I really appreciate your calm, reasoned responses and the way you are able to position the response in a broader context. Perspective is always important.
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It does seem quite ironic that the only path to privacy and security right now, is to pay Google around one-thousand dollars for a piece of hardware that is capable of running opensource software, and can therefore likely be trusted. Harmful blobs or no harmful blobs, it’s available right now, unlike a piece of hardware that I paid Purism for three years ago, and still don’t have now.
@StevenR, @Hristo, @nimji
Re: GrapheneOS/Pixel combo
I might mention Divestos (@ https://divestos.org/ and there is an .onion site for the privacy-obsessed 
) is a “soft-fork of LineageOS” with many of the patches and hardening from GrapheneOS applied. It is available for several non-Pixel phones, so you don’t need to do business with Mordor the Big G. Bootloader relocking is tested and working on 22 of the phones, and verified boot is available for 30 phones. 
Note: I am not affiliated with the DivestOS folks, but I did acquire a refurb’ed Pixel C tablet and installed DivestOS on it while I await Linux Tablet Nirvana to arrive (hopefully) someday.
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This is what worries me the most. I preordered in october 2018, at which point I was promised a working phone in my hands about 6 months later. In my head, I padded that to a year, since I’m already familiar with crowdfunding’s tendency to be optimistic about deadlines. At which point I was expecting finalised hardware, sufficient battery life to make it a viable daily driver, and a very basic software experience which would improve as time went on.
Even this adjusted deadline (and all the ones Purism communicated) came and went without the phone shipping. And then the pandemic threw the whole supply chain out of whack. And while that’s out of Purism’s control, I fail to see the connection between “we can’t source the chips required to manufacture the preorders” and “it’s 3 years after we promised our backers and preorder customers a phone, yet both the battery life and software stack are still a joke”.
We invested in / preordered a mobile phone, not an embarassing conversation starter and clunky tinker toy. How long are we expected to wait, hardware in hand, before it becomes actually usable as the device type it’s been marketed as? That’s my main worry at this point.
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Couldn’t have said it better.
When the pandemic started, it was clear I wasn’t going to get this phone anytime soon, but I was hoping at least that they would use the additional time to polish the software side of things. Two years later I don’t see any significant improvement, only users on the forum helping each other out with command line hacks to get things running. That is why I finally gave my preorder to someone else.
Purism = Fail.
Where is the Fail? Purism still ship L5 phone to peoples, Purism make the best gnu+linux phone never seen on other companies, including pine64, Purism make Gnome Mobile, Purism make the best x86 Laptop, Purism make real convergence you need more?
Extra: gnome mobile will never run 100% on Pine64 devices, worse on android based device.
Only Purism device Gnome Mobile will run 100%.
Purism make the first gnu+linux libcamera app.
Purism it the first company mainlining loader , kernel.
Failed to market their products honestly.
Failed to honor their refund policy.
Failed to realistically asses the complexity of their endeavors.
Failed to meet their own deadlines.
Failed to be honest with their supporters.
Failed to honor FTC rules.
Shall I go on?
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Purism still alive and working for the community, please be more Fair on your criticism to Purism.
There are already lot of other gnu+linux electronics company that already Failed to community on everything, Purism still not.
Please be more Fair if you do not know what is going on on L5 Development.
People, just understand that every customer is different.
Purism did not delivered to the expectations of each and every customer. But to some customers Purism delivered exactly what they wanted.
I bought Librem 5 second hand in 2022 perfectly knowing what it can and what it can’t. For me it is the device I wanted.
You had different expectations and Purism for sure has some responsibility for over inflating expectations. But please don’t think that each and every customer shares your experience and opinion.
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Fair?
I need to be fair?
THEY took money from hundreds of people, delivered nothing but excuses, then changed their refund policy retroactively… Do you consider that Fair?
I speak the truth - how is that unfair?
