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ipnon

Maybe I'm showing my age, but this is the first release of a phone I have been eagerly awaiting.

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I'm young, and this is the first release of a phone I've been eagerly awaiting.

Openmoko Freerunner ;)

Had one many years ago. Great idea but not a livable-with phone. Put me off dev phones possibly forever.

Didn't stop me getting an N900 at launch though. Great little piece of kit.

Ha, Openmoko Neo Freerunner was my first smartphone :) It managed to play the role of "livable-with phone" well enough for me though (but not without some effort of course). Then moved to Nokia N900 and only now I'm switching from it to Librem 5.

> now I'm switching from it to Librem 5

Do you actually have the Librem 5 yet?

Based on the mediocre battery life I'm hearing about on the mntre reform 2, and the need for such a heat sink there, I'm very curious what the Librem 5 situation is. They share a common SoC.

Yes. I have backed it during the original crowdfunding and since a year ago I'm actually working on it at Purism.

The battery life and thermals got much better in the last few months, and there's still plenty of stuff to improve on in the software stack there. With my early batch unit with smaller battery (2000mAh) I'm now able to reach 6h of idle time with modem and WiFi on without utilizing CPU suspend at all (so the phone stays reachable all that time and you can, say, ssh into it - the high figures from the PinePhone blog post rely on putting the phone into suspend). There's still plenty of work left, but I'm pretty happy with how usable Librem 5 comes to be right now.

iMX.8M can be a power and thermal hog, that's right, but once you tame it in the kernel it becomes much more approachable ;)

Wow you kept that N900 alive for a long time!

Mine effectively died after about three years, the USB charging port came loose and the only way I had to charge it was removing the battery and charging externally.

The freerunner was just a little too pre-market for me. I remember installing various different OS and frontend packages and trying lots of things out. It would have been fine but for one failing - whatever I installed, incoming calls would often just be silent. A phone that can't take calls is a step too far!

Well, I have cheated a bit, it's a third one if I count right and I still have some spares... :D

Freerunner sure needed some attention to make it work, but with workarounds and hw fixes for the infamous #1024 and call buzz issues it was a pretty great device. I would have used it longer if not for unbearable GPU performance that drove me towards N900 (damned glamo :))

whoa! I had to give up on my n900 in 2012, when it was clear they were not going to fix two major bugs (GPS often never got a lock, and calls got dropped because the phone app took so long to swap in). it was still one of the best phones I've ever had though; I'm looking forward to seeing what the pinephone can do.

FWIW the swapping issue was massively improved by CSSU-Thumb community update, and AFAIR GPS just needed a correct SUPL server to be set, since the Nokia's one had a SSL certificate that expired soon after the official support has ended.

good to hear about the swapping issue, but the gps definitely have any simple fixes - i spent a good while trawling through forums and trying out various suggestions (i'm pretty sure changing the supl server was one of them), and none of them worked for me.

I sure remember getting AGPS to work by running a SUPL proxy on my own server, but I have no idea whether that was a simplest solution or that I simply wanted to play with running a SUPL proxy :P

I had the cheap FirefoxOS phone, which I thought was going to be a miserable dev phone experience. But it turns out it was actually a very solid phone that did everything I wanted. I'm still upset that that OS was discontinued.

Count me in. I refuse to buy into the Apple ecosystem anymore after "courage" and the last few years of laptops, and I develop in linux anyway, so I'm extremely interested. Perhaps I just need to make the plunge?

My current daily driver is getting old but it still works. I'm going to buy the pinephone and try to use it as a replacement for my daily driver. If it's not convenient enough I will switch back and still have an interesting device to hack on.

There was a Nokia Linux phone I remember being really excited for and went to demo it in a store. This was maybe 10 years ago.

That would be the Nokia N900, which used Maemo, a Debian-based distro. It runs PostmarketOS, as well [0].

[0]: https://invidio.us/watch?v=eux9IcB2lfg.

Or the Nokia N9

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9

His eagerness and excitement at the time could have been more closely related to Nokia N900's novelty (2009), since the N9 was released two years later (2011), and the concept wouldn't be as surprising. That's why I went with the N900 with my guess. In any case, considering both phones flew under almost everyone's radar, you might be right: it could be either one.

N9 wasn’t much of a “Linux phone”, no more than Android is in terms of experience.

The internet tablet line from Nokia 700 through to N900 on the other hand was by all means an “Xorg based” device, though only N900 could make calls(IIRC)

It was wonderful. It's too bad we had to wait this long for a replacement.

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