Well when you install a normal distro on a computer it comes with some file browser, does it not? Why should I expect Librem 5 to come without one?
It proves that I’m right. We still don’t have any FOSS music production software that professionals can buy and use. KDenlive does not even have hardware acceleration. None of the big finance/accounting programs are available like Sage50 or Quickbooks. The FOSS versions probably don’t even have 50% of the functions required. Where is the FOSS version of TeamViewer or LogmeIn that is equally good. They simply don’t exist or are severely inferior.
You do you. But that’s not how I want to spend my free time. My support to Purism was done by the purchase of the device.
It’s not black & white situation but it’s generally true. When I observe what schools and businesses use it’s 9 times out of 10 Photoshop for image editing. Deja-Dup at least has a GUI. So a normal user can use it right away instead of having to look for dozens of commands that may or may not work. A program without GUI like rsync is perfect example of a project that has low or no money behind it looks like. Veeam can backup multiple VMs it can then replicate them and move the copies into different location over internet. It can compress and encrypt the backups. It can create snapshots. It can schedule each backup job at specific time. Can rsync do all of that?
Again you are missing the point completely. Neither is inherently better than the other. What makes one better than the rest is the amount of funding behind it. More developers create more functions, fix bugs more quickly and project gets updated more frequently. The projects that have less money will lag behind. Sometimes they get completely abandoned.
I hate modern smartphones! And the fact that there are only 2 choices. Apple is gatekeeping the app store and won’t let you install apps outside of the store. On top of that iPhones are designed to stop you from repairing them. You can view videos on Youtube where the Logic board will refuse newly installed part even if it came from identical iPhone. So fuck Apple.
Andriod is practically a portable telescreen at this point. If the individual apps don’t spy on you the OS will spy on you. I have watched defcon videos where they showed how Google can triangulate your position even if you are not connected to any wireless network. Then you don’t have root access. This one is particularly infuriating because all Androids come with many bullshit apps pre-installed. Facebook, Samsung Cloud, AR Emoji stickers. Some of these apps could be loaded with rootkits or key-loggers and you CANNOT remove them. You have no control over your own device. Third big problem with Android is the support. After 2 or 3 years your phone stops getting OS updates. Which means you need to flash it with custom ROM which can be a headache or you suck it up and buy a new one. Just imagine Amazon throwing away their AWS servers worth millions of £/$/Euros because they cannot update them.
I supported the Librem5 campaign because I wanted a way out of this situation.
Mobian used to do that, using the umtp-responder(?) server. However, it was pulled because It is unsafe for the phone to export the eMMC drive as external storage . It could be safe to do that for the uSD card but that is not available yet.es the kind of file transfer we know from Android). However, it was pulled exactly because of those security considerations. New files were being created as root. Every USB plug (including chargers) would get immediate access to all files on the phone. So, some user intervention needs to be added to grant file access before that is possible again. Doable, but lots of work to design the interaction and get it right.
It is not something you “expect” indeed. But you also don’t expect to build Rome in one day. The plans are to squize the entire GNOME stack to the size of a phone screen. Give it time.
You are wrong about the core of the problem. Proprietary programs do have funding, but each each of them has to reinvent the wheel. It is a huge disadvantage against free software, which can always add a little grain to the already existing state of the art.
That is why Microsoft former CEO Steve Ballmer compared free (copyleft) software to a cancer: the more it spreads the bigger the wheel proprietary software has to reinvent each time. On paper proprietary programs have no future.
But here come the examples you made, which are niche cases, like music production software. Niche software is not well covered by free software yet. But it is only a matter of time. One day the wheel will be too big to rebuild each time for proprietary programs also in the case of niche software.
Take the case of Edge, Opera Browser, etc. All of them dropped their proprietary implementation of HTML and JavaScript engine in favour of WebKit: the wheel had become too big to rebuild even for huge projects like Internet Explorer.
If a phone exports a mounted drive as a USB mass storage class device (basically an array of blocks) the file system on that drive could get corrupted. It is unsafe in the sense of corruption, never mind about security.
If a phone exports a file system by any protocol for doing that (Samba, NFS, SFTP, …) then it should be all good in terms of avoiding corruption and is as good as the protocol specifies in terms of security (which may be good - SFTP or Samba or NFSv4 - or not so good). I did suggest above MTP/PTP - since those are standard on other phones (and supported as standard on typical Linux distros).
Right now exporting as USB mass storage is relatively safe - because in order to do this on the Librem 5, you need firstly to go into “boot mode”, which requires the user intervention of a) rebooting b) holding the volume-up button.
On the iPhone, where I believe MTP/PTP is used, security is seemingly supplemented by having the computer authenticate itself to the phone and the phone then asks for confirmation on the screen to “trust this computer”. You only need to do that once (the first time) per computer. So if that happened when you plugged into a random charger, alarm bells should ring (but I’m sure some users would get socially engineered anyway).
Yes, that sounds like a good solution. Now it “just” needs to be implemented .
P.s. Apologies for the garbled post above. Sometimes Firefox decides to delete and insert text at random places in discourse text fields and NOT where the cursor currently blinks.
but you need to be something of a USB config guru (that’s basically gobbledygook to me).
I would suppose that you would need something similar in order to expose an MTP class device to the desktop / laptop computer, as well as having some further code on the Librem 5 to respond to MTP requests.
