 result from pine64 forum where the answer is along the lines of "if you don't like it, go away. we are happy with it as it is, there is no solution, and you shouldn't be seeking one. you are bad person for even asking. pine* is not made by apple/samsung, you can't expect it to do things". I have quite a bunch of pine64 devices, but after I saw these interactions, I didn't even dare to ask anything nor to interact with them on any level.
      - Arnavion 3y ago
        >(beside the unusable modem in the Pinephones, which crashes all the time) Install the OSS firmware. Quectel firmware is shitty. For me the OSS firmware doesn't crash at all, though I've heard other people say it still crashes for them once a day or so (?). In any case eg25-m will bring it back so it won't be "unusable". >"if you don't like it, go away. we are happy with it as it is, there is no solution, and you shouldn't be seeking one. you are bad person for even asking. pine* is not made by apple/samsung, you can't expect it to do things". You only get these responses if you reveal yourself as someone who didn't read the warning labels before buying the hardware and/or if you act entitled to a solution, as AndyKelley did in this thread. We indeed do not have any patience for someone who comes in and says "It's complete trash. The software is shit, the battery is shit, it's expensive, low specs, completely unusable."
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    My personal favorite explanation for nearly everything: money Locked down platforms without user freedom are a goldmine
  - api 3y ago
    The naysayers are jaded folks who have watched two generations trade all privacy, freedom, honesty, transparency, openness, and even ownership of their own data for convenience. Judging by consumer behavior it appears that ease of use is more important than virtually any other concern. People who really care about things like privacy and freedom are too few in number to tilt the market, and this is compounded by the fact that as a rule FOSS people don’t pay for things. So the market here is a small number of cheapskates.
    - chongli 3y ago
      I think the intersection of people who were outraged at Reddit’s API change and “average consumers” is very small. They honestly aren’t important to me because for the most part they’re lurkers anyway. The people I care about are the power users, the posters, the creators. People put effort into building communities. Those folks are very few in number but extremely important. They can create a community anywhere they go. They’re also willing to put in effort to begin with so it’s generally easier to get them to move to lemmy when the experience may not be as polished.
- api 3y ago
  It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just economics. There is no money in it so there is no funding available for it. Things like Librem are practically basement operations compared to Apple, Samsung, and Google. Mobile software is far harder and more costly to produce than desktop because the small form factor and rapid casual use cases mean there can be zero tolerance for bad UX. The amount of effort that goes into just getting things like touch keyboard and touch gestures just right is monumental. The tolerances are very tight. PCs with big screens and keyboards can support I/O paradigms that are much less demanding of perfection or require much less polish to make usable. A PC can just put some buttons on the screen or use a command line and that works fine. A phone UI needs obsession.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    It wouldn't surprise me if Apple has spent more time and money on the iOS keyboard than Purism spent on the entire phone + software. Modern phones are probably the most advanced products humanity has ever produced.
    - api 3y ago
      What efforts like Purism should do is greatly reduce their scope. Make a device that does the basics which would be phone, text, basic web, and maybe a media player or support in the web browser for this use case. At first anything else could be accessed via the web, and maybe look at introducing PWAs as a way to do basic apps. Keep the GUI as simple as possible with the smallest number of options and features as possible and focus more on perfecting what is there. Ship a more minimal better polished product. If you don’t have the resources to perfect it, drop it. Make anything more custom or advanced configurable via ssh, but make the core features entirely usable without doing that. At first you might not even have an App Store, just a CLI package manager you can access from a PC with ssh. It’d basically be a hackable minimalist phone. Someone who just wants a privacy oriented minimal phone could use it as is and power users could ssh in and hack on it.
      - SoftTalker 3y ago
        I think maps/navigation is a must. Without that, I’d just use a $30 feature phone
- opan 3y ago
  I believe there are some limiting laws/regulations around radios that make DIY, free, hackable ones usually not allowed. So, modems, WLAN cards, wireless routers... tend to be quite proprietary.
TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
