My government already says that (not for every citizen but for a subset of citizens that includes me, so it might as well be everyone). I use a spare, dedicated, SIM-less iPhone that never leaves my house. It runs the government’s one relevant (cr)app and no other app. That iPhone is shut down except at the times when I need to use the government’s app. Is that a perfect solution from a privacy and security point of view? No. – I may one day migrate that to Waydroid but for now it is good enough.
This is the exact issue. I have found that a 3 finger tap is the trigger. However there is a latency, and 2 finger taps are sometimes misunderstood as a 3 finger. I would just like the possibility to disable this gesture in general.
My country has strong digital NGOs. I doubt that this will be easy for my country’s government to do so. We also had data retention laws that where not used, because of our NGOs that run to our court. Our Corona tracking app was privacy respecting and open source (and optional) thanks to NGOs.
I’m sorry for everyone in another country who will be forced into the “arms of evil”. But even there I would try to fight this (as long as my life is not in danger by doing this).
It’s only thanks to you and others with this spirit — of spending the shoe-leather to solve these problems — that someone like me will get any use out of Librem 5. I also feel my Librem 5 experience has been quite deflating, but the idea of being part of a community that is working together to escape surveillance capitalism sustains me.
I have to say, my own needs are pretty minimal compared with yours, so that my frustrations with Librem 5 should be even more concerning. My calls work fine, especially with the plug-in earbuds+mic. Texting works okay although the on-screen keyboard leaves me making lots of typos I have to backspace to fix, and sometimes I receive images a day late after rebooting. The Weather app usually hangs with gray screen and “Loading…” message; notably, this can happen even when I can easily load this app on my Librem 14 while it is getting its Internet connection thru the phone. Finally, Maps usually loads the map data too slowly to be of use, and apparently there’s no way yet for me to cache OpenStreetMap data on the 80+GB I have free on the phone. (All I want is my old BlackBerry back again. )
Perhaps in the New Year I’ll find time to devote to debugging these problems.
But in the other thread you said you are going to use Ubuntu Touch. Ubuntu is run by Microsoft, and if you run Wireshark on it, it’s constantly calling home to snapcraft.io similar to how Windows calls home to the Azure Edge monitoring.
As one who uses Librem 5 as a daily driver, I think when we talk about Librem 5 Fatigue sometimes this is more of a fatigue with the world than with Purism – because the world wants to stop us from using Purism products for lame reasons.
Yeah, I sure thought someone told me that Microsoft has one of the seats on the Canonical board, to decide what they do. Now when I actually looked for a source online, I didn’t find that yet.
Canonical’s site clearly states that Microsoft Azure is one of their partners, but that says nothing of who sits on their actual board or whatever. It’s listed as one name among many, whereas I was got the impression from somewhere that a large percentage of their board was Microsoft (i.e. maybe 1/7, not 1 in 100)
That is possible but unlikely. To the best of my knowledge, Mark Shuttleworth owns 100% of the shares of Canonical. Therefore Microsoft cannot buy a seat on the board. Microsoft could only have a seat on the board if Mark Shuttleworth chose to nominate someone from Microsoft to sit on the board. That is not totally implausible if it relates to a business partnership but it would also come with negatives.
For a company of their size the board would only be 6± in number of directors. 100 would be completely unwieldy for any company.
As a private company, Canonical has very limited public disclosure requirements. I think if you pay the right UK government agency the right amount of money, you could find out for sure who owns the company and who sits on the board.
Mark Shuttleworth has over a number of years talked about an IPO for Canonical i.e. it would become a listed company. If Mark Shuttleworth did sell up, Microsoft could in principle buy Canonical, either as a private transaction to forestall the IPO or via the share market after an IPO. (If that happened, it seems to me that in the longer term that would be bad for Ubuntu.)
