Louiss Rossman on Purism

Yeah really - the products I’ve ordered and received sure does seem like a scam. /s

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Stop buying from Purism if you will want to get a refund. I think this is much more accurate. I am not aware of any security or privacy issues with Purism. Devices are always shipped, even if some are delayed.

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Actually the battery work better here then on my last Android. I have to charge it once a day, but i could use it two or the hours a day. Plus i do not transmit so many meta information to Alphabeth, Meta or X. And my Librem5 use much less Energy per Day, then my Desktop Computers.

I am fine with it. And oh i use the phone as a daily driver. Works perfect with Fediverse and offline Applications as every Computer do. Plus i can connect USB or a physical Keyboard to it which Android did not support.

Android or Iphone Apps are a Nightmare or SDK-Layer off there Apps! If you do not use fdroid only.

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I have a 3 year old OnePlus 7, when I bought it it easily survived 48 hours with 1-2 hours of screen-on-time. Today the battery life has become much worse, slightly less than 24 hours with 1 hour of screen-on time. My Librem 5 that I also bring with me daily has around 10-12 hours of battery life with suspend enabled. I also use my Librem 5 less than my android phone, so it usually has less than 1 hour of screen-on-time.

I like my Librem 5, but I would have liked it a lot more if I didn’t have to worry about charging it right after coming home from work. I wish it could at least safely survive until I went to bed.

I think we’ll get there. I did a post a while back contrasting the power management between the L5 and the Reform. It is a night day contrast. The L5 has significantly less battery and yet last way way longer than the Reform.

I think the best thing that Purism could do is to partner with a company like Uperfect and make a lapdock that will not charge the L5 but will also not require it to use any battery in order to work with it. In this way you would be able really use the device while away but save battery for when you are not docked. My only real worry is the constant power charging cycles that get used on the phone. It is at least 2 a day. This will wear the battery out a lot faster than a normal once or every other day charge cycle of smartphones today.

Anyway, i can understand both sides of the table here. I wish it was easier to separate the phone itself and the dev working going on with it, from the management. The devs that are working to improve the phone and have done so significantly do not desire any ire.

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Besides battery life which could still improve, there are pretty much two things I would like to have in the future:

  • Wakeup from messages in applications (this would require a new API though as well as a mechanism to wake up the modem when messages need to be received by the CPU).
  • Limiting login via PIN (using a PIN as user password currently allows brute-force access easily - I would like to have separate options: Password for login, PIN for resume with up to three tries)

Otherwise I don’t see a big issue in using it as daily driver. I mean, I can make calls, send text messages, take photos and even record videos. Navigation apps work with its GPS. I guess the apps could be more refined overall but I don’t think that should be priority by Purism currently.

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I think this is outside of the scope for what Purism is responsible for. Remember this is a Linux desktop you are using. Not a Mobile OS. There are no push mechanisms in the background that work with the CPU in a power savings mode.

One top of this there needs to be an aggressive timer that fires when the phone wakes from any event, such that after 10 seconds of the activity being over the phone automatically suspends again.

This waking and sleeping of the computer is not a normal desktop use case, and something I wouldn’t’ really recommend. Instead I would just periodically check your phone.

As this is desktop and not mobile there are going to be certain trade offs no matter what. Still in general I’m glad that Purism is going to trouble of making PureOS a mobile OS without sacrificing the desktop of it all.

Frankly, I’m Ok with the lack of push notifications for the most part, given that outside of messaging apps, they are abused by just about any (commercial/social) app.

So that leaves messaging… and frankly, having thought about it a lot over the past years… I’d rather not have so much push notifications for messages either. It’s gotten to a point where family members panic when we don’t respond to messages within an hour… It’s become a disease. By now everyone I know expects that I’ll respond “whenever I get to it”, but that’s not the expectation most people have of most people… So you know what… No push might help with that (if non-iOS/Androids every gain any foothold)

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I actually think it’s the opposite. Purism might actually be the required entity for that feature to work. They offer a SIM service, right? So they could send you a silent SMS to wake up the phone via modem if they had a service an application could subscribe to.

So the application on the sender’s device could try to make a connection/ping first and if it fails send the service a notification with some metadata which could be resolved.

Technically that should be possible and I would also like the idea to host this service yourself since it could leak some metadata about your connections (potentially revealing your contacts to the service provider). It would still make an interesting project to have as open-source solution for this feature and if you wouldn’t choose any service-provider, you wouldn’t get push notifications at all (making it optional via opt-in).

Someone can’t accept the truth and tries to shut my mouth by reporting valid content. Gratz. I mean crying about “bullshit products” without arguments is ok, but saying “don’t blame devs” is not? :sweat_smile:

@Ick the second post you mentioned was also reviewed. Several posts in this thread where reported.

