Evergreen or Fir?

Currently though the uSD storage reads 5x to 6x more slowly than the eMMC drive. So increasing the storage via the uSD card comes with a compromise. Maybe this is a software problem and it will be resolved in due course.

The RAM is soldered in, and so if anything, one should err on the side of caution i.e. on the side of “too much”. For the RAM at least, there is no need to compromise on freedom if Purism decides to go up to 8 GB.

My own view regarding both RAM and disk is that actual experience of usage should inform a decision as to whether to increase one or both when Fir is being specced out.

1 Like

What about using Android apps in Anbox? It could be a very popular use case.

Again though let’s see whether 3 GB is adequate to run Anbox and an Android app therein.

The Librem 5 with PureOS/Phosh is using most of the standard GTK/GNOME stack and the standard GNOME applications. Yes, Phosh requires less resources than GNOME Shell, but the applications are essentially using the same amount of RAM and processing power as a standard Linux desktop, and those hardware requirements will probably keep increasing over time as the application developers expect PCs to keep getting more powerful. Once you open a bunch of tabs in Firefox or open a big document in LibreOffice, you start running into the limits of 3GB of RAM pretty quick, and you get a subpar convergence. 3GB RAM is enough for just a Linux phone, but if Purism wants to market the Librem 5 as a convergence phone, then the Librem 5 needs to have more RAM to be a useful desktop PC, and I don’t see any way around that.

If Purism had put the microSD card on a USB 3.0 bus (instead of a USB 2.0 bus), then the expandable storage would be a lot more useful. I notice a big difference in the speed on my current phone (Redmi Note 7) when I’m taking photos and saving to the eMMC vs saving to the microSD card.

In my opinion, Purism made a poor choice deciding to use expensive automotive RAM. 3GB of Micron automotive RAM now costs $26.21 per unit (in a lot of 1360) whereas 4GB of Micron mobile RAM normally costs $5.78 (in lot of 1000), and 8GB costs between $15 and $20, when we aren’t in a global chip shortage. It is a question of whether Purism wants to do the testing to verify normal mobile RAM, rather than using the few models of automotive RAM that NXP recommends for the i.MX 8M.

Financing dev work is expensive, and people like me who value Purism’s dev work will buy the Librem 5 no matter what specs it has. The question is how to reach an audience outside the hard-core enthusiasts like us, and I think that having enough RAM and storage for good convergence will be a key part of being able to reach a broader audience. (Of course, it would help if we can convince NXP to add a few Cortex-A7x cores to the Plus or convince Rockchip to make the RK35xx run on 100% free software. :wink: )

4 Likes

I wonder where is the option to pay more and get max RAM for Librem 5.

If anyone from Purism is reading along, here’s a data point from someone who is still in the queue for Evergreen: I think that RAM is going to be the limiting factor for me, in terms of making the phone useful. (As my day-to-day system I use a laptop with 16 GB RAM, which I regularly exhaust…) I would be happy to pay more if I could get a version of the Librem 5 with more RAM (say, 6 or 8 GB). So if it could be confirmed that Fir will get such an amount of RAM, even if it is hardware-wise the same otherwise, I would highly consider getting it.

3 Likes

Don’t say that! The screen is just good enough to not dock it with a Monitor each time you use it for more then a hour :slight_smile:

Changed back to evergreen today. From what I see Evergreen looks ok - Software for Linux phones is improving every day - biggest concern to me still seems to be background run time, but I guess we are getting there. Seeing that the phone will hopefully arrive in 2022 I assume that fir can also take a couple of years.

3 Likes