Only a fool would trust these people…
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Boy, can’t really abide by the negative comments in here. I knew at the start before I entered my credit card that I was taking a big risk with this project. This is literally David vs. Goliath and Goliath is fricken huge. I also know that developing any electronic product, especially where space is a major constraint is at the best of times a huge challenge. I knew this before I surrendered my cash, fully well knowing I could quite possibly never see anything in return, but to me the idea that a company would take a crack at Goliath was all I needed to know. Purism isn’t some multi-billion dollar company with armies of engineers, and marketing people that have tons of experience producing a handset unlike Goliath which has been through this decades ago and as such ran into every possible road block in producing a product, without the constraint of producing a product that excludes a majority of discreet components that don’t meet the privacy criteria. It’s one thing to develop a product which you can base on any number of previous iterations of circuit blocks, but quite another to basically blaze an unknown trail without any assistance from the industry.
I do not for one second think that these people ever had any ill intentions to take people’s money and then not deliver a product. Could they have foreseen all the hurdles? Doubtful, not with the whole covid fiasco that interrupted so many aspects of the product development. Maybe I just understood what I was getting into better than most, but I really don’t think anyone should have assumed that they would just crank out a product without any major obstacles to surmount and then assume delivery estimates where written in stone.
Let just remember that this is a small group of human beings with all the failings that go along with being human, they are up against an army of juggernaughts which have vast resources and experience producing a product without the ambitious constraints that Purism has placed upon themselves.
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I absolute agree with you, Purism taken that big Challenge.
You right.
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If you want made a criticism that fine but be more specify what you are talking about because this “Purism = Fail.” this is not Fair because Purism already success other things, you need to be saying “Purism failed to delivery the phone on date”.
All small gnu+linux company there is high risk of changes, you need to be know already.
Purism still learning on Logistics plus covid, now wars and missing material to build chipsets.
Take a deep breath, be patient. Purism it working for.
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My Pixil 6 Pro arrived today. This coming weekend I’ll put GrapheneOS on it and activate the eSIM on a carrier. I decided to use a SIP service to spoof the number from my Samsung Note 9 when calling out on it, while forwarding the number from my Samsung Note 9 to the Pixil when I am carrying the Pixil around. At least then I should be able to abandon Google Voice and have an opensource phone operating system, designed for privacy and security. With a dual SIM phone (one SIM and one eSIM), it’ll be relatively easy to hide at least one of the phone/data lines to the outside world most of the time while still being reachable through the other line.
I am kind of excited about the possibilities. If I can create and run scripts, I can write small scripts to (for example) turn the radio on, bring-up the phone dialer, and then turn-off the radio after the dialer program is manually closed. So as a user who presses that shortcut (symlink) from the desktop, all I’ll see is the phone dialer come up when I activate it. But behind the scenes, the radio will turn-on first and then turn-off automatically after the dialer app is closed. The same should work to turn on the radio and GPS on before navigating and then they automatically close after the navigation app is manually shut off. With two radios, maybe it’ll be possible to use an Awsim service to hide the ownership of the second modem.
Once the basics are all working, I’ll be asking Purism for my money back on the Librem 5. There will be hell to pay for Purism if that refund is anything less than prompt.
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It would take a year to get the i.MX 8M Quad chips from NXP and probably take a bunch of board iterations to iron out all the bugs, since the main PCB is a 10 layer board with 1200 components. Let’s say that you can start shipping out L5 clones in 18 months time. By that point, I expect that Purism will have shipped out all its preorders for the L5 and paid back the people who cancelled their orders.
I think that you could find a market for L5 clones selling at half the price of the L5, and there probably would be people eager to buy them, since they would function better than the PinePhone, and it is going to be a while before the PinePhone Pro is a usable phone, and I suspect that its energy consumption is always going to be too high for it to ever last a full day on a single charge.
The question is: who is going to do the software development for the L5 clones if you drive Purism out of business? I have tried Lomiri and Plasma Mobile on the PinePhone, and I keep going back to Phosh, because it appears to me to be more functional. I hate to be a pessimist, but I don’t foresee mobile Linux progressing very fast with 100% volunteer labor.
