Time to switch to GNU/Linux phones if you want to own your device.
I've used GNU/Linux as my desktop OS for nearly a decade: Fedora for years, then openSUSE, then Pop!_OS for the past couple of years. These distros seem to have provided a good, current, stable out-of-the box experience (Out-of-the-Box + RPM Fusion and Packman for the former two.)
I just don't enjoy constantly fixing issues on my personal systems, in fact, after work I just want my computer to work. I get some people enjoy tinkering, I simply want my device to work AND provide me the freedom to do what I want if I feel adventurous. I don't distro-hop, and I don't like rebuilding my OS if I can help it. I'll spend a week getting everything the way I like it and expect it to last me at least a couple of years. I use Linux for everything: gaming, writing software, web browsing, you name it.
For as long as I have looked into it, GNU/Linux phones are an absolute nightmare for someone like me. I remember reading an article full of workarounds to get a dialer app to work on some project phone. I just want a phone that works, and could allow me to access root, setup my dot files, and tinker to the degree I'd like. As of now, my only solution has been LineageOS (Android fork) which has a proper terminal emulator with root access by default. As nice as this is, I'd love to support a GNU/Linux Android-alternative, as it's anyone's guess how long LineageOS or other forks will be compatible to the degree they have been in the past.
> I remember reading an article full of workarounds to get a dialer app to work on some project phone.
Currently, phone calls and sms work fine on both Librem 5 and Pinephone. The development rate is amazing. Only the good battery life is lacking yet, but it's improving every month.
I do prioritize currency over stability in many instances, but I do want a reasonable level of stability which is admittedly quite subjective. Pop!_OS or other Ubuntu-based distros seem to strike the right balance for me (Pop won me over with it's built in, togglable tiling manager, a feature I'd have to spend a week's worth of free time researching and trying to get working properly in, say Arch.) I just don't have much free time and motivation to spend getting some tiny quality of life improvement to work.
Concerning the transparency, I agree, they have some issues. But it does not concern me as long as they actually deliver (and they do).
from some of the people at CDPR
Also worth to take a look at is Fairphone, which is a little more finished product than most. It has an active community around it with many ports ongoing.
Thus, for the vast (and I mean VAST) majority of consumers, Librem and the rest of the open source phones were dead on the spot even if it cost 1/3 of their current price.
It's a pipe dream up there with the "year of the Linux desktop".
This is an extremely misleading example. You pay $2k if you want your phone to be produced in the USA. How much do alternative phones produced in the USA cost?
Standard Librem 5 model costs $800, Pinephone costs $150 or $200.
Edit: Also, why do you need a better performance? Browsing and 3D games work fine.
Like they say themselves in that very article you posted :
> For people who want these specialized features that no other phone offers, the Librem 5's price is not unreasonable.
Also, specs are obviously not the only thing that matters, but having seen Librem 5 phones run, it's pretty damn obvious they do kind of matter - the thing seems to run quite choppy.
Choppiness of the UI is not caused by the hardware specs, but by not yet fully optimized software. See here: https://social.librem.one/@dos/104984930233748319
I don't expect my mom to need iPhone 12 performance, but even my mom told me her older LG G-something was slow getting slow, and having played with it before her switching phones, it wasn't nearly as choppy looking as this video.
You and I obviously have very different definitions of "quite smoothly". And specs related or not, UI is a major part of the experience. The initial point still stands: Linux phones are pretty damn far from being anywhere viable for anyone but the most hardcore enthusiasts.
> specs related or not, UI is a major part of the experience
When someone buys a phone (or hell, a computer), they're buying a package of hardware, which dictates available software. Hell, you could make some hypothetical $200 phone with the best hardware on the market, if it doesn't have what some people consider "basic" functionality software side, they won't buy... coming back to the initial point that Linux phones are not ready for prime time.
What other market have you seen that acts differently? Look at how much other niche devices like Braille screens cost, or even more "mainstream" specialized hardware like the Remarkable Tablet -- arguably a much less capable E-Reader than a Kindle/Kobo device by almost all consumer-relevant metrics. But you'll pay more for stylus support on an E-ink screen if you need that, and you'll tolerate a suboptimal reading experience as well.
It's also important not to ignore the fact that the Librem is a flagship device. It is currently the most powerful Linux phone hardware on the market. So you can buy a cheap, low-powered Pinephone (the far better choice for most tinkerers), or you can shell out for something with more raw power -- which is also pretty consistent with how most markets work.
If you want to buy the single top-of-the-line Wacom tablet, you'll shell out at least $4,000, probably more when you factor in accessories. You want rotational support in the pen? That's another $100. Is the fractional improvement in a Cintiq Pro 'worth' the frankly massive price increase over consumer tablets? Probably not, you can buy an entire Surface Studio for the same price, and that comes with a "free" computer. But you'll pay the Cintiq price if you belong to a niche that needs the best the market currently has to offer for your particular use-case. And you'll pay the Librem price if you belong to a niche that needs the (currently) most powerful phone hardware that's realistically usable with a Linux OS.