If you check your phone often for Messages. You could disable WLAN or Mobile suspend with a higher usage of power, or you wait often few seconds to reestablish a connection. And you will retrieve push Notifications.

And you have to keep in mind, that Apple, Google use a third Party Cloud Service for every Push Notitification. Signal Implemented a self Hosted one (with Amazon Cloud supported) , to get this done. And if you like you could have that kind of Services hosted by yourself, from you Home Network or Nextcloud. It is however a Service for on the Road how often you get Messages from your dedicated Offline Home Systems. However, this kind of Messages could be filtered or transfer by a signal over LoRaWan or SMS or from your folks and Friends if its important for you, also through 3erd-Party Signal or Smartwatch.

Me too, and you are right about some optimization for power usage. And i am sure we will see a lot of benefit in kind of a future if more and more Linux phones/devices will emerge. But right know it is, like it is. And i think its not so bad as it got framed.

The Android and Apple Phones are highly optimized, also through to extract much privacy information on as much as possible cloud information externalization. Which Librem could not compete if they do not monetize and offer that cloud as a service possibility. So i hope they just offer one fair service or deploy a self hosted documentation too. You also could add some A.I. to increase Pictures taken by your camera… but the same Quality, as Apple have with the same Hardware, you will only get if you train an A.I. with many Pictures and optimizations proofed by payed engineers. So i have some kind of impressed view about the quality which we already emerged and see on Today’s Hardware… but you know the privacy price for this was high.

I do not know a perfect solution. Loose your Privacy of have some. Or try to recalculate every Step and why it was important to speed up the development in the right direction to a astonishing result.

As your second Point, i would like to have adjust a second small calculation to the pin, to add some two or three numbers easy to add or calculate. To secure the Pin. Like Time you enter, Modulo Time you Enter or Add half of the daiy counts in a month etc… plus a secure third number.

If the choice I must make between comfort or privacy, I would most certainly choose for privacy. Comfort is in my book always less important. I prefer to be off line as most as possible.
So no cloud service or AI inside my L5 please.

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AI ≠ privacy issue. A fully trained AI can be used without sharing data or using internet.

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I dissagree :blush:.
AI needs collected data for training. Where does that data come from? Also, for improving it needs more data, so one needs to keep collecting. Next issue is that AI tends to make discriminating desissions. Examples enough to be found on the web. Another privacy issue is that I have no say on the collected data, despite it’s partialy about me. There is more privacy involved as you may think of. Also, the outcome of an AI desicion can and will be used in favor of the happy few. Not in favor of you and me.

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You’re thinking about a special use case of AI. And for those use cases you’re right. Voice analytics, text to speech with “stolen” voices, face analytics etc etc.

But you forget about all the other useful AIs, that can optimize performance of specific computer tasks. For example animation of characters or cloth animations in 3D computer games. The company has to train it once and don’t need to train it further once it’s shipped. Training data comes from the dev environment or in “worst case” motion capture of professionals (and those can be strict restricted), not from personal datas of users. The AI runs in background of the game, but don’t need to share data. It speeds up animations while also making better looking results. No complex physical calculation anymore. And 1% failures are no problem at all (1% is a huge amount on AI-cameras of the public surveillance), because a not so perfect animation wont even be recognized.

It’s all about the use case and if the app can be trusted (or sandboxed without internet) or not.

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As you are too :wink:
Again, to me, AI is about collecting behaviour of people or the way people use software, devices etc.
As such, it will always come down to collecting data about persons.

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Nope - I’m thinking about every possible AI. As I said above:

That does not mean AI is never a privacy issue, but also that there is no automation of this behavior. I wrote the word “can” in cursive to make it clear that either ways are possible.

You strictly combine AI with user data to train AI. That happens because other use cases of machine learning are not in focus of public discussions. There is no need to speak about AIs that doesn’t affect humans and have no ethical impact therefor. Some use cases doesn’t even require millions or billions of training data and training steps. Sometimes it just need 1 set of training data (given by devs themselves) and 2000 training steps to create a perfect AI for a specific use case. AI is not as evil as Google. AI is more a tool that can be used in a good and in a bad way.

It’s important to understand this, because it will be part of the future FOSS world that’s still privacy respecting. I’m fighting against every discriminating and data stealing AI (and the companies behind), but still saying what I wrote above.

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Thanks for the reply.
I’m still not convinced, but we live (somehow) in a free world where it is OK to have different points of view.
I do truely hope you are wrong and that AI will never be used in Puri.sm software/hardware. If this will be the case I will no longer use their products.

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