PureOS 10 is Released for all Librem Products
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For those looking for a Linux phone, is Purism the only (close to) usable option?
If you just mean a phone that can run a more traditional Linux distribution, you could look into Postmarket OS. There's a list of supported devices here: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
Maybe with some patches on top to enable more functionality, but easily rebaseable, unlike some abandoned 3-6 years old kernel with milions of lines of changes that you have no way of rebasing on top of the latest Linux release, to be able to enjoy all the latest Linux kernel advancements.
More strict definition would be that you can just boot Arch Linux ARM on it or other ARM distro out of the box, and all HW will be accessible and usable.
Otherwise Linux phone is any old Android, because all of them run some hacked up version of Linux. :)
Edit: People responding to me as if I said it's suitable as a daily driver for "most people" or "casual users" need to learn how to read. Not only did I not use either of those phrases, the context of the conversation was "those looking for a Linux phone", which neither of those demographics are.
> Firefox: 8 seconds to open; ... and loads my start page in 21 seconds.
It's constantly improving, and the PinePhone Pro seems similarly promising, but I'd be downright shocked if there triple digits of people daily driving it and enjoying the experience (outside the satisfaction of living on the bleeding edge).
Compared to the “average” phone of a typical person (which depends on country), the pinephone is slower and less capable than that with worse battery life. I do own one, but this is the unfortunate reality. I could probably use one as a daily driver, but at that point I could probably just as well be without a phone, as taking photos is 2000s category and desktop firefox is not the most usable on a touch interface, let alone on such a weak CPU.
So this benchmark tells me the single-core JS performance of the iphone is 20x that of my just 2 year old phone. And you know what? I didn't notice it was supposed to be "slow". I don't have a comparison to the Pinephone and I'm too lazy to look now but if I, a casual (normal?) phone user don't notice this weak cpu, what else might I not notice?
I can't even do things as basic as placing an app icon on the home screen, and expect that it will still be there after the next reboot.
So it is not a daily driver by any stretch of the immagination, regardless of what you mean by daily driver. Even if your idea of daily driver is "a feature phone would do", it's still not there yet (MMS not being fully working, most feature phones have that).
I love the PinePhone and I want to see it succeed, I don't regret spending the money on it, but it is most certainly not usable as a daily driver.
I can see some progress being made with every single update though, so in time it will eventually get there thanks to the community.
[1] https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-beta-edition-with-conve...
It isn't. It's only pre-installed because there's a money deal involved with pre-installing it. Manjaro also did weird things like announcing they have working MMS when they didn't, and even outside of phones are considered to be a weird distro given their relationship with Arch. Going by the IRC channel, a lot of people install a different distro.
>I can't even do things as basic as placing an app icon on the home screen, and expect that it will still be there after the next reboot.
Known plamo bug that they haven't fixed in forever. I stopped using it for that and other reasons and have no idea why people like it. phosh works fine.
Also, "things as basic as" implies that saving the positions of homescreen items is somehow more fundamental than everything else on the phone, and if they can't get this to work then obviously everything else must also be broken. It isn't, and it's not.
>So it is not a daily driver by any stretch of the immagination, regardless of what you mean by daily driver.
It makes and receives calls, sends and receives SMS, downloads voicemails, runs an up-to-date web brower, takes decent photographs of documents when a scanner isn't available, and allows me to ssh to my other machines.
Turns out different people have different criteria for their daily driver phones. Shocking.
>Even if your idea of daily driver is "a feature phone would do", it's still not there yet (MMS not being fully working, most feature phones have that).
a) MMS matters to a few select countries in the world. But since you assumed everyone else has the same view as you about what a daily driver is, presumably you also assumed that everyone else finds MMS important.
b) Dumbphones can't do three of the five things I listed above as my criteria for a daily driver.
c) In the US, it's next to impossible to find a dumbphone that will continue to work in the next few years because of carriers shutting down everything that isn't 4G and 5G.
Really, all this conversation thread has revealed is that people don't think there's a middle ground between a phone that's 100% usable by all 8 billion people in the world and a phone that's 100% useless.
Regarding the other points:
> Also, "things as basic as" implies that saving the positions of homescreen items is somehow more fundamental than everything else on the phone, and if they can't get this to work then obviously everything else must also be broken. It isn't, and it's not.
