Purism is a for-profit company who has also specified a “social purpose.” It is still a for-profit company. It has never filed the required annual “Social Purpose Report”.
The delivery has been a fiasco in terms of both “timeline” as well as honoring their promised refund requests. This is well known in the “Linux Communities”. See Louis Rossmann’s two videos on this.
To be clear, although their mainboard is open, the phone is based on an SoC and the SoC is proprietary. Also, it should be noted that the firmware for the Cellular Modem and the Wifi card is not open (it is proprietary). [And, in that regard, one should note that the phone has not (yet) been certified RYF]. I should note that in these regards, much of this is true for the Pinephone [with the exception that the schematics for the Pinephone(s) are available for inspection but they are not Free]. In terms of the “Linux Community”, the Pinephone and Pinephone Pro offers the same sort of Linux opportunities as the Librem 5 and for much less money.
I think you have a misunderstanding of how software development works in the FOSS world. These are all “upstream” projects in regard to the Librem 5. It’s not “upstream’s” responsibility to reach downstream to help out Purism. It’s downstream’s responsibility (e.g. Purism and others) to work with “upstream” to try to incorporate changes in. I will say that Purism has done a decent job of working with the kernel upstream and the GTK upstream. That said, any problem you have mentioned is not a problem with upstream, it’s a problem with downstream.
e.g. “Crimson” is a distribution codename, not a kernel. It is made/released by Purism and is based on a Debian release/distribution (I believe it was based on Debian “Bookworm”). That codename has nothing to do with a “kernel team”. It is 100% Purism’s responsibility.
e.g. Why do you claim that “LibreOffice doesn’t want to include L5 in their developments”? It’s the responsibility of Purism and/or L5 supporters to make contributions to make LO more usable on the L5, not the other way around. Not only that, the windowing toolkit on LO needs to be able to support Linux, Windows, and iOS … IMO it will not be an easy thing to make it (VCL) compatible with libhandy (LO has their own toolkit which wraps GTK, Windows, and iOS toolkits). And, again, that isn’t their responsibility … it’s the responsibility of the people wanting the change.
Now there is a way to donate to Evangelos a.k.a. devrtz specifically for work on PureOS Crimson for Librem 5, via Liberapay, here:
So for those who want to pitch in, please donate there!
Maybe we can get @evangelos.tzaras to confirm here that it’s the right donation page. (I got the link from him in another communication channel, outside this forum)
As Purism is focusing ridiculously in Government Business, it looks that Purism abandoned the community. Crimson development stopped a year ago and it seems that purism does not care to resume the project for us.
The government or NATO or Whatever does not need Librem 5 as a secure device, as government already has Google providing 200% security Opensource Linux devices via Android on Nexus devices.
There is likely missing information, so feel free to correct any mistake I may have made. I wanted a centralized place to find this information for other people’s convenience. It’s difficult and unreasonable to ask people to read through over 300 replies to this thread just to find the relevant links so I’ve taken that time for everyone else.
I’m not a gatekeeper for this community wiki so anyone is free to add who they wish to add. I’ve taken the liberty to add them at your recommendation though.
So, A) if you are from these parts, send messages to appropriate entities (see end of this page), and, B) I hope one/some of these linux phone HW and SW projects could use something like this to get financial support.
There is a new blog: PureOS Crimson Development Report: July 2024. It starts with “thanks to our subscribers” and gives then a great overview of recent Crimson related development.
Ever since I switched to Mobian (and not once thought of going back to Byzantium) on my L5 I was wondering why it needs both PureOS and Mobian. Can someone explain to me (or refer me to the forum posts if already discussed) why Purism doesn’t merge with Mobian to use synergies?
Put differently, will efforts put into developing Crimson/PureOS also benefit Mobian? Why doesn’t Purism focus on hardware and perhaps contributing some L5 hardware specific software development to Mobian so that there can be one bleeding edge system for the L5 instead of two half-baked ones?
Perhaps this is already basically the case. Perhaps it’s not as simple as it sounds. Please someone explain to me.
Not in any way ever speaking on behalf of Purism but my 2¢ …
Purism intends to upstream what they can into Debian. That could benefit Mobian. That could benefit other distros as well. That could lead to the question (in the long term) … why does either PureOS or Mobian need to exist for the Librem 5?
There could be some merit in having a single consistent distro across all the Purism hardware. This is doubly so with convergence where you would have to justify any inconsistencies between, say, the experience on the Librem 14 and the experience on the Librem 5 when in convergence mode.
It is also not clear to me whether Mobian specifically meets the goals of purity, for example, if PureOS sought FSF “certification”.
It’s an interesting question, especially now when Purism is lagging behind with PureOS Crimson.
Part of the background I think is that when the Librem 5 was first developed, Mobian did not even exist. Purism needed to have an operating system that would support the Librem 5, and PureOS was a way to solve that. Waiting for something like Mobian to exist would probably not have worked; I think the Librem 5 itself played some part in Mobian coming into existence, and the Librem 5 would not have existed without PureOS.
Then there is the matter of different choices made when maintaining a GNU/Linux distribution. With PureOS, Purism can make their own decisions. One example where this matters is in the choice of defaults, for example on PureOS we get Duckduckgo as default search engine, while in Mobian the default is Google (at least it was last time I tested it). And as @irvinewade said there is the FSF endorsement, where PureOS is on the FSF list of “Free GNU/Linux distributions” while Mobian is not.
In my opinion, it is good that Purism maintains PureOS and I really hope they manage to continue with that. For me as a Librem 5 user it means that I have someone to turn to with software-related issues, which sets Purism apart from other companies selling hardware who don’t care much about software.
And that is one point I don’t quite understand. I am wondering why, for example, energy consumption apparently is so much better on Byzantium. Is it that Purism maintains their tweaks for an older kernel but not for a newer one used in Trixie? So as PureOS gets lifted to lets say Crimson (or probably would need an even more up to date version?), Purism’s contributions would then benefit Mobian/Trixie? I simply don’t know how this works. But if going back to square one explanations is too much an effort, don’t bother.
Makes total sense.
Definitely makes total sense and might be one key reason.
I agree, and I am happy they did that and pushed Gnome on mobile!
Generally, I share your opinion on that (even though I have great faith in the Debian community!). I just hope that this won’t create too many inefficiencies and double work for both projects and ultimately disadvantages for all. That is (still) my concern. But anyway, there are smart people at work and I’m positive they’ll manage the best feasible way - sooner or later.
Mobian’s stated goal is to merge all patches to Debian. So eventually (hopefully) there will only Debian → PureOS. Currently Mobian uses the same kernel patches as PureOS. But getting all patches accepted into mainline kernel is going to take some time.
One difference is about policy of updating software - Mobian will only provide bug fixes to software in bookworm (some subset of updates may be available via debian bookworm backports), but PureOS will provide new versions of mobile core apps (phosh, calls, chatty etc). So when PureOS crimson releases, it will be very close to Mobian Bookworm, but crimson could get newer phosh, calls, chatty etc where as on Mobian we will have to wait till trixie release for these updates.