Ubuntu is not run by Microsoft. Ubuntu is run by Canonical. There have been rumors that Ubuntu is trying to get bought out by Microsoft. AFAICT the rumors are mainly due to the fact that Canonical worked with Microsoft in regard to WSL and WSL2. WSL2 is very well done IMO and, if for some reason you need to run Windows, it’s a “must have”. [Edit: As you mentioned, Canonical did partner with Microsoft in regard to Azure. That is simply because Azure hosts Ubuntu images (https://ubuntu.com/azure )].
In regard to “calling home to snapcraft.io” … that is strictly to monitor snap package changes where updates are, by default, automatic. You know exactly what it’s doing because snapd is FOSS.
For browsing the web, I would recommend installing Epiphany beta via gnome-nightly flatpack. Makes loading websites much faster oftentimes, than using the scaled-down Firefox, or the outdated pre-installed Gnome Web.
In fact, I’ve switched to Pure Maps and find it orders of magnitude more responsive. There must be something very wrong indeed with plain ol’ Maps! The (MapTiler?) default in Pure Maps seems much less detailed, however, lacking walking trails I was accustomed to with Maps.
You totally can keep OSM maps locally on your phone, provided you’re okay with using Pure Maps. And I recommend it, as I just posted in the thread you linked.
EDIT: Oops, and maybe I should read the entire thread before responding to an old post
Did you set up the Scout server? I did that and got my detailed OSM maps back. Only caveat is that you have to download the maps beforehand. Luckily the server GUI makes it easy.
There are three problems with the Librem 5:
1.) The hardware is not powerful enough to equal that of the average Apple or Android phone. Only Purism can solve this by building a more powerful phone (hardware).
2.) The Librem 5 software eco-system is under developed. This may or may not be resolvable. Purism and the average Librem 5 owner is competing head-on with a world-wide army of software developers, each with a greed factor as an incentive. They’re making money to build that eco-system and purism’s OS and apps are never paid. This one would appear to be un-resolvable if not for the fact that Linux has (for the most part) never been an OS that pays software developers.
3.) Google and Apple each build software with the intent to have an exclusive and captive customer base. Before PureOS can compete or even participate in many of society’s software systems, PureOS needs to become mainstream. Banks, consumer electronics products, and other of society’s software-related things need to write apps that work on PureOS. This is different than number 2 above. We need not only software acceptance, but acceptance in to the mainstream. For example, even if we have adequate software development resources, the banks can still say “no” to PureOS banking apps.
By looking at each of these three areas separately, we can start the long journey of making a Purism phone (not the Librem 5 which is too under powered) be equally valuable as any Apple or Android phone. In the meantime, I am experimenting more with my Pixil 6, running GrapheneOS. At one point, by the time I finished locking it down as securely as I could possibly do, it was barely more useful than a Librem 5 phone. When you completely disable Google, run everything in separate sandboxes, and turn up the security high enough to really protect your privacy, you have what amounts to a Librem 5 running a de-Googled Android phone. It’s just as impaired as the Librem 5 is. When the internet can’t spy on you, it completely rejects you and is mostly broken to you. Spyware and authentican software is the same thing. If you are completely anonymous, very little on the internet will work for you. Google has already won. For the most part, outsiders are not welcome on the internet. It’s like walking the streets of your hometown. You can go where ever you want to go. But no one will let you in to their home or business. You’re an outsider everywhere you go. This addresses number 3 (above). This is the biggest problem of all. And if you have to be a software security Engineer to resolve these challenges for yourself, it’ll never become mainstream.
I like the Librem 5. It is plenty fast. The hardware is fine for me. Is it perfect? No, but is pretty amazing that a small company made this device and it works as well as it does. I suggest that people should get over their prior use of the Android and/or Iphones ecosystem and move on. Support free hardware and software and stop all the unfair and unhelpful comparisons. This is a Linux device running Linux. If you do not like that, fine. Whatever. Move on. Use something else. Or, support this really cool, innovative, imperfect, device and try to make it better.
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