I strongly disagree with this, it's one of the first things every new user will do with a new phone, it's the very definition of basic considering that our discussion is in the context of usability. Dev priorities should be based on user needs not on some other obscure technical criterion.
> It makes and receives calls, sends and receives SMS, downloads voicemails, runs an up-to-date web brower, takes decent photographs of documents when a scanner isn't available, and allows me to ssh to my other machines.
So it's a feature phone, bar the SSH.
> MMS matters to a few select countries in the world. But since you assumed everyone else has the same view as you about what a daily driver is, presumably you also assumed that everyone else finds MMS important. Again, Dev priorities should be based on user needs not on some other obscure technical criterion.
I don't live in one of the countries where MMS messages are mainstream, so they don't matter to me, but I know those countries exist, and some of those are among the largest countries by population, so I consider it a priority. Again, Dev priorities should be based on user needs not on some other obscure technical criterion.
> b) Dumbphones can't do three of the five things I listed above as my criteria for a daily driver.
they can do everything you mentioned except SSH, and I'm pretty sure there was some Nokia Series 30 app that can do SSH, but of course it's debatable if Series 30 falls under smartphone or feature phone.
> Really, all this conversation thread has revealed is that people don't think there's a middle ground between a phone that's 100% usable by all 8 billion people in the world and a phone that's 100% useless.
At the moment PinePhone is usable by less than what, 2% of the population? So according to your own criteria it's 98% useless? :-P
>I strongly disagree with this, it's one of the first things every new user will do with a new phone, it's the very definition of basic considering that our discussion is in the context of usability.
>At the moment PinePhone is usable by less than what, 2% of the population?
Read the edit in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29310621
---
>Dev priorities should be based on user needs not on some other obscure technical criterion.
>Again, Dev priorities should be based on user needs not on some other obscure technical criterion.
Sorry, but you don't understand how Linux works. People create things that they want to use themselves, not because they have to satisfy KPIs about number of users to their management.
The whole reason MMS support exists now is that one person decided he needed it badly enough to spend time learning a large amount of time reading the spec, learning glib, etc.
---
>So it's a feature phone, bar the SSH.
Wrong. My feature phone can no longer work for calls or SMS because the carrier decided to block it, since it's shutting down 3G. It also doesn't have an up-to-date browser.
> People create things that they want to use themselves, not because they have to satisfy KPIs about number of users to their management.
Instead, for me it is more something like:
"I create things for the community, including my mum who, back in the 90's, could never learn how to program her VCR".
Well, I've never contributed to any Linux distro but I contributed to a few OSS projects and I usually have that kind of goal in my mind.
Regarding the feature phones problem, I believe there are a few "new" feature phones that support new network standards, I will dig the links up, I'm a bit of an Amish when it comes to phones so I have researched this topic multiple times in the past (but eventually decided to go for the PinePhone instead). The browser is not going to be great of course, but should be serviceable in most cases.
Edit:
these are some of the feature phones I have evaluated, they all support 4G, at the time I did not have browser or camera among the requirements so some of those don't have them:
https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/product/feature_phone/ky... This one has no camera
https://www.thelightphone.com/ this one has no browser or camera
https://mudita.com/products/phones/mudita-pure/ Unfortunately still says "pre order", so not viable right now
https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_au/feature-phones All models have camera, browser[1] and 4G, unfortunately they come with some unwelcome preinstalled software, such as Whatsapp and Google Maps. PS the link brings you to the Australian website, if you are in the US replace "_au" with "_us" in the URL, the selection of models is slightly different.
[1] all except the 225 have KaiOS Browser which from what I've read is serviceable for basic browsing, the 225 apparently comes with a lightweight browser based on Opera Mini which is unable to render correctly most websites so it would be only useful strictly as an "emergency" browser.
It unfortunately not fully open source, but other than that its a normal Linux distro (Qt, DBus, systemd, rpm, Python, etc.). I have been running it on my primary device for years so I would say it is useable. ;-)
Lack of support for proprietary apps is something to blame those proprietary app developers for, generally. They haven't given the people freedoms to port them.
Matrix and XMPP are third party, free, and already usable on a PinePhone.
[0] https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-adds-pureos-to-list-of-endorsed...
Purism gets around the requirements for FSF RYF by loading proprietary firmware from a separate chip instead of main CPU
> PureOS leverages the legendary security support from upstream Debian.
