The thing is “if” they could produce and ship them at $150 per unit and sold them for $350 each phone would only be able to fund about 5 hours of development not including the employers in taxes and benefits not paid by the worker.
By going with a $600 price gives them and additional 6.25 hr of development. I believe the price to produce the phone is more than that till they get production up and running for large batches, so lets say they can pay for 10hrs of development. From the crowd funding they sold around 3,500 (rounded up from the $2+mil) so they funded 35000 hrs of development or almost 17 full time workers for one year and the project is going on 2yrs.
My point is the cost of the phone is not over priced if you want it to be actually released. Many crowd funded projects think I will charge a lower price sell more and it will work out. They then run short on funds and never deliver.
well i find some articles from Phoronix quite good and informative. i would not say that it’s bad or it needs to stop existing because of one or several out-of-place articles. let’s tone it down a little shall we ?
We need both PINE64 and Purism, since they are both pursuing worthy goals that the FLOSS community really needs, so we should be rooting for the success of both companies. The world will be a better place if both PINE64 and Purism are producing good Linux devices and active communities of users.
The important thing is to understand that the two companies have very different goals. PINE64 wants to be a community-based company that will produce the hardware for open source software projects and tinkerers. UBports, KDE Plasma Mobile, PostmarketOS, Maemo Leste, and LuneOS really need a company which will build inexpensive hardware for their software. We need thousands of smart developers to start working on apps for mobile Linux, and it will be easier to convince them if we have a variety of Linux devices on the market that serves many different sectors of the market.
It is part of PINE64’s business model to work with open source projects since they are basically co-developers who will complete its hardware, so its communication and its collaboration with the community has been better in my opinion.
We need Purism to fight for free software and the ideals of the FSF. We need a company that believes in digital rights, privacy and security, which will lead the fight against surveillance capitalism and planned obsolescence, and give public testimony before the government on how to reform the tech industry.
We need a hardware company that will release its KiCAD schematics files under the GPL 3.0+ license, like Purism does, but we also need a company like PINE64 which caters to tinkers and builds devices for their needs and will sell them parts.
I actually think that the two companies will push each other to do better in the areas that they currently do poorly. People who buy the PinePhone will say to to PINE64, “why aren’t you releasing your schematics files under a free license like Purism does?” and “why aren’t you choosing hardware like Purism that doesn’t require binary blobs?” People who buy the Librem 5 can say to Purism, “why didn’t you send the dev kit to UBports, like PINE64 did?”, “why aren’t you sending the first models in your Aspen batch to partner projects like PINE64 does?”, and “why doesn’t your store sell parts like PINE64 does?”
Having PINE64 in the market will push Purism to improve its communication and collaborate better with the community, but it will also push PINE64 to care more about software freedom and open hardware, so ultimately the world is a better place.
No company can be perfect in every area, so having friendly competition will help all the Linux companies improve. The thing that we should be worrying about in my opinion is the profitability of both these companies, so that both of them will survive in the long term and serve as models for other companies to jump into the Linux hardware market. The more people who buy Linux mobile devices, the more programmers who will start making apps for mobile Linux, and the more opportunity we will have to create a viable mobile operating system that provides a real alternative to Android’s spyware and iOS’s walled garden.
Coleco Telstar predates PC gaming by about a decade, so there was evolution into that. But really, to get access to most top quality games on a computer, you have to run Windows and I can’t bring myself to do that. There are a remarkable number of games being ported to Linux though. Steam is still stuck in the 32 bit era for some reason and that makes me sad.
Linux support via Steam’s Proton and Lutris is pretty solid at this point. There are some major games that won’t due to anti-cheat mechanisms (Destiny 2 which will result in a perm ban, Fortnite), but on the whole it’s pretty easy to just game in Linux and not need Windows.
it’s a pain in the ass to be forced to work on windows and game on Linux though …
i mean if i have to work in the gulag might as well play there too … maybe i’ll get married and have children there too … after all we are very adaptable … or should i say adoptable
File bugs to WIne then to get your software to run if you haven’t already, throw a bug bounty on it if you’re so inclined. Only way to improve support for Windows native only apps on Linux if your work apps aren’t supported by Wine yet and you have to have whatever app (I understand, Wine doesn’t have solid support for Kontakt yet)
Oh I am very much impressed with what Steam has accomplished. My only issue is their 32bit dependencies, which messes with other things on my system that are more important than gaming, unfortunately. @reC I find it a pain in the ass to work in Linux and have a need to game in Windows, it’s why I game on a console.
. It was awesome.