Runs on the Librem 5 Smartphone – Week 2

This makes me happy. This is good news for all Gnome users.

I also mentioned AMD CPU for a good reason as Nvidia is poorly supported by modern Wayland compositors.

The wireless card is also Atheros 802.11n with no a/c support.

Librem 15 is very much a mid-tier laptop.

This phone is months from shipping and we haven’t even been shown multi touch have we? Is that even a feature being promised?

Ultimately the difference between this and the Raspberry Pin is tangible - $614 to be exact. I know that Purism isn’t out to sell a mainstream phone, but my doubts are seriously strong that they’ll sell enough of these to justify the effort.

I can build anything that’s missing in Linux as long as someone invents the fountain of youth so that I can spent a few thousand engineering years on implementation.

I also need to challenge you to look up a video of LineageOS and compare it to these videos. LineageOS would be like going forward 20 years into the future compared to this. This is a very rough tech demo at best, and this thing is supposed to ship this year.

LineageOS is giving you 95% of the privacy and freedom benefits while giving you a nearly infinitely better software library and UI along with it.

As a $100 tech toy phone I can see success but not $650. That’s iPhone money.

The software seems good. After all, it is just GNU/Linux/GNOME - all you need to do is get a C compiler and hardware drivers and then it just works. An older video did show major stutter during scrolling but that can probably be mitigated.

What's concerning is the hardware side of things. I don't think many people expected it to actually ship on the original planned release date, but the delay has been getting quite large. All the stuff on their blog is about software running on the dev kit; we have no idea what progress is like on the hardware. Turning it from that bare PCB into a phone is a lot of work.

Their marketing guy also released a video a month or two ago comparing the Librem boot time to that of an old Android phone, complete with OEM crapware. If they have nothing better to do than make such stupid comparisons, then it is hard to believe it isn't vaporware.

Also, the videos are legit for the software, but they are all running on the Dev Kit, not the actual phone hardware, which we haven't seen and have no idea what the progress on is like. So the hardware kinda does look like vaporware. In the link you have, for instance, the best they can do is take a fake circuit board image and fade it into a fake phone image. That's not encouraging.

As someone who preordered the Librem 5, I know I'm not going to get an operating system with the polish of iOS or Android. I'm willing to live with that; the phone is attractive for other reasons, both practical (easy to hack) and ideological (freedom!). Heck, even if the final product turns out so poorly that I end up never using it at all, I won't be too upset: even if my $600 didn't end up benefiting me personally, at least it went toward a serious attempt at achieving a worthy cause (an open phone).

Still, I would like to try actually using the phone as a daily driver, and for that to be viable, I'll need to be able to access the services I depend on. Luckily, I don't use that many services, and many of the ones I do use mostly have web versions; as much as I hate the experience of using webapps, I should be able to get by with them. But I can think of several that I'll have trouble accessing at all:

- 1Password

- iMessage (I guess I could try to set up the Matrix bridge.)

- Slack? Discord? (Both have desktop web versions, but not sure if they have usable mobile web versions. That said, I have bitlbee set up to connect to Discord already and I know there are bridges for Slack.)

I'm lucky that none of these seem to be hard blockers for me... but other people may not be so lucky.

And, well, if things work but are a poor experience, at some point I'll probably get fed up with it and switch back to my iPhone. Some people are more ideologically committed than I, but many are less. Though I'm not counting on it, I would love if Librem's OS gained momentum and became a sustainable ongoing project, rather than dying off as a prototype like so many prior attempts (webOS, Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch, etc.). For that to happen, it will need users.

My point is it’s so small, nobody will focus on it. However, if they can easily port their existing codebase, it will have more apps.

Some additional thoughts:

1) maybe shipping a new OS with hardware, catering to a privacy focused niche is key to succeed this time

2) maybe web technology wasn’t ready to have wide adoption for making cross-platform apps at the time FirefoxOS was launched, but is now

3) maybe PureOS will fail regardless of how apps are built. In my opinion, the best chance of succeeding will be from actually being useful. In order to be useful, it needs software. Unless, of course, you seriously believe that getting hackers excited by not using web technology will be a better solution.

Now understand, thank you.

Before your kind explanation, I indeed did not fully grasp what Purism was doing. I was naively thinking they were doing a privacy-focused device that I could someday use everyday.

But instead they are doing a device that will run Linux and will occasionally make calls. I had one of those: Openmoko. Still have it in a drawer.

Without making a device that is actually useful, which will survive more than one iteration, those are futile attempts. Truth is: one small company will not be able to make a full well-integrated phone software in the time/money the company is allowed to burn. Unless they embrace "outsourcing" apps to existing ultra-portable (web) ecosystem, the attempt is doomed to fail.

Sadly, but if the course continues, I will make my prediction: Purism will successfully release Librem 5, there will be a half-baked UI (like MER/Openmoko/Sailfish/OE), half-baked bunch of native "Notepad" apps, no one will seriously use it, and it will be the last phone Purism will release.

Then, the circle of life: a new company will try the same.

1. Allow non-kernel updates without carrier interference. Google has had to learn this lesson the hard way. Let the carriers lock down the lower layers, but Firefox and the user-facing stuff should still be able to update well enough for a few years.

2. Don't launch on crap, low-memory devices. KaliOS works on low-end devices, but that's because it is hyper particular about which apps run and what web APIs they use (and a lot of websites don't run very well). There's no reason a web device can't work for high-end devices. Most people run the same 50 apps as everyone else (and 25 of those ship with the phone anyway). High-end devices also open up other options like running Android in a linux container (like ChromeOS does).

3. Make WebAssembly (then asm.js) first-class. "Native" wasm apps with more direct access to APIs and access to a standard set of canvas widgets (sorry, HTML sucks for a lot of things). New APIs need to be available for more specific cores (especially things like DSP or ML units). Finally, add support for fully-native processes for trusted programs because sometimes 25-50% slower is too much and sometimes a spec (eg, Vulkan) simply isn't available as a webAPI yet but competition is needed here and now.

4. Be different. Make something that tries to clone Android and people will expect it to be Android. Firefox OS would have gone much farther looking and acting like webOS (which is still a better UI than Android more than a decade later). You can't disrupt a free, mature project with an identical, but immature project and a bunch of ideals that 95% of people simply don't understand.

Right. And this was a mistake by Mozilla: they tried to make an OS, and a browser and interact/negotiate with 3rd-party phone vendors. I did not care for FirefoxOS-based phones indeed because they where "same old ridden-with-firmware black boxes".

Mozilla makes a good browser, they'd rather keep doing that.

Purism is a different story. It seems they understand that some folks appreciate open hardware, privacy-focused designs. Cool, one ingredient for the success: check. But in order to be a successful product, the phone has to be useful out-of-the-box. And if the hardware company will attempt to make a whole "native" software stack, they will fail the same way as Mozilla failed at being an OS-company and HW-facing company: not enough resources.

So, how about Purism makes a great hardware (+ drivers), and integrates exactly three apps: 1. a phone app that is able to make/receive calls, 2. a short-text messaging app 3. and a blazing-fast browser to access the world. Done. Basics are there: I can make calls, I can receive/send messages, I can access email, slack, hail uber/lyft, use web-based maps/navigation, listen to online podcasts/music, use web-based calendars, etc. A phone I could use everyday.