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Comment by fevangelou | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time understanding how regular people in need of "security/privacy" would pay 1200+ USD for this device. I'm not even touching on specs etc. The only ones I can think of needing such "security/privacy" would probably make a great sidestory in Breaking Bad or get their own post-mortem show on Netflix.

Kudos for using Linux, but that alone (and the hardware gimmicks) is really not enough to justify the cost.

P.S. For comparison the (somewhat) similarly spec'ed PinePhone costs 150-200 USD.

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> Kudos for using Linux, but that alone (and the hardware gimmicks) is really not enough to justify the cost.

Much of that cost went into Linux driver/app/phosh development. It made libhandy happen, which become libadwaita. Future Linux-based mobile OSes will be able to stand on the shoulders of all that.

So it’s really more of a donation, plus I got a Linux phone on top of that.

Besides, if I’m lucky and the hardware and battery last long enough, I’ll be using the Librem 5 as a daily driver for a decade, which would help amortize the cost even more. During those years, I won’t have to worry much about software obsolescence. All the drivers have been mainlined into Linux so I’ll always get to use the latest kernel version – even if something happened to Purism.

I could have written this same comment in 2008 about my OpenMoko. It certainly did some useful low-level work (especially when Maemo/Meego/etc. increased the importance of standardisation), but its biggest own-goal was repeatedly throwing away the user-facing stuff (jumping from GTK, to EFL; when QtMobile/Qtopia was actually the most usable!).

Still, that did last me a decade; although I replaced it with a PinePhone rather than a Librem ;)

People in need of security and privacy would be far better off with GrapheneOS. For the Breaking Bad crowd there are specialized crimephones like Anom that are pre-compromised by law enforcement. Librem is more for people who want to run traditional GNOME/KDE on a phone instead of Android.

Why GrapheneOS and not, say, a stock Iphone?

They said privacy.

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