Librem 5 Update: Shipping Estimates and CPU Supply Chain | Hacker News Reader

Librem 5 Update: Shipping Estimates and CPU Supply Chain

puri.sm

For me, it is likely already too late. A law has been passed in Russia (effective since April 1) that requires certain apps to be pre-installed on all smartphones that are sold or imported, and some of them (e.g. for the Wink streaming media service) are simply not available for desktop linux. Therefore, if the phone arrives later, the customs will turn the phone back and apply charges against me for an attempted smuggling. So unless they can ensure that it arrives earlier, I have to ask for a refund.

That law sounds like a really bad idea, but: In theory Purism should be able to comply. As long as these apps support Android 7, they could ship the Librem 5 with Anbox and these apps preinstalled. BTW, do these apps exist for Sailfish OS (or its russian variant)? If so, they can likely be ported to Kirigami and then run natively on Linux phones.

I'm curious, what's the stated reason for requiring that streaming service?

Promoting Russian services (Wink, ivi.ru and others) over foreign ones (e.g. Netflix). Removing the uncompetitive advantages that Western services have - because apps for foreign services are typically preinstalled already, and the user had to install apps for Russian services explicitly, and a typical grandma cannot do it.

Get a PinePhone then.

I already have one (BraveHeart edition).

the shit in Russia is crazy but I don't think customs is going to check any of it especially if you are going to use mail proxy so it will come into Russia as a regular parcel with an old phone(it even looks old)

PinePhones are due to ship next month for $200. Is a Librem 5 worth waiting for and paying 4x the price?

I got my Librem 5 last week, and I'm sad to say that it isn't. The software is just not there. It's in a state that would have been disappointing if it had actually shipped on time two years ago. A device that cannot reliably connect to a wifi network in 2021 is... mindboggling. I wrote up some of my first impressions here in the Purism forum: https://forums.puri.sm/t/myl5-librem-5-evergreen-arrived-in-...

My current plan is to sell it on at half price, which should roughly cover a new Fairphone.

If you are really selling it, please get in touch - hello@linmob.net is my email, I am in Germany.

I've had the first gen PinePhone and my view on it is that this is not really a mass market device yet.

The PinePhone is just too slow to use. It's frustratingly unresponsive.

I hoped the LibreM would be fast enough to make the phone usable.

And then after that, there need to be apps that work, but the Free Phone ecosystem is fractured. There's Android derivatives such as the Lineage or /e/ OS, there are pure Linux variants running Phosh, which was developed by Pureism, but also runs on Mobian and postmarketOS, and there is Plasma Mobile, and UBPorts, as well as GerdaOS, which is based on KaiOS, which is a fork of FirefoxOS.

This sounds you did have a Braveheart edition and have given it away since.

I got started with the UBports Edition PinePhone in June and I think it's amazing how much the software has improved since. I have quite a backlog of new apps I need to add to https://linmobapps,frama.io, and overall it has gotten more stable and smoother as more and more is being upstreamed and hardware enablement happens.

BTW: I am writing this on my PinePhone.

UBports is arguably obsolete, it is based on 2014-era Ubuntu-specific code that even Ubuntu moved away from and is now bitrotting. Mobian has a more promising software stack, but I agree with the OP that the PinePhone is painfully slow, and it doesn't matter which edition you have, because they all have the same underpowered A64 CPU.

I didn't give it away, it's functional.

As for UBPorts, it stoppped updating! It just fails to update. It also insists I'm on a captive portal when I'm on my home wifi.

If you just want a Linux phone, probably not.

A lot of the price of the Librem 5 goes towards subsidizing the software development. Pine64 only produces the hardware and leaves the rest to the community, but everyone benefits from much of the work Purism is doing in the software stack.

I got a PineTab recently and am currently running Mobian w/ Phosh on it. I'm also still frustratedly awaiting my Librem 5, but those Mobian PinePhones look nice.

Someone might say the Librem 5 has better specs, but it's also huge and really not targeted at the average consumer (they probably don't care about the physical kill switches or convergence).

This unboxing/first experience video[1] about the Librem 5 provides an overview of what you get when you buy this device. The phone seems very limited in its current state, lacking basic features like working cameras or hardware-accelerated UI components (the choppy scrolling is being compared to Android Froyo, released in 2010). The launcher locks up the screen with no feedback until the app is loaded, you need to tap on some apps to bring them into focus as if you were clicking on a window in a desktop app, things like that. Full GTK desktop apps like Audacity look cramped on the tiny screen, even if it's remarkable that they run at all.

I get that this isn't meant to be a fancy flagship, what it means to only use Free Software and a traceable supply chain, all of that. They must be proud to work on such a project. Realistically, the market for it seems incredibly small, and the prices being quoted mean that only truly dedicated Free Software advocates would buy this phone. One thing the video mentions is the availability of 2 different models based on the origin of the hardware components: one fully built in the U.S. (with American-made components?) costing $2,000 – not a typo – and the other version costing $800 (presumably sourced from China).

It's great that they are trying to do this but… this user experience, for this price, considering the competition? What they are trying to achieve comes with a ton of major challenges and it won't be easy to ship a product that enough customers find valuable enough to buy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH8DRyKUZDg

> you need to tap on some apps to bring them into focus as if you were clicking on a window in a desktop app

Nope, not really. What's shown on the video is just a modal window not getting focused after its parent has been manually selected. This is going to go away once the activity overview starts to group child windows together with their parents (it didn't so far because it required wlr-foreign-toplevel-management protocol to be extended upstream to provide information about parent-child relationship).

> Full GTK desktop apps like Audacity look cramped on the tiny screen

FWIW such apps can be scaled down - which makes them pretty usable in many cases.

BTW. The video shows the state of the software from initial shipment in November. Plenty of things have changed already since (YouTube works out of box, jumpy scrolling is fixed etc.)

> Full GTK desktop apps like Audacity look cramped on the tiny screen, even if it's remarkable that they run at all.

Full desktop GTK applications ran nicely on the N900 ten years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900

It's sad that the world has developed in a direction that we still need to consider this remarkable.

Oh good - I read

> The iMX-8 processor we use in our Librem 5 is also popular in the automotive industry

and immediately assumed that they were going to be blocked for the foreseeable future, but it sounds like they expect to be okay (assuming that they're not overly optimistic, of course).

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