Ha. Well, I can afford it but I have been down that road with Purism. I suspected as much and I appreciate you confirming the “over-marketing” aspect of the FLX1. As I stated in my other post, I am happy with the Librem 5, at the moment.
Thank you for sharing, though. I was thinking directly of you because I remembered reading your prior review.
Is it good to support another manufacturer even if you keep using the Librem 5? They’re all working on the same software … at least partly?
It is good to support mobile Linux development, period.
Agreed, growing the ecosystem one way or another is a good thing. Both with our monetary support, using the devices, using the software and contributing to the software (via usage, bug reports, documentation, support, and even code).
But that’s just the ideals of FLOSS anyway. We can’t give up!
FuriOS is based on trixie, so any changes they make will eventually come to PureOS Dawn as well.
FuriOS is based on trixie, so any changes they make will eventually come to PureOS Dawn as well.
If they upstream them.
They publish all their changes Furi Labs · GitHub (at least 108 repos right now). I hope they will push changes upstream, but even if they don’t someone else could take those and submit it upstream (as the license allow it).
History tells us with a large degree of certainty: If devs don’t push their changes upstream, those changes will almost certainly not make their way into upstream.
I have seen at least one place where they stated their intention to upstream changes,
" phosh: the last used window should be displayed on the right (as in android)
My question is: why on the right? I’m using it with left hand and so it’s even further away one handed (already in the dead-zone where my thumb cannot reach it anymore while mid is still ok).
The wrong place here to response, but wanna show that not every idea should be upstreamed.
They said “add it as a preference”, not force this on everyone. You will still be able to choose what you prefer.
This is not GNOME-philosophy compatible. I made similar suggestions in past.
Just wanted to give an update. The Furi Labs blog post about USA bands and everything working was updated to say, “Production release will hopefully be released in the October update 13.0.4.”.
My FLX1, in the Portland, Maine, USA area has pretty good 4G coverage now. Not great, but good. MMS using my T-Mobile SIM is still not working. Development is working with my device to get it working but it seems to me it may still be a while.
FuriLabs claims “Privacy”, but on their website they embed Google fonts, have a Google captcha, and use Microsoft’s Github.
Purism actually cares about Privacy and goes to great lengths to improve it. For Furilabs it is just marketing garbage.
Practicing what you preach is very convincing.
I don’t think ridiculing everyone not reaching the 100% ideal mark is a good idea for progress with mobile GNU/Linux. They offer a system that is very usable today. We can’t expect all people will make a single jump from Google Android/iOS to a 100% RYF certified phone in a single day. People who are looking for a Google free phone operating system can already buy this phone (I have one now). I feel much relaxed compared to Librem 5 (I still have both). Battery life is pretty good (easily lasts a day), data connection is pretty stable, alarm actually works (though I have to keep gnome clocks in foreground still), gps and camera works. I can use android apps out of the box (I have to use FairEmail since geary is broken - both on FLX1 and Librem 5 - broken in different ways, blank screen on Librem 5 and no new mails on FLX1).
I know it is not 100% ideal, but may be 90% of what I’d like, people can still push drivers to mainline kernel like they do for many old android phones. But I can more confidently carry a GNU/Linux phone today - with all the user space apps Free Software.
Not using Google captcha and Google embeddings isn’t exactly a high bar though. It’s not like they have to rewrite some modem firmware or create kernel drivers from scratch.
They also don’t just say it is a “Linux phone”. They explicitly call out privacy on their website. They push privacy in their marketing, but clearly don’t back it up.
Privacy is not a binary thing, it is a spectrum. Each issue has a different impact and severity. Trying to treat every single issue with the same severity does not help us move forward as we will never get to our ideal goal in a single day. So we will need to make allies and friends with people who may be willing to come 90% of what we want, we can try to convince and move them towards the 100% mark. If we insist we will only work with people who fit 100% of our ideal high bar, that is not necessarily a good way to advance privacy or Freedom.
I know it’s not a binary thing. I never said it was.
I pointed out they claim “privacy”, but for the lowest bar possible, they fail.
I’m certainly not saying Furilabs have to be 100%. You’re making that up. I have Pinephones and a bunch of other Pine gear, I have System76 laptops and workstations. They’re not perfect.
I’m just pointing out that Furilabs clearly don’t care about privacy if they don’t even bother to do the simple things to protect users.
I agree on this. Github is one thing … but Google scripts on their own page? Not using this is a minimum requirement to trust someone saying “privacy is important to us”.