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Comment by fouc | Hacker News Reader

We should all buy a librem 5 phone as a show of support.

Or maybe rather buy the Pine Phone that comes from a company with actual embedded/mobile hardware experience (Pine64 boards, Pinebook, etc.) and based on early prototypes seems to work fine ? Not to mention costing less & not being shrouded in tons of marketing like Librem 5 does.

Both should be encouraged

After reading the article it seems like Purism made fundamental design mistakes and started selling this phone to the public long before it's ready.

I don't think that should be encouraged. If you follow their blog and product description page and then place an order you're just about hoodwinked into buying something that's claimed to be at least mostly working.

I don't think that's ethical, even if the hardware and software itself is.

I just want my devices to be as upgradeable and future proof as my desktop is. If giving my money to either of these companies brings me to closer to that dream, I'll do it. Though the pinephone's $150 is a much better way to show my support than the librem's $750+

Yup, and at $150, I might just buy multiple. I want one to tinker with, and if it works well, I might ditch my current phone and get one for my kids as an emergency phone. I might give them a gifts.

At $800, I might buy one, but it has to be really good.

PinePhone's $150 currently does not finance the software development in any way, and will bring just around $10 per device in the future to external software teams (and I believe the price of the final batch is supposed to increase a bit).

Librem 5's price, on the other hand, finances a whole team of software developers that develop things people can (and already do) also use on their PinePhones. It also helps to move the SoC support forward, as PinePhone mostly relies on already existing sunxi efforts.

If you can't afford a Librem 5, get a PinePhone, but if you're explicitly about getting "closer to your dream" then Librem 5 seems like a much better option when it comes to showing support.

$750 is still steep for a phone that's "a hassle to use" and never available when I need to use it. Isn't there some way I can directly support one or both of these teams?

In the end I think Pine Phone actually does more for open mobile software development than Purism. Rather than sponsoring a new mobile OS effort built mostly from scratch (Pure OS) financed from selling a limmited number of expensive devices, the Pine Phone provides a cheap and accessible platform for all the existing mobile OS efforts (Sailfish OS, Ubuports, Plasma Mobile, Maemo Leste, etc.). As far as I can tell as being part of the Sailfish & Maemo community, this is working quite nicely with a lot of interest and work being done by community members to get Sailfish OS and Memo Leste running on the Pine Phone (and also the Fxtec Pro, another nice new reasonably open device with a hardware keyboard).

> a new mobile OS effort built mostly from scratch (Pure OS)

I'm not sure where does that come from. PureOS is a very lightweight Debian derivative which is built around regular GNOME. Majority on the work happens directly on upstream and benefits everyone even on desktops. Even parts that were actually built from scratch, like phosh, are being built with interoperability and reuse in mind (you can run phosh on any layer-shell compatible Wayland compositor, like sway; and run phoc with other shells as well, such as MATE). Also, libhandy is meant to augment existing Gtk widgetset, as opposed to some other efforts like UBports or Plasma Mobile that require you to completely rewrite your applications to use new QtQuick frameworks, as there's no effort being made to make regular Qt Widgets usable on phones.

Vast majority of the work put into mobile PureOS is just improving Debian and GNOME to work well on mobile.

(PS. Just today I've seen a community member sharing a video of Maemo Leste running on the Librem 5 on Matrix... ;) postmarketOS with various shells, including Plasma Mobile, also works already, and UBports developers already received their devices, so we may see it running there soon as well)

Sure, there are many base libraries Pure OS on the Librem 5 uses, but most of them have never really been used on mobile devices and as you mention require qite signifficant enahancements.

Then in comparison, there are libraries that have been used on mobileLinux devices for a while and even open source native applications (mostly on Plasma Mobile & Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish OS apps are still sadly mostly closed source).

Not making use of and extending all the mobile friendly software almost seems like starting from scratch to me.

BTW, what telephony midleware is Pure OS using ? Ofono, FSO or something else ?

Well, I've seen the effort needed in the past to lay the foundations (when working on SHR and FSO) and see what's needed now (when working on PureOS). The difference is massive - turns out that thanks to things like always-connected 2-in-1 laptops with mobile broadbands and hidpi touchscreens, lots of things that you simply had to make "mobile specific" in the past can be just reused from the desktop now; and improving them makes things better for all GNU/Linux users, not just mobile ones.

The telephony middleware is a great example of that - it uses ModemManager, which is a part of a regular desktop stack and already well-integrated in GNOME (and other DEs) for many years. Thanks to that, you can just plug a USB 3G/4G stick to your laptop, install Chatty and start SMSing - just like that, plug'n'play (you may even be able to make calls if your modem exports audio over USB, but it's rare).

It's not selling this version to "the public" as you explicitly have to opt-in to these batches.

I want so badly to agree with you, but it's become rather clear that puri.sm is a bit of a sleazy company, or at least its leadership is.

I've spoken with multiple ex-purism employees who were laid off before the librem5 shipped. Their comments largely echoed what's in Zlatan's Phoronix interview. [0]

At the moment I'm inclined to support Pine64 over Purism. We're not so desperate for a linux phone that we should throw our resources behind poorly run, misleading companies.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zlatan-T...

at least, if not sleazy then at least very hypey. and such hype/marketing and "reputation management" doesn't really sit well with me.

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