Genuine question, I was interested in trying to play around with one a while ago, and I spent a fair amount of time searching and could not find a single monitor for under $1000, and most of them were in the $3000 to even $7000(!!!) range for a device that can literally only display a single line of text at a time.
If there are manufacturers making cheaper devices, or even just doing anything interesting with the hardware like building multiple-row 2D displays instead of 1D single-line outputs, I would love to know about them. It's a market I'm somewhat interested in.
The cheapest option I ever found was https://www.boundlessat.com/Blindness/Braille-Displays/Brail..., which is $1000 for a device that can display a whopping 14 characters at a time.
Sure. 800$ is still quite steep and, exactly as you said, relegates the device to a fringe market.
> What other market have you seen that acts differently? Look at how much other niche devices like Braille screens cost, or even more "mainstream" specialized hardware like the Remarkable Tablet -- arguably a much less capable E-Reader than a Kindle/Kobo device by almost all consumer-relevant metrics. But you'll pay more for stylus support on an E-ink screen if you need that, and you'll tolerate a suboptimal reading experience as well.
> It's also important not to ignore the fact that the Librem is a flagship device. It is currently the most powerful Linux phone hardware on the market. So you can buy a cheap, low-powered Pinephone (the far better choice for most tinkerers), or you can shell out for something with more raw power -- which is also pretty consistent with how most markets work.
"Flagship" doesn't mean much other than "best X company has to offer". Indeed, it's the best you can buy for now, doesn't mean it's particularly great. The experience seems quite hit-or-miss, I've seen both horribly sluggish and quite usable footage just recently.
> If you want to buy the single top-of-the-line Wacom tablet, you'll shell out at least $4,000, probably more when you factor in accessories. You want rotational support in the pen? That's another $100. Is the fractional improvement in a Cintiq Pro 'worth' the frankly massive price increase over consumer tablets? Probably not, you can buy an entire Surface Studio for the same price, and that comes with a "free" computer. But you'll pay the Cintiq price if you belong to a niche that needs the best the market currently has to offer for your particular use-case. And you'll pay the Librem price if you belong to a niche that needs the (currently) most powerful phone hardware that's realistically usable with a Linux OS.
Fair point. Am I misunderstanding the goal of Purism, and merely existing enough for these projects, or are they aiming to grab some market share? I'm just utterly unconvinced that this is anything other than a fun curiosity.
If you buy a Purism laptop today, you'll already pay a premium over companies like Dell. I suspect that Purism is happy to see companies like Pine existing, and I know that they want Linux smartphones in general to be a broader market, I don't know that they're seriously thinking about trying to launch $100-200 competitors. To me, it just doesn't match their other products, I don't see anything else they're offering that would fall into that same category.
And while people would like to see Linux completely take over the desktop/mobile space, I think there's a much broader category of people who just want the market to be big enough for us and to be big enough that it is able to meet our needs. Past that it's not the end of the world if it doesn't get larger.
This is also part of what's frustrating about stuff like the "year of the Linux desktop" joke -- in many ways, the year of the Linux desktop already happened a while ago. Linux got good enough that you can pretty easily mainline it instead of Windows without serious issues or downsides. I have not booted into a Windows computer in multiple years, I don't even have a backup install anywhere. It just doesn't come up anymore. In terms of software, Linux support is something that a sizable portion of the indie games market now talks about, and between Steam/Proton and the recent architectural/policy changes happening on Mac you're now about as likely to be able to run a game on Linux (if not more likely) than you are to be able to run it on a modern Mac device. Meanwhile, 'mainstream' Linux OSes finally got polished enough that it's completely reasonable to put a tech-unfriendly kid or parent on a Linux machine without worrying that you'll get tech support requests every week. There's still a little ways to go with some legacy/holdout software in more niche professional fields like graphic design, but if you're a relatively normal user, then at some point Linux stopped being a struggle to run.
So in the same way, when I talk about the success of the Linux phone market in general, I'm not necessarily aiming for "we monopolize the entire space and nothing else exists." I think it's completely plausible that the Linux phone market might grow, not put Apple out of business, but still grow enough that there is a reasonably priced, usable alternative for people who value privacy and freedom.
In them meantime, it's niche. As far as I know, the front camera on the recent Pinephones still doesn't have software support. So yeah, it's currently a niche market for people who have very specific wants and needs. It seems kind of premature to me for people to be complaining about price and hardware when we're still celebrating things like camera support; commoditization is something that happens to mature markets, not new ones -- and that all takes time.
It works well since October: https://www.pine64.org/2020/10/15/update-new-hacktober-gear/.
Regardless, the point still stands that if we've had camera support for ~3 months, we're probably not at the point where we need to seriously worry about whether we're currently offering the highest value-to-money hardware choices to consumer demographics that have never opened up a command line before.
Asus 1215B released in 2011 with AMD Radeon HD 6250.
Windows and original proprietary AMD drivers, OpenGL 4.1 and DirectX 11
Open source AMD driver replacement, OpenGL 3.3
So in 9 years no one bothered to match the previous proprietary AMD drivers capabilities, while Asus keeps the Windows ones available in the latest Windows versions.