Librem 5 Is Calling | Hacker News Reader

Librem 5 Is Calling

puri.sm

I really do hope the Librem 5 is a success, and I'm extremely grateful to Purism for moving forward with this. I will absolutely make Librem my primary phone provided it has a reasonable price tag for good hardware specs and is usable.

That said, a little while ago I looked into developing some apps for the Librem, and I don't think they intend to either now or in the future provide any sort of a paid app store. This is a massive problem IMHO. I write lots of open source and will continue to do so, but without a means of funding it will never take off like the other major platforms. I would love to see free-as-in-speech app store that also allows payment. As has been repeated ad nauseum, free-as-in-speech doesn't have to also mean free-as-in-beer.

That said also, I don't actually think Purism needs to do this themselves. In fact it may be a lot better if they don't and we had an independent org running the "app store." It would obviously require some collaboration with Purism tho, so I hope I'm wrong about their apathy toward the idea.

In related news I have the PinePhone Braveheart edition and am super pleased with it. Hopefully between the different companies going for it, we'll have some fully open alternatives to Android/iOS soon!

> I would love to see free-as-in-speech app store that also allows payment.

The problem here is payment processors, and the problem with payment processors is pressure from banks, and the pressure on banks comes from regulators. So it's not really a problem that Purism / Librem can solve.

Um, bitcoin, anyone?

The problem with BTC is that demand to spend it on normal commerce is close to nil. Most people don't have it, and the ones who do are HODLing.

So, basically, even though the phone is/will/might be good it will be the windows phone debacle again with people, journalists and reviewers beating the drum of "no apps ! no app store !" until we get articles lamenting what could have been and what a shame it is because we don't need so many apps and the essentials one (whatsupp, facecook and prestagram) got there in time anyway.

This is what I hoped the Ubuntu Phone would be: a full-featured Linux distribution running on a phone! It also suffers from not capturing the Android app ecosystem, but at least it might drive Gnome to get responsive/phone-ready apps. Plus using the same base could enable some nice computer-phone integration.

I'd rather Gnome focus on computer-ready apps a little more rather than chasing a phone future that will likely never come to pass.

I don't mind Gnome 3 but it has taken, in my opinion, too many steps toward mobile already.

While I would tend to agree, it's now already pretty much phone/touch ready, so it might as well make use of it. I feel like Gnome's UI is finally getting some consistency after having a lot of random changes from version to version in the past years.

I don't really use many of the Gnome apps as I'm mainly in the browser or terminal, but various things like the video player, image viewer, document viewer, recorder, webcam app, process monitor, all seem to have converged to being very narrow focused and simplified. I usually like the simplicity, and if I need more I turn to specialized software.

Actually I'd agree that changes have mostly been positive in the last several versions.

Awesome progress by the purism team!

Maybe the majority of people who pre-ordered these brick sized devices will finally start to received them after they've been "shipping" for 9 months after already being more than a year late.

Thankfully there's more competent companies like Pine64 pushing alternative devices.

You do not seem to acknowledge the huge task they untertook. The internal Dogwood batch has already come to Purism [0], so the progress is made all the time.

[0] https://social.librem.one/@purism/103968824971000879

I keep waiting for news about their RYF certification.

So it’s capable of doing the bare minimum required for a device to be called a phone?

Yes, and that’s a large accomplishment given the important constraints that were placed upon this project.

On the one hand, I thought the same. On the other, this is area is a minefield of proprietary non standards and walled off chips and protocols. Embedded is bad, communication even worse. Having an open source phonecall is a real achievement and a testament to the endurance of the people working on it.

Its impressive and not at all, at the same time.

You are right! Most other phones do so much more, like sending all your data to a big corporation with almost no need for you to worry about it. I'm writing this from my Android phone and hope Google isn't going to be angry with me.

~12 years ago Android and iOS were at the bare minimum to be considered a phone by making a call and having the basic necessity apps.

It takes time to build something from scratch. Especially the way Purism is building it without proprietary hardware and firmware blobs.

Maybe we should discourage everyone from learning programming when they first print "Hello World"?

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