LineageOS has never provided root access by default, and it is designed to work without it just like normal Android. It used to be that you could manually enable root access in LineageOS, but they removed that option 4 or 5 years ago. If you want root access in recent versions of LineageOS, you’ll have to manually flash supersu or magisk on your device via TWRP. I assume that the other AOSP derivatives (CalyxOS, /e/, GrapheneOS, etc.) work the same, but I haven’t investigated it.
PostmarketOS does allow root access, but it works like standard Linux, which is a security model that I’m comfortable with. The big issue is what repository is being used in your AOSP device. If you are only installing from F-Droid, you are unlikely to get any malware, but I always end up installing proprietary stuff from the Aurora Store, because somebody insists that they only use Whatsapp or they can only communicate with me via Skype.
Ubuntu Touch has locked boot files and sandboxing for its apps, but that happened because Canonical was paying a large team of developers to work on it. As I see it, we aren’t likely to get good security features for the other mobile Linux distros without having some paid developers working on it.
I agree.
I made the decision to avoid the Google Pixel because I don’t want to reward the chief company promoting Surveillance Capitalism in the world and Pixels don’t have a microSD slot for expandable storage, which promotes planned obsolescence. However, Pixel does gives you the most flexibility since all the major AOSP derivatives support Pixels and Google supports their phones for longer than the other OEMs, so you will get security updates for longer.
You don’t have a lot of choices. Samsung still assembles some of its Galaxy S series in S. Korea, and most of its phones which are sold in Europe and the Americas are assembled in Vietnam (although it now gets 20% of its phone from Chinese companies, but those are mainly geared for the Asian market.)
Sony assembles some of its high-end Xperias in Japan, but most are assembled in Thailand. There are other phones assembled in Japan, but they are mainly for the Japanese domestic market.
There are lots of components like batteries and cases which are likely to come from Chinese companies. The best bet to avoid China is to buy a Samsung with an Exynos processor, because Samsung makes so many of its own components (application processors, image sensors, RAM, Flash storage, screens, batteries). It’s worth looking at the teardowns by TechInsights and iFixit to see who makes the components.
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Honestly I personally don’t believe that the price of Librem 5 will stay at this level.
We can’t know if for sure without an official confirmation from Purism, but I think that they increased the price in order to slow down the sales of new Librem 5 units until they manage to deliver their backlog.
Because when they sell faster then they produce, obviously the backlog will never be delivered and you will have even more angry customers. It is much more elegant to kill the waterfall of orders by increasing the price to insane levels than to just stop accepting new orders.
So when the backlog gets delivered, it is not impossible for Purism to decide to drop the price of Librem 5 back to a much lower levels. It really depends on their production capacity.
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Purism’s biggest crime was the changing of their refund policy that caught a lot of people up who gave over their money under different rules.
A lot of the other stuff can be explained by other circumstances to varying degrees of believability. I am also mindful of adding to the negativity, but I can’t let justification of the refund thing pass without comment.
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I am not sure if this was a quote by Napoleon, but there is the statement “Moral is something that exists only if you are able to afford it”.
It is easy to say that countries should not use coal for producing electricity as it is bad for the environment, but you will always have poor countries that will not be able to afford the luxury to opt for cleaner alternatives.
It is easy to say that we need to fight monopoly and reduce the Chinese monopoly on the electronics market by buying alternatives. But as we know few people buy the L5 USA as you have to pay the premium.
And exactly like that it is easy to say that it is immoral to change the refund policy and you will be absolutely right.
But we also don’t know if Purism would have gone bankrupt if they would not do it. And going bankrupt would have done more damage to society by killing the currently best attempt for mobile Linux than the damage of behaving unjust towards some customers.
I also wish that things were better. I also wish that they would get 10 billion USD on the stock market and be able to affors everything. Sometimes it is a matter of luck or coincidence.
Several years ago buying Tesla stocks was mathematically absolutely irrational. But people bought them anyways and it became a success story.
Just like that people could have bought irrationality stocks of Purism and fund a success story. But it did not happened (yet).
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It huge better change refund policy than a bankruptcy where the loss is much big, these similar cases have already happened, for example: http://neo900.org/
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/youyota-sailfish-os-2-in-1-tablet#/