Also received my librem 5 recently, and it's incredibly disappointing. The software in particular is incredibly buggy and janky. When I open the app store it just fails to load things sometimes. Even the FirefoxOS device I tried a few years ago was better.
- xethos 3y ago
  > When I open the app store it just fails to load things sometimes. Considering how many desktop linux distros fall down with this, you may be expecting too much of your beta-level phones. It's been years, yes, but power management isn't exactly easy. Just look at how bad Linux laptops were even just a few years ago - hell, look at how long it took the multinational mega-corporation to get Android's background power consumption down. It was so bad people on XDA set Tasker to turn off BT, location, and even wifi when not in use. You're right, FLOSS phones currently aren't good. But they finally exist, and that's enough for me to be excited about
  - j45 3y ago
    The first app stores for iOS/android worked. Even webos.
  - CuriousCosmic 3y ago
    > You're right, FLOSS phones currently aren't good. But they finally exist, and that's enough for me to be excited about Also people forget that android is still FLOSS. You don't need to be running upstream/mainline linux to be FLOSS. It's mentioned kinda off hand as "oh well running android without google sucks" in the article but graphene OS has proven that you can get a very pleasant, well ironed, and secure/hardened user oriented phone while using FLOSS for basically everything except some firmware level blobs for high end phones. And FDroid proves that we can have 90-95% of all the quality apps we could need without even installing anything google dependent (even FCM push notifications which were historically limiting can be replaced with unifiedpush) That experience contrasts with the "FLOSS phones" like the librem or pine phone which show that you can get most if not all of the hardware working without firmware blobs even if the software up the stack sucks. So what is stopping us from just starting with one of the generic AOSP targets for graphene os and focusing it for one of these FLOSS targets? Do we just not have the specs in the hardware with decent FLOSS support? If that's the case, doesn't that mean we are quite literally steps from the finish line?
Arnavion 3y ago
>The software is shit, the battery is shit, it's expensive, low specs, completely unusable. >I had the same reaction with the pine phone a couple years ago. Anyone who writes "the software" like you and TheAceOfHearts did, as if it's an iPhone or Android, doesn't understand the first thing about a Linux phone. Please resell them to someone that's less PEBKAC than you. Thanks. They'll appreciate it. And in the future I recommend asking people who have them before you buy them, so that you know ahead of time not to keep these phones from going to people who will make better use of them. For example, we in the PinePhone IRC channel will happily listen to what you want from the phone and tell you whether the phone meets those requirements or not.
- OldManRyan 3y ago
  They shouldn't need to understand it. I don't understand the first thing about how my phone works or mobile development in general. It just works and does what I need it to do.
  - Arnavion 3y ago
    Yes they do need to understand it. If you believe you don't need or want to understand it, then Linux phones are not for you. It's okay. Really. Not everything has to be for everyone, and evidently Linux phones are not for you. Please don't buy them. Thanks.
    - OldManRyan 3y ago
      You don't need to understand it according to Librem. They are marketing a "user-friendly"(their words) replacement for iPhone and Android. If this was a product sold for the most hardcore Linux users who dream about bash scripts then yeah this isn't a product for me and that's fine. But, that isn't what they are trying to sell and that is the problem.
      - Arnavion 3y ago
        "replacement for iPhone and Android" are your words, not theirs. And as for the PP the manufacturer has always been very explicit about it: https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-beta-edition-with-convergence-package/ https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-beta-edition-with-conve... >Beta Edition PinePhones are aimed solely at early adopters. More specifically, only intend for these units to find their way into the hands of users with extensive Linux experience.
NovaDudely 3y ago
The saving grace of the Pinephone is that it is only about 1/8th the cost! They set the expectations realistically. It is a hacker phone for hackers. It feels like as soon as the community is moving in the right direction, the entire state of technology has moved on to something else and they are constantly trying to realign.
jackphilson 3y ago
iphone has had millions and millions of dollars of research and development
- hiddencost 3y ago
  Billions
harry8 3y ago
Reminder whenever this comes up that the Nokia N900 was a beautiful, functional thing running linux and Free software 10 years ago. No really. Best phone I've ever owned. Better than apple or android. It's loss was immense.
