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.

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.

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).