Approximately when will the Evergreen Lot be delivered?
In advance thank you!
Patrick
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No idea sorry Patrick, I am hoping end of August???
Considering that FCC certification takes 8-12 weeks and they can’t start that until they have the Dogwood batch to test, I’m guessing November or December of this year.
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An Evergreen for Christmas, 
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Currently no one will be able to tell you for sure, any speculations from the past prove this.
Consider that Dogwood just released a very informative news update, but seems to not have been shipped yet. After the shipping of dogwood there will probably be more tests of what improved with this batch and what can be improved for evergreen. So consider that they will also need test feedback from dogwood users to maybe let it influence the evergreen result.
Also consider that evergreen is the biggest of all batches so instead of all past batches the shipping will probably be a larger time span. This also means that any failure would be a big damage so I would test it even more than any past batch as a big part of the success, reputation and future product of this product will depend on it. You could argue that purism is far behind, but also see that all batches improved and were well tested.
On the other hand changes were initially planned to be less with every iteration. Currently the change from Chestnut to Dogwood seems to be rather important, so you don’t know what the future will offer for Evergreen.
If you want to speculate: Draw yourself a time line from the beginning of this project and count the months between each batch and extrapolate considering the points from above.
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it is possible that this speculation would not be as effective to the Dogwood > Evergreen transition as we have seen compared to the first 3 …
that being said there are NEW variables in the WORLD TODAY that were NOT arround during the first 2 … it is CRAZY hard to speculate today …
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I think that it is better to look at the tasks that Purism has to do before it can ship Evergreen, and then try to estimate how long that will take:
- It has to get FCC certification or it can’t legally sell the phone.
- It has to get suspend to RAM working if it wants the Evergreen batch to generate any new sales. Otherwise, battery life will be so horrible that every reviewer will tell people not to buy the phone.
- I don’t think that it has to have the cameras functioning, but it has to have enough kernel support for the cameras, so that it knows that the hardware will work with later software updates. This means that it has to figure out the poorly documented MIPI CSI-2 interface and get support for it into the mainline Linux driver.
- It has to verify that the BM818 and PLS8 can keep functioning while the rest of the system is suspended and will be able to wake up the phone when a phone call is received. It doesn’t have to have it functioning, but it has to know that the hardware allows it and it will work later with a software update.
- It doesn’t have to have video out working, but it has to have it working enough in the mainline Linux drivers that it knows the hardware will work and software updates will be able to provide it.
This is hard stuff and Purism is still far from being able to ship Evergreen. If Purism can’t verify that the cameras and video out will eventually work in the Linux kernel and the cellular modems will eventually be able to wake up the system, it really should not ship Evergreen, because it can’t change the hardware later.
Watch the issues and merge requests for Librem5 and especially linux-next and you will have a much better idea when Evergreen can ship.
NXP has done a very poor job of supported the i.MX 8M driver in mainline Linux, and it is really hurting Purism. It drives me crazy that people always compare the PinePhone to the Librem 5 and never acknowledge the kernel work that Purism has to do compared to PINE64.
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Thanks for the informative list.
Why does it need to be in the mainline kernel by the time of shipping the hardware?
In general, with all of your “doesn’t have to be working but they have to know it’ll work” points: seems like that boils down to purism getting it working in hacked-up form, but not necessarily in a form that is properly polished up, packaged for distribution, upstreamed, fully debugged, etc.
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I think he meant it doesn’t need to be, but it being in the mainline kernel serves as an excellent and important milestone.
I think the indications are that video out is working.
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@amosbatto: Thanks a lot for summing up the big tasks that are still laying ahead.
On top of the ones you mentioned, the random shutdown issue needs to be solved that Kyle Rankin reported on in the “Dogwood Shipping Out Today” thread.
It is good that they finally reported what caused the delays in Dogwood and that they are giving backers a choice whether they would like to switch over to Evergreen - but this seems to be another tough nut to crack, as they did not yet find the real reason for this issue.
I ordered mine at the beginning of January 2019 and I still think that it was the right decision and that Librem5 is an important step into the right direction and a good product to back (even though I would really wish for a more timely and open communication of issues), but I would be positively surprised to see Evergreen being shipped before the end of Q1 2021 and I would not be surprised anymore to see the same happening all over again, i.e. being given a choice to switch to Fir due to the next wave of issues - and / or due to Covid-19-based delays.
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It doesn’t have to be in the mainline kernel, but Purism is working from the latest mainline kernel, when it works on the i.MX 8M driver, and Purism then submits its changes to the mainline kernel, so effectively there isn’t much difference.
Yes, Guido Gunther posted that he was getting DCSS and DisplayPort alt-mode working after I wrote this list. Cross that one off the list. It will be interesting to check how much of DCSS support was Guido’s work and how much was NXP’s.
Sebastian K. posted that Purism is focusing on better run-time efficiency, before it works on suspend to RAM, so that one might take a while. I have no idea what is happening with camera support. At this point, we still don’t even know what image sensors the Librem 5 will have.
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I have been waiting patiently for the librem 5 evergreen model for as long as i can recall , my own phone is falling apart but i do not wish to renew due to this waiting game also i am slightly concerned that as time continues to fly past and technology in general keeps upping the minimum standards my question is shall 3gb of ram still be good enough when it finally arrives ?
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The RAM requirements depend on the OS. If you are planning to install another OS on the phone, it would depend on that OS’s requirements.
I don’t know the minimum requirements for PureOS. I was able to run Debian on a Dell laptop that had 2 GB. It ran pretty well. That computer just died about 6 months ago.
We have a Raspberry Pi with 1 GB RAM. It runs Raspbian. It is … slow But the kids like it.
My iPhone 6s runs just fine on 2GB. It’s actually really fast, running iOS 13.4.1.
I think PureOS should run pretty well with 3GB RAM, since it is Debian-based.
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ok thx, hopefully people will post real life experience tests from the dogwood soon to hear how ram performs
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Yeah, although 3gb sounds low, I know I saw a post somewhere by Sebastian K. (cannot recall where so I cannot link it) that while running PureOS with Firefox and I think a few other apps running, it was only using about 1/2 the RAM. This is promising. I also remind myself that I’m running full-fledged KDE Plasma on my desktop right now and it only uses about 600-700Mb while running, so 3gb for a mobile DE should be fine.
If I can find Sebastian’s post about that, I will update this with more accurate info and a link.
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My desktop running now with: two different web browsers, plus Thunderbird, plus nautilus, plus a few other small odds and sods is using a shade under 3 GB - and obviously that isn’t optimized for a low-memory environment. Sure, you wouldn’t want to be simultaneously editing 10 x 25 MB JPEG images if all you had was 3 GB but …
Unlike Android phones, it should be possible to install and run applications from an SD card and to use an SD card as RAM. Sure, the SD card is slower than real RAM. But depending on how the SD card, the RAM, and the operating system interact, it should be possible to make these differences in memory types unnoticeable when running applications and storing your data. Unlike the other phone Manufacturers, Purism doesn’t try to soak more money out of you so that you need to buy the most expensive model to gain adequate performance and storage space. I was maxed-out on RAM on an Android phone until after I rooted it and was able to use the new root access to install and run applications from SD card.