Librem 5 dev kits are shipping
puri.sm
puri.sm
Buy one of these phones because you
- Want a 'free' phone to exist in the future
- Want an open source phone to exist in the future
- Want a secure phone to exist in the future
It may not be up to your standards now, but without your support (money) it will never exist.
If you have the money to spend, then spend it. Consider it a donation to the cause.
Disclaimer: Views expressed are my own and do not have anything to do with my employer.
I ask because I wanted to buy a Firefox OS phone and it was impossible. There were preorders and non-official compatible terminals, but the official, all hardware working, reasonably featured ones were impossible to get.
Apparently the phone is due in Q2 2019, though I find that unlikely.
I do have one of their laptops. I paid and got it a week later, so they have shipped things.
Also donating some time and money to postmarketOS and ubports(the community continuation of the ubuntu phone) because I really want any or all of these to be successful.
It most likely will never make it to production. At this point in time, if the creators were being honest, they would either have announced an OEM sign up, or have announced that it has already been delayed beyond Spring 2019.
As much as I like donations to causes, donations to doomed causes who aren't honest about the probability they'll ever come close to a reality are useless.
They advertise lifetime updates for a product they don't even have a supply chain lined up? Really? And the money spent will serve to (according to them) support the development process? So who will actually pay for the phones ordered?
Wishful thinking is nice, but it is nothing beyond wishful.
in this case however, they do sell laptops. so, they aren’t completely incapable of supply chain.
depending on if the laptop is really an in-house design, or not, they may be certainly going from a very basic to an extremely sophisticated supply chain.
or it could be that it’s not an in-house design fully and someone else is doing the supply chain and general design of the hardware.
the date is extremely optimistic or the handset hardware is much farther along than is obvious from the content on the site.
having said that i am a backer and can’t wait. vote with your dollar i suppose.
Anyone can do it, because it can all be outsourced. But they don't talk about any of it.
Not only that, but they say that the cash from preorders will be used for development, which raises the question: who will pay for the actual devices of those who pre-ordered?
Give it another year or so and they'll inevitably fold, not returning any money to those who pre-ordered and posting a cute, self-pitting story about all the challenges they faces on such a honorable mission.
Just like everyone before.
I like the project with some minor reservations, but there is not much to discuss at this point. I'm not gonna cheerlead. My biggest regret is price and size. I'm waiting for more information on Necuno Mobile [0] as I believe it will be in my price range, however with worse hardware. But they both can share software and that's great.
As for Purism I will wait for when it's cheaper or I will have more money to spend. I would buy one if it would be in a notebook or netbook form though. That's also what I'm hoping for - an iMX8M laptop.
8M is really weak. That would be pretty much a Pinebook with Vivante graphics.
The i.MX 8 QuadMax at least has two A72 cores, similar to Rockchip RK3399.
I've got an Acer R11 which I put GalliumOS on (definitely use 2.1 / 2.2, 3.0 has issues). If you really want ARM, there are options there, though I'm not sure about regular Linux support on those.
The R11 is small and handy, with a decent keyboard. Battery life isn't quite as good as with ChromeOS, but still sufficient.
Windows Phones and countless other smartphone environments floundered over the years even though they were backed by behemoths. What chances does Purism have?
So while I have absolutely no hostility towards the project I just don't think it's worth donating money to what I consider to be a lost cause. I'd rather donate money to other Open Source projects who I think will make better use of it.
I would be very glad to be proven wrong however, the current smartphone ecosystem is an absolute nightmare if you value privacy and having control on your hardware. If it turns out that the Librem 5 is not dead on arrival like I presume it will be (assuming that it even manages to arrive in the first place) I'll definitely consider buying one.
I'm sure Microsoft would've no problem making profitable phones, but if their goal is to obtain as many users as possible, as fast as possible, by spending millions upon millions on marketing and other endeavors then it becomes a lot more difficult.
I doubt the Purism folks are unaware of this, but I think this running a standard GNU/Linux stack as opposed to what Ubuntu Touch/Firefox OS were doing, gives it at least a shot.
