Ghosted after refund request, what now?

[Privacy2]

@muon

I don’t think the age of the hardware means what you think it does. That’s spyphone mentality where they want you to buy a new one every 2 years because the old one (with perfectly working hardware) is “obsolete” and “slow” thanks to the addition of new bloatware or whatever. Very wasteful, expensive and environmentally nasty.

L5 still has work to do software wise but what from what I’ve seen, people are saying that it’s gotten better and faster with time.

I think that, perhaps, you don’t know that even the user experience with FOSS software requires increasingly powerful/generous hardware.

When I first started with Linux, it was on a machine with 8MB RAM and a 486DX33 processor with a 210MB HDD. I paid an extra $200 to have 8MB RAM instead of 4MB RAM. The current FOSS software (browsers, DE, …) would not currently work on such a machine. Software bloat — because software is designed to be used on current HW — is just as prevalent in the FOSS world as it is in the proprietary world.

Observations:

1. This forum appears to be full of people who would pay a lot for 4GB (Liberty) instead of 3GB RAM (standard Librem 5) and would, although the SoC can’t handle it, really want 8GB. PureOS on the Librem 5 is starved of RAM. There was a thread of people using ZRAM in “overcommit” configurations just to get reasonable performance. They called it a “revolution”. Why and how to extend ZRAM on L5. A revolution for Librem 5 stability!

2. The Librem 5 Evergreen comes with 32GB “storage” (plus sdcard). There are people on this forum who are doing gymnastics to try to not run out of fast (non sdcard) storage. Cleaning logs, flatpak installs, etc.. Some are even forced to use the sdcard for executables (flatpaks), etc.

So, yeah, the Librem 5 evergreen specs are “ancient”.

Let me tell you the story of my 5mo old Pixel 7a. I paid $350 for it. It comes with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage (but, sadly, no sdcard). It has great battery life for its speed (it uses a 5nm fabbed chip instead of 28nm for the Librem 5; i.e. not “ancient”), so in normal usage I get about 2 or 3 days between charges. I run GrapheneOS … which is a secure and privacy respecting OS. It benchmarks at something like 6 times the NXP i.MX 8M and has a TPU/NPU. There’s plenty of FOSS software on F-droid including termux.