I don’t like your phrasing — so I will mirror it so you might understand why I might object. Blanket statements about a group is a bad look and is tribal.
Purism fans just refuse to remember that the Librem 5 also depends on closed source
firmware:
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The firmware for the cellular modem is proprietary.
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The firmware for the Librem 5 wifi card is proprietary.
Purism fans just refuse remember that there is a lot of Free software for Android. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_and_open-source_Android_applications
Purism fans just refuse to remember that they don’t have a monopoly on knowledge about HW, firmware, drivers, OS’s, and the Free software landscape?
I noted above: The firmware for the WiFi in the Librem 5 is proprietary. Don’t confuse the open source driver with the proprietary firmware.
Also: If you remove the cellular modem, you’ve taken away some phone features — you basically just have a tablet. Temporary removal is only temporary.
Also: In the later Pixels the IOMMU can completely isolate the cellular modem. Maybe read the Graphene FAQ. https://grapheneos.org/faq . There are lots of interesting parts.
For example:
Activating airplane mode will fully disable the cellular radio transmit and receive capabilities, which will prevent your phone from being reached from the cellular network and stop your carrier (and anyone impersonating them to you) from tracking the device via the cellular radio. The baseband implements other functionality such as Wi-Fi and GPS functionality, but each of these components is separately sandboxed on the baseband and independent of each other. Enabling airplane mode disables the cellular radio, but Wi-Fi can be re-enabled and used without activating the cellular radio again. This allows using the device as a Wi-Fi only device.
Where GrapheneOS is different is that they only support devices with good IOMMU support for isolating components. The lack of such support is why Graphene does not
support the Librem 5 ( https://grapheneos.org/faq ):
Devices also need to have decent integration of IOMMUs for isolating components such as the GPU, radios (NFC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Cellular), media decode / encode, image processor, etc., because if the hardware / firmware support is missing or broken, there’s not much that the OS can do to provide an alternative.
Here is a link to a GrapheneOS dev that you might want to consider in regard to Librem 5 vs. GrapheneOS: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux-phones.html
Here is a link to a discussion on reddit that goes over some different topics in regard to the Librem 5 vs. GrapheneOS: https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/pcos2x/would_it_be_possible_to_put_grapheneos_on_the/haltxj2/