That's my main problem really, I have Spotify, WhatsApp and a couple other closed-source applications on my smartphone that I need in order for said phone to be useful. If there are no ports or alternatives maintained on the Librem I'd just be buying a very expensive paperweight. And I don't think I'm a heavy app user compared to most of my friends who often have a couple social network apps, games etc...
Sibling comments mention that MS could probably make a profitable phone but they don't have the same objectives and I say that it's irrelevant. The problem is third parties and app supports. I need my phone to do more than calling and texting these days, I need decent driving directions, a multimedia player (ideally something that interfaces with Spotify, but I know that's asking for a lot), a chat application that can connect to WhatsApp (I won't convince all of my contacts to switch to Signal, Jabber or IRC) etc...
I need that stuff to be maintained and updated for at least a few years. And ideally after that I'd like to know that I can count on a Librem n+1 being available so that I won't have to change ecosystem once again.
I've bought a few open source/homebrew systems over the years, mainly handheld consoles to run emulators. It works but the software is often rather lackluster and very amateur looking. It's also generally maintained for a little while then the contributors move on to something else. It's fine for a toy emulator console, not so much for a smartphone.
The hardware is not the issue, the ecosystem is.
Most non-technical users don't care about updates, their care about their low prices for pre-paid phones and the respective monthly expenses.
Sorry it's not very portable, beyond whatever subnotebook sized x86-64 system you can run it on. Where your phone calls meet ss7 and the pstn is still going to be totally closed source and opaque to you.
Part of the backlash against purism is that they market themselves as a fully libre platform when they are not. Many viewed that as trying to cash in on the desire for a truly libre laptop.
From their website
> Purism’s Librem products are the only modern high-end devices where you are in control and have complete visibility into the operating system, all bundled software, and the deeper levels of your computer.
Emphases added. This is false, or at best misleading. You don't have complete visibility into the Intel Management Engine. Only after their initial release have they managed to strip the ME down to a fraction of its original size, but its still there doing who knows what.
Purism started during a time when concerns behind management engines were gaining a lot of traction. They capitalized on those fears by marketing a laptop with "complete visibility" without actually delivering on that.
They are a step in the right direction, but they don't market themselves as that. It makes things harder for people like Raptor Computer Systems who actually deliver "completely visible" machines as from the marketing its easy to assume that their products are equally free/libre, so why pay extra for the Raptor products?
> If you have the money to spend, then spend it. Consider it a donation to the cause.
If you have money to spend, spend it on a Raptor machine that is _actually_ completely visible, or donate it to a reverse engineer working on libre drivers, or a hardware engineer working on libre designs.
I put money down more than a year ago. They didn't meet their MoQ, and so offered refunds or applying it to another product. I chose a refund almost two months ago, and I still have not received it despite many follow ups and shifting deadlines.
I'm concerned that Purism may be having cash flow issues?
The price rise, while making sense, also says to me that they're trying to gain access to more funds now rather than in the future.
Great that there is a company that wants to do this. Not great that they have 0 transparency around refunds and supplychain.
In my mind, securing users in 2018 means to have a decent password manager with an up-to-date browser, make sure that apps are sandboxed and prohibit the browser from accessing all my user's files. Do they tackle this?
I think it looks like an interesting project and will buy one. I especially like the hardware kill switches.
>Here are some benefits and key differentiators of the Librem 5, the world’s first ever IP-native mobile handset and the only user-respecting mobile phone product offering on the market:
- Privacy protection by default, instead your profile and data being products sold to the highest bidder.
- Does not use Android or iOS. The Librem 5 comes with the mobile version of our FSF-endorsed operating system PureOS by default, and is expected to be able to run most GNU+Linux distributions.
- CPU separate from baseband, isolating the blackbox that the modem may represent and allowing us to seek hardware certification of the main board by the Free Software Foundation.
- Hardware Kill Switches for camera, microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and baseband.
- End-to-end encrypted decentralized communications via Matrix over the Internet.
-We also intend the Librem 5 to integrate with the Librem Key security token in the future.
Also see here: https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-5-final-decision-about-kill-...
