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Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

>When I saw the price I assumed they were trying to position a premium product.

They are. They are building a product that let's you do anything you want on the device.

Honestly, the phone should be priced at a premium level because it will appeal to a demographic that will pay more for a phone that lets them break free from the closed ecosystems of Android/Apple. It also gives them extra cash to re-invest in the company and doesn't require them scaling their manufacturing just yet.

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What can you do with the Librem that you can't with a Moto G?

Run a modern mainline kernel (and future mainline kernels) without losing compatibility with the drivers for most of the hardware.

At least at the moment Librem5 still requires non-upstreamed drivers: "The kernel will be the 5.3 mainline kernel with some additional drivers" [0]

They do at least appear to be actively developing those drivers publicly for eventual submission upstream, though: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/linux-next/activity

[0] https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Software_Reference.html

Ok, but what does that let you do that you couldn't otherwise? Nobody buys a phone for the operating system, it's for the hardware and the software that runs on top of the OS.

It lets you continue safely using your phone after a year or two, because it won't be stuck on outdated software full of unpatched security vulnerabilities.

Apple offer that. I accept the preference and arguments for an open system etc and the distrust of a global corp., but the support lifespan of an iOS device has more recently been ~5 years.

You're forgetting that developers exist.

Are you saying that it's a useful phone for developers or that there's a lot of opportunity because basically there's no mobile-first Linux software out there?

Both.

Clearly that statement is false because some people bought the phone because people bought it for the OS

They bought it for the OS because there's software they want to run on it. I'm just asking what that software is.

> Nobody buys a phone for the operating system

I did. Pretty much because all the drivers are mainline(able). Even if purism went belly up today, I could continue to run up to date Linux on my librem 5 basically forever.

The baseband OS is still a binary blob that you don't really have any visibility into though, right?

It's a black box for sure, but it's not a 'binary blob'. That's an important distinction. There's no kernel module that tied to a specific kernel version. And even better the WWAN module is in an M.2 (?) socket, so it'd replaceable in the future as new tech comes out.

This internal expansion is a really cool feature. I'm not sure how much use I would make of it, but I really like this feature and I was surprised they were able to cram it in there. Nice one.

More info: https://liliputing.com/2019/08/librem-5-smartphone-will-have...

Hi, I'm nobody.

I have no interest in Android or iOS. I have no interest in phones that make it difficult to run non-android systems on them. I have no interest in devices I have to break into in order to make them do what I want them to do.

Phones that I've been using for more than 10 years now make it easy to run Debian GNU/Linux on them, baremetal, straight out of Debian repositories. Those devices don't require me to run any proprietary binary blob on my system. Those devices are supported by community years after their manufacturers abandoned them, as mainlining makes that task actually manageable. That's the kind of phone I'm interested in and its OS plays a big part in it.

> I have no interest in devices I have to break into in order to make them do what I want them to do.

And that is?

Do you have time? The list is going to be really long.

Just two examples: removing Google apps from Android devices, installing non-store apps on iOS.

If you run a web search along the lines of "best apps for rooted Android" or "best apps for jailbroken iPhone" you will find many more examples of useful things that you can do with rooted/jailbroken devices.

But the Librem 5 isn't a rootable Android or iOS device, it's a Linux phone. What's an example of some killer Linux-only app that's needed on a phone?

Bash, apt-get, chmod, vim, grep, cat, crontab, python3, pip3, httpd, sqlite3, ps, ls, top, df, lsblk, ifconfig, iptables, perl, apt-cache, chown, nano...

Sounds like you're more interested in GNU stuff than Linux stuff. Most of that is available on Android probably because it's also running Linux.

Wayland/X11, PyGTK/PyQt, usbip, being able to compile apps without dealing with Android's awful NDK, telephony scripting, itch.io's butler, PulseAudio streaming... and those are just the first things that came into my mind.

I have a secondary Android device just out of necessity, I am a power user with enough past experience (I was active in Openmoko community, made Debian chroot for Kindle Paperwhite, am still using Nokia N900 etc.) and no - I have no actual interest in Android. Stop-gaps like Debian chroots or layers on top of libhybris won't replace the real baremetal, mainline thing.

Most of that is available on rooted Android, which brings us back to what we were saying at the beginning of this subthread...

Do you have the same approach about all other linux-powered devices - cars, fridges, TVs etc?

Get regular security updates.

> They are. They are building a product that let's you do anything you want on the device.

Completely orthogonal to “premium”

I mean it is essentially a premium feature in the current market of cheap locked down shit.

Isn't the most expensive phone you can buy also the most locked down phone you can buy, the iPhone 11?

Premium and expensive aren't the same thing, though often go hand in hand :)

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