- AndyKelley 3y ago
  tell me more?
  - crote 3y ago
    It had a well-polished Linux-based OS, developed in-house by Nokia. Excellent hardware for the time, and a keyboard which was a delight to use. It got pretty decent reviews - even outside of the Linux fanboy bubble. It's just a good phone which happens to run Linux, not a mediocre phone hyped because it is one of the few Linux options available.
    - AndyKelley 3y ago
      I mean, Android is mostly Linux. I don't think the kernel is the issue. The issue with librem is that they put very little effort into the basic user experience of the software.
      - harry8 3y ago
        The point is that the n900 was Gnu/Linux with glibc like mama said was good for you and worked along very similar lines to your desktop machine. Maemo was gtk+ based and many Gnome applications ran really nicely. Eg Gnumeric was great. The desktop dev environment worked so you could port or write stuff from scratch then load it onto your phone. apt-get worked - apt was the app store iirc. But who cares that stuff? It was as slick and nice a user interface as the then recently released iphone! No really, I'm not making that up. Fold-out keyboard was terrific too. Way, way ahead of android at that time and arguably still. From memory the touchscreen on the iphone was better but nothing else was. Microsoft bought nokia and killed it. Nothing has been as good since.
teaearlgraycold 3y ago
Honestly you're best off getting a Pixel and flashing it with AOSP.
thoweiruo234234 3y ago
Saifish on Sony Phones should work like a charm though.
nirui 3y ago
Ain't we are all responsible for "duping" Purism into making that phone? Just look at the hypes after the announcement and how people loved it on paper. It's a classic example on why you should never fully trust your consumers for their suggestions. Based on those hypes, Purism probably thought they can just create a phone for hackers first... and never realized the reality that even hackers loves consumer products. Just take a look on how many hackers owns a MacBook as their main driver despite the existence of many good Linux laptops. People are hiding some truths here, and they wanted a smart businessman to figure it out. As one of the hypered, I'm sorry, Purism. This is the baseline that I actually wanted from a handheld device: - Runs open source Android and Linux without bug, maybe also iOS; - Powerful, as least 8GB of RAM and a relatively fast CPU; - Big swappable battery, 4~6 hours continue use without a re-charge; - But most importantly, INexpensive, at least not far more expensive than their consumer counterpart; - Then you can start thinking about ergonomics, self-serving ability, usability and extensibility (builtin keyboard, swappable modem etc) I should have listed all this clearly in my hype post...
- xcv123 3y ago
  > Just take a look on how many hackers owns a MacBook as their main driver despite the existence of many good Linux laptops Apple silicon is becoming one of the best options for Linux https://asahilinux.org https://asahilinux.org
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
interlinked 3y ago
Valve should try their hands at it. Steam deck already makes up ~40% of linux desktop installations. By the end of this year, it should be more than half of all linux installations.
- lopis 3y ago
  > Steam deck already makes up ~40% of linux desktop installations Do you have a source for this? This sounds a bit hard to believe, and I can't find a source. The sources I found show that within Steam installations, Steam Deck users are a significant share, but not the majority [0] [0] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/06/steam-deck-already-hits-over-5-of-linux-users-on-steam/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/06/steam-deck-already-hit...
andai 3y ago
I've never used these phones but from your post it sounds like the operation might be run by Apple or Google, to give free software phones a bad name. It probably isn't, but the fact that it seems like a possibility isn't a great sign!
- beebeepka 3y ago
  That was my first thought as well.
plq 3y ago
I know it's not free software, but I find the Jolla/Sailfish phones, the spiritual successors to the OS of the N9, a decent tradeoff between freedom and usability. It even runs android apps!
Hackbraten 3y ago
Sorry to hear that. I’m waiting for my Librem 5 myself and I’m also bracing myself for disappointment, especially given the years of waiting. A small consolation may be the fact that not all the software development effort we’ve paid for is lost. On the contrary, the work Purism has done both in userspace and kernel have immense value. One day, another Linux-based phone will appear, and it’s going to stand on the shoulders of what Purism did. It’s never going to be perfect, or even nearly as polished as the duopoly UX we’re accustomed to. But it’s going to be good enough, no matter if Purism will even be around by then. Also, the software for our Librems will only become better with time, as annoyances are ironed out. tl;dr Purism is definitely underdelivering, and we have all reason to be mad at them. It’s only going to get better though.

BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago

no excuse, merely a conspiracy explanation: it simply cannot be permitted. somebody realized PC market/platform made a huge "mistake", letting anybody make software for them and permitting random hardware. this 'mistake' was avoided on smartphones for very pointed, clear, intentions of social control. there exists NO homebrew smartphone hardware like for PCs.

chongli 3y ago
Your conspiracy explanation doesn’t pass the sniff test. There’s a much much simpler explanation: lack of demand. Heck, you’d think people on hacker news would be all over open source alternatives to proprietary hardware, software, and services. Yet take a brief wander over to one of the many (many) recent Reddit crisis threads and you’ll find countless naysayers talking about how lemmy and the like will never succeed, despite gaining hundreds of thousands of users in a week and a half.
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
  it is really incredible, how could lack of demand be made to happen? but I'm not trying to imply anything. I merely wonder if such a thing (to create or destroy demand of something) is possible; and if it were, how would you do it? surely it involves marketing? but I also want to reflect on the market cap of convenience...
  - Arnavion 3y ago
    Linux phones are a niche within a niche. Marketing won't do anything to change that. Most people are satisfied with iPhones and Androids, and the few that aren't are mostly satisfied with degoogled Androids.
    - __d 3y ago
      That's the problem with the vision of a Linux phone as being "iOS/Android-like, but without the corporate control". For an open phone to be truly successful, it has to be better for its users, and in a way that's worth shifting ecosystems for.
- Arnavion 3y ago
  >Heck, you’d think people on hacker news would be all over open source alternatives to proprietary hardware, software, and services. Yes, every PinePhone thread has people posting that it's unusable because it's not as good as a flagship iPhone or Android. Or the usual "not ready to be a daily driver" ... because the definition of "daily driver" is apparently a constant of the universe written by God so everyone is expected to have the same one. Meanwhile I've been "daily-driving" my PP for two years at this point because calls, SMS, voicemail, Firefox and the camera work well enough.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    For me a mobile phone needs: phone; SMS; Web browser; maps/navigation. That’s 90% of what I do with my phone and I can live without the other 10%
  - not_your_vase 3y ago
    This is kind of my biggest gripe with Pine64 (beside the unusable modem in the Pinephones, which crashes all the time): the community. Every time I google something related a pine* product problem, there is at least 1 result from pine64 forum where the answer is along the lines of "if you don't like it, go away. we are happy with it as it is, there is no solution, and you shouldn't be seeking one. you are bad person for even asking. pine* is not made by apple/samsung, you can't expect it to do things". I have quite a bunch of pine64 devices, but after I saw these interactions, I didn't even dare to ask anything nor to interact with them on any level.
    - Arnavion 3y ago
      >(beside the unusable modem in the Pinephones, which crashes all the time) Install the OSS firmware. Quectel firmware is shitty. For me the OSS firmware doesn't crash at all, though I've heard other people say it still crashes for them once a day or so (?). In any case eg25-m will bring it back so it won't be "unusable". >"if you don't like it, go away. we are happy with it as it is, there is no solution, and you shouldn't be seeking one. you are bad person for even asking. pine* is not made by apple/samsung, you can't expect it to do things". You only get these responses if you reveal yourself as someone who didn't read the warning labels before buying the hardware and/or if you act entitled to a solution, as AndyKelley did in this thread. We indeed do not have any patience for someone who comes in and says "It's complete trash. The software is shit, the battery is shit, it's expensive, low specs, completely unusable."