I acknowledge the efforts in hardware integration they do. I'd love to see the Linux desktop being upgraded to Android's standards.
In my view it's two things: 1. It's defense in depth. No one person will ever be able to review every single line of code running their device, but anyone can crack open the case (and/or check the open schematics) and verify that flicking the switch kills the microphone. And 2. The baseband still has proprietary code running it that you can't verify so the only reasonable thing you can do to it is power it down.
Went through the website and many forums but haven't found any definitive.
For commandline applications all you need is to develop for GNU/Linux. It should work pretty fine on Librem 5 too. If you want to develop GUI applications see libhandy[0], a GTK+ widget library developed by Purism for Librem 5.
If you need to, you can get motivations from https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/app-mockups and HIG guide for GNOME is available at https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/
There's plenty of information and tools on the internet for doing what you're after. You don't need one true way of doing this from Librem.
I don't like complexity so I have just a bunch of simple scripts for this. But it's also possible to use buildroot, crosstool-ng, Arch Linux ARM mixed system building, where you drive the build from the target device, but compile object files remotely on x86_64 using a cross-compiler, etc., etc.
https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Apps/index.html
Looking at their guides, the app APIs usability is a joke from Android point of view, even Tizen has better docs.
https://developer.tizen.org/development/api-references/nativ...
Best of luck I guess.
b.) As long as you develop a standard GTK app for Linux, it should be easy to adopt it for Librem 5.
c.) Are you seriously comparing their WIP docs to someone who has put billions of dollars and over a decade into their platform and has a JetBrains powered IDE?
b.) What is the standard GTK way to access Linux desktop services like address book, NFC or Bluethooth LE?
c.) Yes I am, because that is what the large majority apps developers will be expecting to even loose a day of their income playing around with it.
I don't forget the corpses of OpenMoko, Maemo, Moblin , FirefoxOS. Even Jolla, Tizen and webOS aren't something that have managed to move the needle, in spite of the amount of money that has been wasted on them to this day.
So yeah, I am sceptical that it won't be yet another attempt joining them in a couple of years.
b.) When I am talking GTK, I mean GNOME here, as that's what the Librem 5 will run out of the box. There's all the APIs GNOME exposes for your dev pleasure + any other that you can utilize on standard desktop Linux, including bluetooth, contacts etc. [1] [2] [3].
c.) The majority of devs that are on iOS and Android, sure. but since there's plenty of Linux desktop applications already, I suspect the initial set of apps would be these, optimally ac customized to a mobile screen.
That'll give them a functional edge from their Android/iOS equivalents pretty much from the get go. which is also the major advantage of this effort compared to Ubuntu Touch/Firefox OS - the fact that if you're on Linux. you're already on the Librem 5.
d.) This is very much ideology-driven at this point. It is very important for efforts like this to exist. It probably won't ever be as big as Android/iOS, but it's important to do for the smartphone what Stallman set out to do in the 80s for computers. And few believed in him then. I don't see how "being skeptical" is furthering any cause.
I believe in a free, open-source, privacy-focused smartphone, in the post-Snowden age and an age where war on general-purpose computing is heating up. If this ships, even in less than ideal state, I'd welcome it with open arms. I realize that others may not be so inclined, but there must be people who push the boundaries in order to preserve free computing. I count myself among them.
1 - https://developer.gnome.org/references
If you are not aware, recently (since GLib 2.44), the boilerplate code required in C is a lot less than it was required before. Say for example see app.c and app.h files at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/tree/master/examples/appl...
In fact it could be Qt too, that'll run perfectly fine too, if GTK isn't your thing.
The main surprise for me is they're shipping it without the lcd panel working.
They can control the backlight. But no video.
Now I'm participating in the gamble that can be made to function without rework, I'd at least like complete details, not "we are talking to the panel vendor".
But hardware is never easy. Lets hope it works out.
Thank you very much for a lead!
I didn't want to drop into overly technical detail as not everyone wants that. You are of course welcome to participate in the community forum that was setup to chat about the state of the dev kit.
