Librem 5 smartphone (Q3 2019)

[Davo]

The moment is fast approaching that Purism (an SCP from California) will finally offer the world a genuinely Linux native smartphone, after 2 years of initial crowdfunding (a tiny $2m+ btw) and incessant hacking the core since then.

Just who is waiting for (or else eagerly anticipating) this product launch just remains to be seen IMO. The price point is not cheap at all at about $650 for a fairly rudimentary-specked phone.
2 or 3 years old tech albeit with an internal and SoM facelift qua features. Smartphones are however incredibly complex animals with accelorometers, gyrometers, magnetometers (and all 3x just determine pitch and angle and attitude or orientation alone).

Then you get into the ARM cpu, the gpu the radio, baseband, cellular, peripherals. No wonder Linux has always tried to piggy-back upon an existing Android installation, within a container environment. Android itself however adds up-to 3 million lines of out-of-tree code to the Linux kernel used (mostly years out-of-date).Plus up-to 8x fabless construction partner companies then use that code to eventually configure their own stuff to work with it (and almost none of that code is publicly inspected or vetted) and the product launch is thus determined by last to the party and the proverbial weakest link in the chain.
Plus how often does any Android phone ever get updated? If you are lucky maybe once or twice. Many attempts to go with Linux-ways-better here -like postmarketos or cyanogen or Jolla, Sailfish or Ubuntu Touch ... but nothing ever really viable.

Purism might well be different here. The enormous number of commits hitting Linux kernel 5.2(/3) this week alone indicate a very eminent release date. As does daily youtube teaser videos. Entire chipset (nxp) plus the etnav gpu, plus glemasco, plus radios, baseband all hitting the Linux-next mainline kernel branches. I am just very, very excited here. Just 5 seconds to boot a full Linux on a smartphone (one penguin btw shown for each second). OK Oreo boots in 15 secs and who powers down anyways (me maybe haha), pobably also easy to dual-boot it too, to adapt any Linux like Arch/Tumbleweed (or whatever, MX too). It will use Gnome libs and tools ootb, but kde plasma mobile should also work just as good semi-ootb. MX would surely work too - if say stuff like tpm, trousers, various gnome libs, various specialist pure libs, posh etc and quite a number of other gnome native libs added were ported ...plus it could be running an almost nightly build Linux-next style mainline kernel (version 5.2 or above) all pre-loaded - this almost sounds just too crazy good to me.

Anyone else already per-ordered this phone or maybe even looking to do an MX build cq spin on this phone? It is not cheap at all, quite clunky and big, and it is not bling either and the production run is very tiny and it's only raison-d 'etre is to give you Linux on a smartphone (with no added extras at all).
The rest is work in progress stuff. Privacy is being touted of course as a reason to buy, but that comes with going with the Linux way anyways.

Quite intriguing stuff though end-of-day, to not only be able to run Linux on a smartphone - with it 99% being piggy-backed on top of Android, but to actually run full Linux in all of it's intended glory and speed and it's utter power too. The price is very steep though here and the apps available very limited and even basic functions being available are almost a miracle to have, as this ecosphere is so incredibly hard and complex to code upon. Endless chains of partner companies all delivering just a a stepping-stone element to the entire final product. This one phone though does offer an all-in-one Linux solution, mostly anyways.

About 90% core functionality, limited app functionality, real kill switches and replaceable batteries etc. If you order online most specs are just "tbd "(like yet to be determined stuff) even now, but most of those ordering will not care one jot about either price or actual specs ...just that it will boot 100% Linux natively and that it can run Linux mainline kernels ootb and with no android to be seen. I'm very excited here myself and await delivery sometime soon, full specs still fairly unknown (will have 8gb ram, though all the dev-kits shipped with only 4gb). Very rare that I would ever think to buy something, with limited actual shipping specs included and without full and circa 99% research ...but this phone is just THAT important to some people (me too). Android is sort-of maybe Linux-based, but only with some millions of added codelines and a few more millions by contracted associates (who use closed source models only). Not quite the same thing.

Anyone else feeling this type of buzz of excitement of a semi-imminent release of an actual Linux smartphone so very soon? Yes, so very expensive to acquire and not top-end of the market qua components ...but sometimes freedom is not as free as it should be.

[duane]

I have been watching this for several years. Since my first post here about Purism's phone.
I do not have the financial means to buy one yet. Not sure if I ever will.
I share your excitement though. If they can achieve this it will be great news for Linux and security minded folks.

[Davo]

I have been watching this for several years. Since my first post here about Purism's phone.
I do not have the financial means to buy one yet. Not sure if I ever will.
I share your excitement though. If they can achieve this it will be great news for Linux and security minded folks.

You did not make too easy for me to find your long-ago post cq thread on this matter ...but found it eventually and all the more kudos for it to begin from anno 2017
viewtopic.php?t=42925
Again the big problem is the almost huge selling price at about $650, for some otherwise run-of-mill specs.. So many folks just cannot go there in paying this money. I fully understand that angle and it was a huge decision to make for me too. To buy or not to buy. I'm not rich at all. but do want this product so much

I almost never buy anything without knowing shipment date beforehand, rma policies, full specs of the entire equipment etc ...but this company does seem to be one to maybe trust a bit more than normal.Yes, I bought last year with expected release this past January, then March, then July (maybe).
Still nothing terribly specific on the actual specs of the Phone or release date. One of the 15x dedicated employees though is Chris Lamb, who until a month ago was our own Debian project leader for the past 2~3 years (which then means that do you think this adds credence to their SPC as a whole, which it must do so ...and so you go on and encounter EU commission lawyers and politicians and quite a few 100% Linux hackers too within their mix.