Anytime I do a vulnerability scan of a Debian image (updated via apt) using AWS ECR I get a laundry list of open issues including a few high severity CVEs. Meanwhile images based on Amazon Linux, Alpine or Oracle Linux are clear or have only few lower severity CVEs. I haven't looked at AlmaLinux recently but I'll need to soon; if it is anything like CentOS I expect the scan will be fairly clean.
Whatever rationale there might be for this it is difficult to explain to stake holders. In any case 'legendary' seems a stretch comparatively speaking.
They avoid mentioning GNU/Linux in general.
pmbootstrap will allow you to generate an image for your phone, flash it, set up a cross-compile environment and a chroot with emulation trough qemu for local testing, it's quite easy to use.
There's likely some sweet (sour) spot of "not enough" that the supplier will care, and "too much" to satisfy your demand from some stock leftovers.
You don't need to be a mega company to source 4k panels instead of 1080p panels in 2021, both are long past being volume commodity parts the same as sourcing 16 GB DIMMs instead of 4 GB DIMMs doesn't require you be Apple or Dell either.
I like high-res screens. But in general, the best course of action for a laptop is to get the lowest possible resolution that still works for you. Personally, I have a hard time seeing how an upgrade from 1440p-ish to 4K-ish makes any discernable difference on a 14" and how it justifies cutting into my power efficiency.
> In general case it is not true....
Really? You could at least pretend to argue in good faith...
Humans simply cannot see with such clarity without using a magnifying glass.
Plus, it uses more energy and require more expensive GPUs.
It does suck some power though, same with high refresh. I used to have my laptop flip between 4k 200% DPI and 1080p 100% DPI based on whether I was plugged in. Usually ran games at 1080p. Important to use nearest neighbor scaling in that situation though or it'll get blurry.
There is absolutely a visible difference between HiDPI displays and standard ones.
You may need glasses. The difference between a 1920x1200 panel, and a 2560x1600 display at 13.3" is slight, but very visible.
It does. Text looks better on high density displays.
Perhaps it's still possible if you can get the drivers and kernel from the right places, but if seems like you won't receive any official support on such a setup.
If there was a keyboard as good as Android or iOS options in terms of speed and accuracy, then I would expect to see good text based interfaces popping up. But the keyboards I've seen have still been pretty clunky.
The SXMO image for Pine64-Arch [1] seemed pretty nice, but clearly still in development of the basic features.
[1]: https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/releases/d...
That pretty much just leaves Phosh or Plasma for mobile DEs. IMHO Phosh is way more usable right now (particularly if you use the great Tweaks app developed for PostmarketOS). https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/postmarketos-tweaks/
(I believe a version of the Tweaks comes bundled with Manjaro Phosh and it can be built from source on Mobian Phosh too...)
You might have issues with your install or hardware.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/qsaap3/purism_is_a_...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/htqz2q/purism_wont_...
I hope the company catches up while they continue to make the Linux computing world better. Being aware of their faults is important, but trying to drag them through the mud does a disservice to everyone.
The phone was crowdfunded in September/October 2017, so it's 4 years.
They're having a hard time with the funds now, so they probably have to delay refunds in order not to go bankrupt. Recently they got some inestments, so it should get better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27949435.
That right there is a red flag. Sometimes companies don't make it. I've never heard of a story where a company put themselves above their duty to their customers in a way such as that which didn't lead to massive problems down the road.
I sincerely hope your interpretation is incorrect.
But then you need $X before you can make even the first sale. One way to do that is by taking pre-orders. Then you have money for the R&D before you have a product to ship.
The problem comes if the product is late to market and then the people with pre-orders are unhappy. To give them a refund you have to have sold N products -- not including the one they're canceling -- or else you don't have the money because you already spent it on R&D.
As long as you eventually sell N products, you can eventually give the refund, but you might not be able to do it yet. And, of course, if you never sell N products, you're in trouble.
I just think that once you've accepted money for a good or service and haven't delivered that good or service, and the person wants their money back, you should be giving that money back to the degree you're capable. That it's inconvenient and may actually lead to the dissolution of your company or result in people not getting all their money back isn't really relevant. Make a case to the people and see if they are willing to accept it or alternatives (such as waiting a bit for more of their return), but don't make decisions on their behalf when your duty to return their money is clear.
Linux is only free if your time is worthless
One note: according to the email they sent to crowdfunders in September, they've changed their policy back to what it was originally and will now issue refunds.