What surprised me is until it's fixed, there's no certainty what the problem is. Eg, dsi lanes mixed up, polarity of dsi lane wired wrong, some semidocumented reset signal on the panel got forced to 0V or forced inactive but panel requires it strobed, psu to panel must come up in specific order, psu level or quality or wiring mismatch... there are many possible ways just from having no video it can be a hw rework issue to solve it. Of course dsi is also complex, it can easy be a sw-only config issue, or some combination.
It's not up to me as your paying customer to go ask on a 'support channel' why, it's up to you to explain the reasoning why you believe that's a software-only issue.
But it will have a i.MX 8M SOC [1] and more than 2GB of ram [2].
The dev kit has a 720 x 1440 5.7" screen [3] (I assume this is the final screen).
[1] https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers...
[2] https://puri.sm/posts/june-1st-last-call-for-librem5-devkit/
I do have one and it works perfectly with most linux distros. I use manjaro to be specific.
PureOS is Debian based linux operating system.[1]
> I love OSX - could I not do the same with OSX by tightening it down?
It depends entirely on how and who you trust. If you implicitly trust Apple and that their goal now (and in the future!) and that their team can vet all the code going in to the degree that no single or small group of developers there working in tandem could get a backdoor in place in either software or hardware, then I doubt there's a better choice given Apple's ability to design their own hardware and their complete control of the software stack.
If you would rather trust in a large distributed group of people having public access to view and vet the source which is public and believe their vested interest in keeping the system is the better choice for continues security, choose an open source system wide wide use.
1: https://puri.sm/posts/what-is-pureos-and-how-is-it-built/
To my knowledge, most of the problems people have with systemd are because it replaced an extremely old and well known and understood system generally implemented with shell scripts and replaced it with a more complex and engineered project to get speed and extra features (pre-opening pipes and re-spawning listeners on the other end when a client want something from them, etc). In an effort to provide a more seamless boot, traditionally external projects ended up being subsumed (DHCP, and DNS resolution to support robust network support on boot).
I'm not sure if it was ultimately the right decision or not, but since to my knowledge almost every major distribution has adopted it, I assume it's viewed as worthwhile by qiute a lot of people within the distribution planning community at least.
I'm not really sure how any of that relates to this project specifically, so perhaps you're referring to some other aspect of it?
However, it's obviously preferable to want/use what's being shipped on the device to all recipients.
In this libre-oriented space in particular, what users are likely to want as a priority is the ability to easily reproduce the bits shipped on the device from source, and be able to restore the device to a state no different than shipped from the factory using those self-reproduced bits. The freedom to run some hacked up half-baked alternative stuff they're technically free to install should they wish, is not the top priority.
A major component of the value conferred by this freedom is that those shipped, reproducible bits, contain a desirable foundation for the community to converge on and iterate from.
Telling people "you can install whatever you want" before even delivering is signaling "potentially unusable, controversial vaporware is shipping, community fragmentation ahead" to anyone paying attention.
I'm not particularly averse to systemd/GNOME, but I do fear that it's probably too immature an ecosystem for production mobile use and it's unnecessarily threatening the project's overall success.
It would have been more prudent to collaborate with the Jolla/Sailfish folks and ship basically a secure Nokia N9 successor but with an easily reproduced and flashed image, which the N9 lacked, while the GNOME community grinds away on getting their stack mobile-ready for a potential future device. I don't know if the licensing could have been hashed out to get the N9 stack fully available in reproducible form, but I'm inclined to assume that if there were components legally obstructed from such distribution, it probably was less work to reimplement them than build all the components needed for a GNOME phone.
A big part of Librem 5's mission is to be secure and private, but perhaps even bigger part is to be FLOSS and hackable, so one could use any host and any stack to develop pretty much anything they could on a standard GNU/Linux distro.
Locking down iOS/macOS may improve security, but doesn't give you access to the source code, does not protect you from Apple and does not free you from the limitations they've put on you as a developer, or going via their-own distribution channels for that matter and having complete control over your future if you're an iOS developer.
So it all depends on why you're exited about the Librem5, but if openness, FLOSS, hackability are any part of it, then locking down Apple hardware wouldn't do it.