That gives me some good confidence here,that this product will actually release very soon. Apparently the very latest extended delays were because of horrible battery software performance. I do not care at all how raw the system performs on release, but battery stuff is so crucial here and would be very bad to ship with horrible battery. The rest of it ...and I just don't really care at all. if the fonts or res is bad, or there is some tearing just tweak the gtk-stuff like we always do anyway.You don't care for gnome. then just go kde plasma mobile instead. want android style apps, then go with Anbox layer. Want to go without then just detox and go without.
Even if it would be only a tiny desktop on a phone, you could still dock it's power to a random PC connection anywhere in the world. It'll be quite a lot more though, I'd either fully expect or else just like to think.

The normal excitement though is mixed a little bit with some concerns, warranted or not. Bought almost a year ago, still no definite release date, still no full specs released. Time left to cancel is 6 months from now, don't want to do so though.

Mostly I want to d/l to usb about 30x Linux distros and the very night that device arrives ...just do an all-nighter. All linuxes in and out all non-stop,much dual-boot etc. i've been waiting for Linux on a phone for very long now - and no Android is no substitute whatsoever here.
Some rumours do suggest shipment on the 4th of July. Hope do! This is one purchase that I just buy sight-unseen, with not inside knowledge ...and it's a very very expensive purchase too. This is my only exception to full and total and blanket research in the past 15 years to any high-end dollar purchase.

Just so very excited about first execution of terminal commands on a fully Linux phone,the ultra-fast speeds etc. Just to own your own phone would be nice already

[handy]

I've been watching Purism for some years too. I like their philosophy, a lot. Though the price of their phone is currently too much for me.

I wonder whether this thing runs pure Linux or is using Android?

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/piphon ... martphone/

I could afford this one. I guess I'll get around to getting the bits & pieces required to add to one of my 3b+'s & see...

[KoO]

Looks very tasty but the price in Australia..

$649 US vs $925.45 AU is a joke..

[LU344928]

Looks very tasty but the price in Australia..

$649 US vs $925.45 AU is a joke..

Purism's goal, We believe phones should not track you nor exploit your digital life, is commendable but It may not be allowed in Australia when you have idiots like these in power:

"Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has said the laws of mathematics come second to the law of the land in a row over privacy and encryption. Under new legislation proposed by the Australian Government, messaging apps like WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage would be forced to hand over the contents of encrypted messages... George Brandis, the Australian Attorney General, said the UK security agency GCHQ has assured him it was possible to unlock encrypted systems.

One encryption company states, "(this) endangers the security of everyone who uses online services, it weakens civil rights like privacy and due process, and it places an unprecedented burden on tech companies to attack the very users they set out to serve.

"There is nothing new about a government seeking to break encryption... But Australia’s new law goes much further, deputizing tech businesses as accomplices in a surveillance scheme so loosely conceived that no one really knows its limits... Once police have gained access to a suspect’s device, they could easily remove evidence from the device that could prove the person’s innocence. There would be no way to know."

[KoO]

Looks very tasty but the price in Australia..

$649 US vs $925.45 AU is a joke..

Purism's goal, We believe phones should not track you nor exploit your digital life, is commendable but It may not be allowed in Australia when you have idiots like these in power:

"Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has said the laws of mathematics come second to the law of the land in a row over privacy and encryption. Under new legislation proposed by the Australian Government, messaging apps like WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage would be forced to hand over the contents of encrypted messages... George Brandis, the Australian Attorney General, said the UK security agency GCHQ has assured him it was possible to unlock encrypted systems.

One encryption company states, "(this) endangers the security of everyone who uses online services, it weakens civil rights like privacy and due process, and it places an unprecedented burden on tech companies to attack the very users they set out to serve.

"There is nothing new about a government seeking to break encryption... But Australia’s new law goes much further, deputizing tech businesses as accomplices in a surveillance scheme so loosely conceived that no one really knows its limits... Once police have gained access to a suspect’s device, they could easily remove evidence from the device that could prove the person’s innocence. There would be no way to know."

Hear to that if you are using your mobile phone while walking across the street anywhere even at the lights we will now be fined. I could go about this country for ages but I like not living in jail..
Australia used to be the place to be Not Any More.

[jackdanielsesq]

Rather than spend a bundle on a new unproven framus, that might or might-not work as advertised,
buy an older iPhone4/5/6 that Opple no longer supports for say $25 bucks - root it - roll your own,
and you have a fairly decent, secure phone for very little money ... this Librem sounds like a loser

Every drug-dealer will have several, but not before the Federales crack it .. not a new idea.

It has never been good form to discuss your next diamond heist on any mechanical device, even the
mob were smarter than that - we dont even send bank docs via the 'Net - always use FedEx - KISS

Regards

Jack

[handy]

The movie "Body of Lies" [2008], is worth watching. It is quite revealing re. "terrorist" methods of side stepping the U.S. & its alies surveillance techniques.

[xali]

what are your thoughts about this one?