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  My personal favorite explanation for nearly everything: money Locked down platforms without user freedom are a goldmine
- api 3y ago
  The naysayers are jaded folks who have watched two generations trade all privacy, freedom, honesty, transparency, openness, and even ownership of their own data for convenience. Judging by consumer behavior it appears that ease of use is more important than virtually any other concern. People who really care about things like privacy and freedom are too few in number to tilt the market, and this is compounded by the fact that as a rule FOSS people don’t pay for things. So the market here is a small number of cheapskates.
  - chongli 3y ago
    I think the intersection of people who were outraged at Reddit’s API change and “average consumers” is very small. They honestly aren’t important to me because for the most part they’re lurkers anyway. The people I care about are the power users, the posters, the creators. People put effort into building communities. Those folks are very few in number but extremely important. They can create a community anywhere they go. They’re also willing to put in effort to begin with so it’s generally easier to get them to move to lemmy when the experience may not be as polished.
api 3y ago
It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just economics. There is no money in it so there is no funding available for it. Things like Librem are practically basement operations compared to Apple, Samsung, and Google. Mobile software is far harder and more costly to produce than desktop because the small form factor and rapid casual use cases mean there can be zero tolerance for bad UX. The amount of effort that goes into just getting things like touch keyboard and touch gestures just right is monumental. The tolerances are very tight. PCs with big screens and keyboards can support I/O paradigms that are much less demanding of perfection or require much less polish to make usable. A PC can just put some buttons on the screen or use a command line and that works fine. A phone UI needs obsession.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me if Apple has spent more time and money on the iOS keyboard than Purism spent on the entire phone + software. Modern phones are probably the most advanced products humanity has ever produced.
  - api 3y ago
    What efforts like Purism should do is greatly reduce their scope. Make a device that does the basics which would be phone, text, basic web, and maybe a media player or support in the web browser for this use case. At first anything else could be accessed via the web, and maybe look at introducing PWAs as a way to do basic apps. Keep the GUI as simple as possible with the smallest number of options and features as possible and focus more on perfecting what is there. Ship a more minimal better polished product. If you don’t have the resources to perfect it, drop it. Make anything more custom or advanced configurable via ssh, but make the core features entirely usable without doing that. At first you might not even have an App Store, just a CLI package manager you can access from a PC with ssh. It’d basically be a hackable minimalist phone. Someone who just wants a privacy oriented minimal phone could use it as is and power users could ssh in and hack on it.
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      I think maps/navigation is a must. Without that, I’d just use a $30 feature phone
opan 3y ago
I believe there are some limiting laws/regulations around radios that make DIY, free, hackable ones usually not allowed. So, modems, WLAN cards, wireless routers... tend to be quite proprietary.

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago

Also received my librem 5 recently, and it's incredibly disappointing. The software in particular is incredibly buggy and janky. When I open the app store it just fails to load things sometimes. Even the FirefoxOS device I tried a few years ago was better.

