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.
Corrected.
Well, yeah, but maybe he was making some oblique point (like suggesting that Mozilla is run by Google) - or maybe it was just an error.
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.
The puremaps app handles offline nicely together with the osm scoutserver (as mentioned in the issue you link to)
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.
I agree that the hardware is plenty fast. As an example, the Librem 5 has much better hardware resources than the pinephone, and many mobile GNU/Linux operations run painfully slowly on that device. Nevertheless, when my friend installed bare-metal Android on the pinephone via glodroid, everything was smooth, and the performance was seemed totally adequate. I think that shows that the hardware of the pinephone is totally adequate, and the Librem 5’s is much better. It will just take time for the software to come along, and the software has already come through huge improvements 
Many thanks to Purism developers for making this happen. The Librem 5 software has seen steady improvement the whole time I’ve owned it. Excited for the future!
Well said. Good point about the software evolving. The software has gotten so much better over the last several years. I am hoping that Crimson continues that improvement as the updates/upgrades have greatly slowed-down recently.
Hi Steve, you are right about the power of average hardware, but…
You do not need it if you focus on Information an computation at all. The two will have future benefits of Hardware development, sure. But they will try to leak every sensor data you leak in you daily present and sell it against you. With the purism free and open source hardware you have the chance to calculate stuff by yourself or with a powerful computer on the internet by yourself. If the hardware leak power, you will be free to set up a powerful one on the internet for your access and program and shift that computation from your phone to your external trusted hardware or cloud.
So… to have privacy is nothing that the others will offer cause they are earn much money from sell your data… and no i do not trust pixel hardware, even if someone else they its the best Android you can get with free and open source Android software (graphen.os).
The Librem5 have hardware switches(!). Even if you do not trust the software on you phone… and with A.I. compiling and influence humans… to do so. Think this is the best you can get.
But now the good angle inside told me to trust humans and developers with open source in the first place.
I remember thinking a few months ago, when there was talk of Google’s DRM of internet access, that the only space left for privacy users would be the Dark Web. What does that say about society where that’s the only free space left?
Its a fake Sarcasmo220, cause you can watch (without camera) or Internet Device watching you or a WLAN device which tracking your Body movements… and talk about Online Stuff too, and share or watching movies or read Text without the knowledge of internet right now. Its not likely for 99%, just they do not know about it… but it is possible.
Or, in other words, if you can’t make it work the way it should work, make it an invite-only club for the connoisseurs.
http://www.fallacydetective.com/news/read/snob-appeal
You’re making a fallacious argument that it’s either “FREEDOM” or usability/accessibility, while in reality those two should not be mutually exclusive.
Power has many metrics and dimensions. Not all requirements are equal either.
Depending on the context, almost none of us knows what they’re doing most of the time. Please let’s embrace that we’re a diverse bunch with different needs, all of which are valid.
We’re all being consumers, almost 100% of the time.
I’ve made 1k+ contributions to open-source projects in 2023 alone. I’ve contributed code to mainline Linux, like several other forum members have. Yet, I enjoy watching the occasional live stream or movie, which makes me a consumer.
So, is the L5 powerful enough to fit my needs? For most purposes, yes, definitely. Is it enough for daily driving in 2023? Maybe not just yet. There’s still work to do, expectations to manage, and feelings of frustration to cope with.
Yet most EU-based banks don’t allow general-purpose Linux devices as a 2FA device, and aren’t planning to do so anytime soon. Which means you don’t get to do bank transactions unless you also own (and maintain) an unmodified, trusted iOS/Android phone.