> If you would like us to go ahead with refund, we can now allocate your parts to another order and refund your Librem 5 product in accordance with the policy.
Also moved twice in last 4 years and Purism accidentally sent it out to old address. When I noticed that and asked for help - they stopped the package and re-sent me a new one to the new address.
Very happy with the device. Very happy with service and support. Freedom is well worth waiting for.
This either seems like a lie or they are having issues managing a proper queue.
I know that purism does focus on the tech nerd audience - but with demos like that, good luck selling it to people who are just privacy-conscious who want a glorified, private flip phone replacement.
I know far more people in my life who are privacy conscious but not tech nerds, to the point they would consider buying a flip phone.
If Purism marketed to them as being a superior private flip-phone alternative, they could sell far more phones.
I guess what upsets me most is that Linux companies like Purism claim they want to build a 3rd ecosystem. You aren’t going to get a 3rd ecosystem going with videos like that.
I think my point is more along the lines that Linux people overestimate regular folk's interest in specs and details. But that isn't a winning strategy in the real world. Apple doesn't say how many megapixels their cameras have, or how many GBs of RAM their phones have, or the CPU clock speed, or the modem version - and the specs they do give, they don't advertise them out loud. Has Apple ever announced that we have a 2000xSomething OLED display in huge letters? No, it's a "Liquid Retina XDR" display and that's all most people need to know. If you really care, it's in the specs sheet.
That's also not counting the actually embarrassing parts of this release. You just got a Camera app? In 2021, where phones are all about Cameras, you only got an out-of-the-box Camera app just now? (Maybe there was a camera app earlier - but the release video implies the camera app is all-new and wasn't there before.)
And despite not advertising specs - they sell just fine. If Apple got overly technical, they might sell less because it's confusing.
The whole post is droll, it's a big fat nothing-burger based on my casual perusal. Felt like they just needed to say something about the version number changing on their distro.
So, what exactly am I supposed to be impressed by here? Maybe I need to revisit the post, since I did skim it pretty quickly.
It's a desktop OS. If you connect an external monitor, you can use any desktop software, including GIMP. Works fine on my Pinephone with phosh.
How is that any different than literally any other distro you can boot on a handheld?
You're basically confirming my point; nothing especially "convergent" about pureos to see here, no?
People aren’t going to connect their phones to a monitor and dock to use GIMP. People might use GIMP on their phones if it were available.
Upd: here is GIMP for you: https://social.librem.one/@eliasr/105589789106877911.
I'm not sure what you're talking about.
We've had the ability to run unmodified desktop linux apps on handhelds since the bad old FPU-less days of the Sharp Zaurus.
That's ancient history, and the whole f!cking promise of "convergence" AIUI is to make those applications usable in touch interfaces while being capable of transitioning seamlessly back into a desktop point-and-click interaction model when you dock the handheld.
It's basically just an Android thing to be a linux-based handheld that actively obstructs running conventional desktop linux software. And even in that world you can coax it by adding the missing userspace bits, isn't there an android app that does just that (termux)? https://github.com/termux/x11-packages/issues/144
Anyways, this feels like a pathetic strawman discussion at this point, I have better things to do today, cheers.
Or is KDE now a Purism project? Or is Sailfish? Or sxmo? Or is p-boot? Or Linux kernel when no drivers overlap between the two SoCs? Or is crust? Or modem manager? Or all the work going into modem's kernel and firmware? Or is megapixels a purism project? Or debian/arch linux arm and all the packaging effort done there that many distros with pinephone support rely on?
Pinephone software support is so much more than re-using PureOS components.
Anyway your question was:
> Perhaps you know some other vendor developing and selling phones with a desktop OS and desktop apps?
And that doesn't require any PureOS components for full functionality. I run i3wm on my Pinephone for convergence. Easy to dual-boot into i3wm/arch linux or any other mobile distro for use on the go (mobile wayland based DEs have terrible performance with dual monitor use anyway, compared to plain old Xorg, and if anything is less needed is to fluidly swap between desktop and mobile UI, when reboot takes a few seconds anyway). Maybe some people really need that kind of convergence, but dual boot is enough for me.
I've made this project to showcase that functionality to people, and to also show that there's not just PureOS/phosh
Thank you for the p-boot, it's great and I'm using it myself. However I don't think that volunteer development is sustainable in the long-term and can lead to a usable (daily driver for non-nerds) GNU/Linux phone without commercial contribution.
