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Librem 5 Phone Review - August 2023
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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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So you're blaming a company for a person not on its payroll writing a weird and dumb email? Ok.
They did do a "slap a logo on things"-thing with FOSS Android apps for their librem.one service. On the other hand, they do actually pay for software development for the Librem 5 in a way that helps the entire #linuxMobile ecosystem - a PinePhone or a Snapdragon 845-powered Android phone running postmarketOS would be way less useful without Purism's investment. It's all quite grey.
My first point was "it's obscenely overpriced". So let's dissect that:
That's almost worse than my 2015 idol3 which has an octa-core CPU. And it's freakin' $1.299!!
On the other hand let's look at Shift6MQ:
And it's €577 (which makes $627) which is less than half of what Librem 5 goes for. Would you call Librem 5 overpriced now?
You somewhat agree with my third point but add that Purism develops software for mobile Linux (which I don't deny) and say that running pmOS would be less useful without it (which I don't agree). There's Plasma Mobile, there's SXMO (which I love the most) and lately even Gnome Mobile feels more snappy than Phosh. FOSS always finds a way.
Let's talk about my second point. I said that "this cultist shit doesn't make it any better" referring to the Louis Rossmann video. If you've ever watched the video, you would've seen that there's a real person with a real problem and being stonewalled by Purism (which is not a singular incident by the way, I have seen numerous people saying the same shit). The thing you should've done would be to sympathize with that customer instead of coping for the company (if you're not the person that wrote the e-mail, of course). But here you are debatelording with semantics. Not on its payroll? What the fuck does that even mean? Why would I care about who's on whose payroll? I care about the community.
The Shift6mq is a great phone, no doubt about that. Glad you like it! It's a pretty main-stream design hardware-wise though, compared to how the Librem 5 is built, see https://lemmy.ml/comment/2645546 - that does not make it worse device though.
My only point was that I don't see how people arrive at "Purism is a cultist org" when some rando writes a stupid email to a YouTuber who is not part of that organization.
Regarding the investment in software: It's not just Phosh, it's libhandy (and libhandy-4/libadwaita), the initial work on adaptiveness in GNOME apps (which makes GNOME Shell on Mobile such a slam dunk), the modem manager based telephony stack (instead of dealing with weirdly patched forks of ofono, a project originating from Nokia/Intel's Meego), and more. So even if you are not a fan of Phosh, which is perfectly fine, you may still benefit from Purism's effort and most certainly the community efforts that took this work and build upon it/brought it to other UIs and hardware.
I maybe an old fool, but I still credit Purism for starting the Librem 5 effort in a time shortly after Canonical had announced it would no longer develop Unity 8/Ubuntu Touch, Jolla were struggling, and other efforts had long been dead.
Edit: One thing I forgot: The people that Purism payed/pays for Librem 5 software work are usually community members, BTW.