That's surprising. They burned through a ton of goodwill by holding many people's money for many years, while being non-responsive to depositors, refusing refunds if they did respond, and so on. A lot of ink and footage has been spilled over it. Their laptop effort seems to have evolved into something almost reasonably non-scummy, but the Librem 5 put a lot of people off.
Current complaints, from what is (by all appearances) a tiny user base, about the state of the device and its lack of usefulness are also common enough, e.g.:
The more-viable alternatives are not without their own tradeoffs, but they are at least actually viable for normal people. I can't see putting family members on a Librem 5 or a PinePhone (much less a PinePhone Pro) without it being an absolute train wreck of a time for anyone but the most extremely basic and patient user.
Even their most prolific and downright stubborn true believer of a booster on HN admits he has to disable JS to load a number of web pages, given how anemic the SoC is. As others have pointed out it would have been a midrange Android chipset well over a decade ago. How exactly that works when one needs to use a site requiring JS to function has me feeling like I'm daily driving Nokia N-series tablets in the late 2000s again, except Nokia tablets were somehow a more polished experience two decades ago than one gets today out of either the Librem 5 of PinePhone due to the lack of real manufacturer and community support.
We need a viable Linux slab with a radio, and I want one to exist. It'd be nice if it was fully free of proprietary device blobs and was reasonably power efficient, but that's currently a fantasy completely out of touch with the state of available radios. I would carry my Linux ThinkPad with a built-in cellular radio or an external hotspot everywhere before it would make sense for me to try to pretend the PinePhone or Librem 5 meet even a basline level of utility value.
For someone who wants to check simple IMAP email, send and receive SMS messages and load basic websites, and are satisfied with poor camera performance, size, weight, battery life, and durability, while feeling good about the hardware they run (even if its hardware and software security is poor), then they may be quite happy with it.
> We need a viable Linux slab with a radio. It'd be nice if it was fully free of proprietary device blobs but that's currently a fantasy totally out of touch with the state of available radios. I would genuinely carry my Linux ThinkPad with a cellular radio everywhere before it would make sense for me to try to pretend the PinePhone or Librem 5 meet even a baseline of utility value.
The PinePhone (Pro) is there. They work as a laptop replacement. Their problem is more on working as a phone. There's even a repo out there to turn the touchscreen into a touchpad. With a bluetooth keyboard, it's basically a laptop.
> Even their most prolific and downright stubborn true believer of a booster on HN admits he has to disable JS to load a number of web pages
YouTube works on the PPP. If YouTube works, likely any JS works. Google Maps on Firefox also works.
You: We're there. It's a bad phone. This thing works as a laptop replacement. You'll even be able to use it as a trackpad some day!
This reads like satire. You guys are so out of touch with consumer expectations that you can't even string together a coherent argument in favor of these devices you so love.
Even if it was a viable phone, are we really calling mid-tier 2016 performance, from a device which was discontinued due to being under-supported by its manufacturer and dev community, as being "there"?
We are most certainly not "there".
On the JS, a strident supporter is saying he has to disable JS. Convince him his experience isn't real, not me.
Of course I knew that the Librem5 existed, but at the time I was thrown off by the price and the smell of "impending shitstorm" the device reeked of. Afterwards, I was too deep into the Pine side of things to pay attention to what was going on over at the Librem side.
It's sad that these two devices have derailed open phones so much. Obviously there's a ton of things to figure out, radio chief among them. But I fear that the corporations have learned from what happened during the "PC compatible" era of computing and openness will be a thing of the past.
> It's sad that these two devices have derailed open phones so much.
Agreed. Those two have made such a mess of things that I think if something interesting does sprout up, it'll come from somewhere else.
I think one issue is that the hard-liners who are willing to make the compromises necessary to daily drive one of these things as an actual phone aren't interested in any solution unless it's fully open, and certified as such. Which I get, but desktop Linux more or less evolved on hardware containing significant proprietary blobs and closed code, and at many levels. It wasn't perfect, but the OS had room to mature on genuinely good and useful hardware.
Instead, these two companies are trying to push molasses up a sandy hill. Virtuous though it may be, it seems kind of doomed to failure, and this doesn't feel like one of those situations where the glory is in the trying.
Eschewing genuinely excellent hardware because it's imperfect, all while running a hot mess of an operating system, also strikes me as a losing strategy.
Give me a modern SoC with modern radios, strong contemporary security features, all running a well-supported distro, and I'd be there in a heartbeat, despite whatever misgivings I held about the non-FSF-approved nature of the hardware, because that's exactly my current desktop, laptop, and server computing situation (modern security features aside). If I saw a viable open phone hardware project happening I would be happy to support it, but for some people there's a real "you are either with us, or against us" mentality about it, and if someone's going to make me choose...
> I fear that the corporations have learned from what happened during the "PC compatible" era of computing and openness will be a thing of the past.
We both hope you're wrong, but some things certainly seem to be trending that way, and quickly.
I haven't heard much bad about Purism. I was always more on the Pine side.
A quick search online didn't find anything. Can you give me a quick breakdown or link?