xethos 3y ago
> When I open the app store it just fails to load things sometimes. Considering how many desktop linux distros fall down with this, you may be expecting too much of your beta-level phones. It's been years, yes, but power management isn't exactly easy. Just look at how bad Linux laptops were even just a few years ago - hell, look at how long it took the multinational mega-corporation to get Android's background power consumption down. It was so bad people on XDA set Tasker to turn off BT, location, and even wifi when not in use. You're right, FLOSS phones currently aren't good. But they finally exist, and that's enough for me to be excited about
- j45 3y ago
  The first app stores for iOS/android worked. Even webos.
- CuriousCosmic 3y ago
  > You're right, FLOSS phones currently aren't good. But they finally exist, and that's enough for me to be excited about Also people forget that android is still FLOSS. You don't need to be running upstream/mainline linux to be FLOSS. It's mentioned kinda off hand as "oh well running android without google sucks" in the article but graphene OS has proven that you can get a very pleasant, well ironed, and secure/hardened user oriented phone while using FLOSS for basically everything except some firmware level blobs for high end phones. And FDroid proves that we can have 90-95% of all the quality apps we could need without even installing anything google dependent (even FCM push notifications which were historically limiting can be replaced with unifiedpush) That experience contrasts with the "FLOSS phones" like the librem or pine phone which show that you can get most if not all of the hardware working without firmware blobs even if the software up the stack sucks. So what is stopping us from just starting with one of the generic AOSP targets for graphene os and focusing it for one of these FLOSS targets? Do we just not have the specs in the hardware with decent FLOSS support? If that's the case, doesn't that mean we are quite literally steps from the finish line?

Arnavion 3y ago

>The software is shit, the battery is shit, it's expensive, low specs, completely unusable. >I had the same reaction with the pine phone a couple years ago. Anyone who writes "the software" like you and TheAceOfHearts did, as if it's an iPhone or Android, doesn't understand the first thing about a Linux phone. Please resell them to someone that's less PEBKAC than you. Thanks. They'll appreciate it. And in the future I recommend asking people who have them before you buy them, so that you know ahead of time not to keep these phones from going to people who will make better use of them. For example, we in the PinePhone IRC channel will happily listen to what you want from the phone and tell you whether the phone meets those requirements or not.

OldManRyan 3y ago
They shouldn't need to understand it. I don't understand the first thing about how my phone works or mobile development in general. It just works and does what I need it to do.
- Arnavion 3y ago
  Yes they do need to understand it. If you believe you don't need or want to understand it, then Linux phones are not for you. It's okay. Really. Not everything has to be for everyone, and evidently Linux phones are not for you. Please don't buy them. Thanks.
  - OldManRyan 3y ago
    You don't need to understand it according to Librem. They are marketing a "user-friendly"(their words) replacement for iPhone and Android. If this was a product sold for the most hardcore Linux users who dream about bash scripts then yeah this isn't a product for me and that's fine. But, that isn't what they are trying to sell and that is the problem.
    - Arnavion 3y ago
      "replacement for iPhone and Android" are your words, not theirs. And as for the PP the manufacturer has always been very explicit about it: https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-beta-edition-with-convergence-package/ https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-beta-edition-with-conve... >Beta Edition PinePhones are aimed solely at early adopters. More specifically, only intend for these units to find their way into the hands of users with extensive Linux experience.

NovaDudely 3y ago

The saving grace of the Pinephone is that it is only about 1/8th the cost! They set the expectations realistically. It is a hacker phone for hackers. It feels like as soon as the community is moving in the right direction, the entire state of technology has moved on to something else and they are constantly trying to realign.

jackphilson 3y ago

iphone has had millions and millions of dollars of research and development

hiddencost 3y ago
Billions

harry8 3y ago

Reminder whenever this comes up that the Nokia N900 was a beautiful, functional thing running linux and Free software 10 years ago. No really. Best phone I've ever owned. Better than apple or android. It's loss was immense.