That's interesting, but arguing that is not my goal in this discussion.
You just asked what other comapny builds phones that can run dekstop OS and apps. Pine64 now has two. And IMO best uscease for that is without any PureOS components, just with straight desktop apps as existed before all this adaptation to smartphone form factor and touch interface. (It's my bias showing here, because I don't like nor use GNOME dekstop environement. Someone who likes GNOME may enjoy that PureOS putting some effort into making it possible to connect to a monitor and seamlessly transition into some convergent environement where their favorite apps will adapt to the current screen size.)
Sure, these aren't usually literally the same pieces of software running on the Mac, the iPhone, and the iPad. But from what I can tell, that's not literally true on Purism, either, because the software is going to have to be recompiled for different CPU architectures. So now we're actually a lot closer to what Apple's been doing the last few years with Catalyst (and kind of slouching toward a grander strategy with SwiftUI). And again, not to put too fine a point on it, but I don't actually care in practice how much code is shared between the versions of my prose editor I'm running on the desktop and on the phone, given that they function the same way and edit the same files. (And share them all completely transparently, because they're using iCloud. Walled garden etc. etc., but this is a real selling point.)
Purism's real argument is free-as-in-freedom software. And that's a good argument. But I think they need to get a lot better at reaching the "casual but concerned" audience, and that means getting better at writing press releases and product announcements. Speaking as a professional writer, the PureOS 10 announcement page is really, really bad. You may not think it's fair to judge the quality of the product based on that, and it isn't, but it's still going to happen. (Judging from the comments here they also need to get better at, well, shipping hardware, which is an even more serious problem, granted.)
The top half part is quite good. It's not presenting itself as modern or slick, but as privacy and freedom and transparency. It's a good angle, because hardware is not this phone's strength.
The bottom half is where things go off the rails. "One Powerful GPU?" Don't gaslight me - anyone who has played a game on a smartphone looks at that and goes oof. HTML5 apps because you don't have real apps? Blegh - especially because it says in the description "we plan to." The "competitive chart"? A huge mistake because it gives the competition absolutely no points - which makes it look obviously biased and completely lacking credibility. What other company makes "competitive charts" that don't acknowledge, at least somewhat, the good points about the competition?
And then there's the availability part which is just really bad. 52 weeks? There will be two OnePlus phones, a new iPhone model, and a new Samsung model by the time that thing supposedly ships. Also, if you are really concerned about your privacy - you can't wait a year being no more private than before!
It's the best mobile GPU working with fully free software. This is for the audience that cares about it.
> HTML5 apps because you don't have real apps?
But they do have real apps. Thousands of desktop Linux apps.
> Also, if you are really concerned about your privacy - you can't wait a year being no more private than before!
If you're in a hurry, consider this: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa.
Agree concerning the "competitive chart". Still it looks funny IMHO.
T860MP4 in Pinebook/Pinephone Pro is similar or better, and also works with fully free software.
"Parents: You will love the Librem 5 because it will allow you to communicate with your child, ..." -- Um, in 2021 people know what a phone is. Maybe skip to the part about why yours is better than the competition?
"Lifetime updates that actually extend your phone’s life" -- Do they think updates from other companies make their phones self destruct? Seems like they're alluding to specific scandals, but it is kind of odd not to link to them directly. Also comes across as really evasive to not say how many years of updates they guarantee.
"Real convergence means bringing your desktop computer with you wherever you go." -- Have you not heard of a laptop? Surely they could have started with an actual definition of what convergence means. Doesn't help that the rest of the paragraph is talking about how hard they worked shrinking the OS instead of why you'd want the feature. (Side note: operating systems are software so nothing special is needed to get one to physically fit in my pocket)
Actually, it's the lack of updates from other companies making their phones self-destruct, as in they become unusable bricks. If the software is proprietary, you have no way of updating it yourself.
> Also comes across as really evasive to not say how many years of updates they guarantee.
It's "forever". The devices run FLOSS, which means that even if Purism disappears, they will still get updates from the Linux community. My 12+-year-old laptop runs latest Debian.
> Surely they could have started with an actual definition of what convergence means.
It's linked: https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-co....
If all you care is longevity, then Apple is definitely a good choice. However, if you also value freedom, then your only other mainstream choice is Android, which is only supported for 3 years or less.
Which is kind of stupid frankly, most of those will rather install themselves something custom.