Really, I find the discussion sparked by user1 quite interesting and not negative.
The usual discussion here have been either lead by hyperpositive fanboys or by trolls, complaining that their favorite spy-app wasn’t on the list of promised apps.
It just so happens that I worked both in hardware developement and with high-end RF-equipment, used by real phone companies.
The results are not promising at all. They are highly worrying, just a bit less worrying than they were at the beginning of the year. The hardware is inferior and people lie to themselves by hoping on software improvements. Typical behaviour of software engineers who are used to taking well developed hardware as a matter of fact and thus overestimate what software is capable of.
Against my better judgement I did invest into this project, just to be dragged into a never-ending chain of disappointment, regarding purisms communications. During “developement” they just kept publishing typical marketing stuff and a few crums of insight into software developement. Each and every piece of information on hardware developement was highly worrying. It looked like some amateurs in their garage were developing this. Although admittedly most amateur equipment far outshines what purism presented.
I was flabberghasted as to why on earth they would insist on developing their own crummy os, instead of using an existing, tried and proven one. Why, oh why, do the opensource people insist on forking and forking and forking until each and every neckbeard developer has its own fork so they dont have to compromise with anybody. It would have done so much good to concentrate the effort in an existing mobile OS. But then it suddenly got clear why they wanted that: Why did they never openly say that they were not developing the hardware themselves? Aparantly they outsourced it to some obsure chinese company.
Even though I didn’t see any reasonable probability of this iteration of the project ever producing a fully usable phone, i kept my money really long on purism. Both because it wouldnt hurt me to lose the money and because I was hoping that this project, however crummy it would turn out, might still ignite a new tiny spark in the linux-phone, which has been a rotting corpse being defibrilated for almost a decade.
At the same time I find the arguments of most of the wealthy people in here unbearably arogant. The phone is extremely overpriced and expecting people to pay 900 to 1100 money units for an idea and a barely usable brick of hardware is quite optimistic. But reproaching people who cant afford to blow such considerable sums through the chimney, by reminding them that they dont pay for a phone, but for an idea, is dispicable and literal poison for the project and the community.
Same goes for reproaching people for not being able to grasp the immmensity of this undertaking. It’s not the responsibility of the customer to understand the complexities of a product.
I like to get enthusiastic about stuff like the librem 5 more than the next guy, but people should gain a little bit perspective on the real-life situations of most (non-tech) people, who got duped into investing their hard-earned savings, believing it would be like buying an iphone with less features, but more privacy.
I’m afraid that by the intransparancy, unreliability, overpromissing and underdelivering and thus disappointing, the librem 5 will prove to be a dagger in the heart of the above mentioned corpse of the linux phone idea.
That bein said: cudos to purism for their refund policy. At some point I decided that enough is enough and demanded my money back. And they actually refunded everything quickly and without any problems at all.