AndyKelley 3y ago
tell me more?
- crote 3y ago
  It had a well-polished Linux-based OS, developed in-house by Nokia. Excellent hardware for the time, and a keyboard which was a delight to use. It got pretty decent reviews - even outside of the Linux fanboy bubble. It's just a good phone which happens to run Linux, not a mediocre phone hyped because it is one of the few Linux options available.
  - AndyKelley 3y ago
    I mean, Android is mostly Linux. I don't think the kernel is the issue. The issue with librem is that they put very little effort into the basic user experience of the software.
    - harry8 3y ago
      The point is that the n900 was Gnu/Linux with glibc like mama said was good for you and worked along very similar lines to your desktop machine. Maemo was gtk+ based and many Gnome applications ran really nicely. Eg Gnumeric was great. The desktop dev environment worked so you could port or write stuff from scratch then load it onto your phone. apt-get worked - apt was the app store iirc. But who cares that stuff? It was as slick and nice a user interface as the then recently released iphone! No really, I'm not making that up. Fold-out keyboard was terrific too. Way, way ahead of android at that time and arguably still. From memory the touchscreen on the iphone was better but nothing else was. Microsoft bought nokia and killed it. Nothing has been as good since.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago

Honestly you're best off getting a Pixel and flashing it with AOSP.

thoweiruo234234 3y ago

Saifish on Sony Phones should work like a charm though.

nirui 3y ago

Ain't we are all responsible for "duping" Purism into making that phone? Just look at the hypes after the announcement and how people loved it on paper. It's a classic example on why you should never fully trust your consumers for their suggestions. Based on those hypes, Purism probably thought they can just create a phone for hackers first... and never realized the reality that even hackers loves consumer products. Just take a look on how many hackers owns a MacBook as their main driver despite the existence of many good Linux laptops. People are hiding some truths here, and they wanted a smart businessman to figure it out. As one of the hypered, I'm sorry, Purism. This is the baseline that I actually wanted from a handheld device: - Runs open source Android and Linux without bug, maybe also iOS; - Powerful, as least 8GB of RAM and a relatively fast CPU; - Big swappable battery, 4~6 hours continue use without a re-charge; - But most importantly, INexpensive, at least not far more expensive than their consumer counterpart; - Then you can start thinking about ergonomics, self-serving ability, usability and extensibility (builtin keyboard, swappable modem etc) I should have listed all this clearly in my hype post...

xcv123 3y ago
> Just take a look on how many hackers owns a MacBook as their main driver despite the existence of many good Linux laptops Apple silicon is becoming one of the best options for Linux https://asahilinux.org https://asahilinux.org

deleted 3y ago

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interlinked 3y ago

Valve should try their hands at it. Steam deck already makes up ~40% of linux desktop installations. By the end of this year, it should be more than half of all linux installations.

lopis 3y ago
> Steam deck already makes up ~40% of linux desktop installations Do you have a source for this? This sounds a bit hard to believe, and I can't find a source. The sources I found show that within Steam installations, Steam Deck users are a significant share, but not the majority [0] [0] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/06/steam-deck-already-hits-over-5-of-linux-users-on-steam/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/06/steam-deck-already-hit...

andai 3y ago

I've never used these phones but from your post it sounds like the operation might be run by Apple or Google, to give free software phones a bad name. It probably isn't, but the fact that it seems like a possibility isn't a great sign!

beebeepka 3y ago
That was my first thought as well.

plq 3y ago

I know it's not free software, but I find the Jolla/Sailfish phones, the spiritual successors to the OS of the N9, a decent tradeoff between freedom and usability. It even runs android apps!

Hackbraten 3y ago

Sorry to hear that. I’m waiting for my Librem 5 myself and I’m also bracing myself for disappointment, especially given the years of waiting. A small consolation may be the fact that not all the software development effort we’ve paid for is lost. On the contrary, the work Purism has done both in userspace and kernel have immense value. One day, another Linux-based phone will appear, and it’s going to stand on the shoulders of what Purism did. It’s never going to be perfect, or even nearly as polished as the duopoly UX we’re accustomed to. But it’s going to be good enough, no matter if Purism will even be around by then. Also, the software for our Librems will only become better with time, as annoyances are ironed out. tl;dr Purism is definitely underdelivering, and we have all reason to be mad at them. It’s only going to get better though.