All I can say is I just built my wife a computer with windows 10 (a requirement for her course she’s doing) and I literally had to sit on my hands to not put my fist through the screen. That OS is total garbage, bloated code. I have been on Linux for many years now and I could never go back. Apple yes I feel the same as you about Apple and Google (the all seeing eye). Yes there are fancy apps and such that I’ll probably never use and I find that with most apps on my rooted nexus 5 with crDroid on it, I just don’t use half the apps I loaded just for the novelty but then never use again.
We live in a world of corporate tyranny and the way out is to support FOSS warts and all. The more it becomes the norm the more robust it will get because ultimately WE have the power to change the whole landscape and there is nothing these huge corporations can do about it. It’s like crypto, the genie is out of the bottle and it’s not going back, ever.
But they can do something about it. They can lock down the hardware so it only runs their proprietary OS/firmware. Although Purism is now making their own hardware (for phones) so Librem5 is exception but the current trend seems to be going in this direction. Many new phones have their boot-loaders locked so you can’t even flash them with custom ROM. This will probably happen with normal laptops/desktops too.
uuuuh ! that’s spicy ! so let’s ask the majority of people in the world what a Black-Box is … shall we ?
most of them would probably answer … “uh, you mean like an airplane Black-Box ?”
Also I saw a short article about another commercial DAW. I don’t know if it was FLOSS to be honest but Linux was supported. Unfortunately I don’t remember the name.
Also see the FLOSS sections of:
Actually “professional” could be defined by earning money with it. I don’t see a reason why that can’t be done with audacity even if it doesn’t satisfy sophisticated needs. My suspect is the that there are enough MagicMusicMaker content since the 90s.
And when we are talking about multimedia we should not forget that blender has become a well supported industrial defacto standard for professional cinematic animations and rendering.
I don’t know how much of this works are contributions from volunteers. For the Linux kernel there are statistics of contributions:
The community of Linux kernel developers comprises about 5000-6000 members. According to the “2017 State of Linux Kernel Development”, a study issued by the Linux Foundation, covering the commits for the releases 4.8 to 4.13, about 1500 developers were contributing from about 200-250 companies on average. The top 30 developers contributed a little more than 16% of the code. As of companies, the top contributors are Intel (13.1%) and Red Hat (7.2%), Linaro (5.6%), IBM (4.1%), the second and fifth places are held by the ‘none’ (8.2%) and ‘unknown’ (4.1%) categories.[197]
8.2% of contributions didn’t came from a company and 4.1% from unknown companies. So I think we can say that there are significant contributions from volunteers even if it isn’t the majority today. Although I must admit that for an exact interpretation we have to go to the source and research what unknown companies actually are and how freelancers are recorded.
About SSH and SCP: this is probably much better than MTP, although MTP should be supported.
About rsync: it is international that it is a CLI program, but i quickly found a GUI via web search. There are probably more. https://opbyte.it/grsync/
Your point was there is no file explorer, when you can download a file (but not a app ?) here a reminder :
But if your point was that the librem 5 should come with a file explorer pre-installed : I totally agree, and the recent update of nautilus greatly improved its usability on the Librem5
You are pushing contradicting thoughts here
99.99% of FOSS are not for sale, I let the 0.01% to exceptions (scams?)
But I get you point : globally, you don’t find what you are used to
You said ‘people don’t want to be volunteers’ which is a complete ignorance of the FOSS history and actual state of it
I gave you my contradicting example to your statement, and you put a hypothesis that I answered with a real world case scenario, I’m not telling you to conform to it
Omg … again a complete ignorance of the FOSS history and the K.I.S.S. principle
But let’s play a bit to your game :
Can I change the code of Veeam to fit one of my specific needs ? No.
Can Veeam be started on a server without graphical interface ? No.
Can every fonctionnalities of Veeam be use in a script or by any other software ? No.
Can Veeam be used on a smartphone or others ARM, or 32bits devices ? No.
Seems to me, your graphical proprietary software is a bit limited and needs more founding (yes, that’s sarcasm !)
There is too much to say about some other bold statements you made, but I won’t go further, because it seems to me, those are only certainties built upon your lack of knownledge about the GNU/Linux (or FOSS) eco-system
One other thing we do agree tho, is that the actual smartphone duopoly is a shitshow that needs changes
And I think your “thoughts after few weeks of use” are still interesting, because it shows what a non-GNU/Linux user could think about the Librem 5 at this stage of developpement
heh ! i just remembered the question that the character Alan Bradley asked the CEO of present-day-ENCOM during the shareholders meeting : “what has changed in OS 12 ?” the answer was “we put a new number on the box”. that answer came just as Kevin Flynn’s son was releasing OS-12 source code to the world …
I think you’re missing the point. Don’t buy their stuff! If everyone does that then they loose. Our only way out of this digital gulag is for each of us to do our part and that is opting out of the digital jail.
My guess is that only legit means to sell FOSS is like “Sure, here it for free take as much as you want. Oh but if you want some support it’s gonna cost ya.” (As not everyone who has the source code can understand what it does.)
I’ve seen a model where people are basically buying pre-built binaries. Whoever wants to go through the trouble of building the thing doesn’t have to pay.
@Poseidon consider, also, to use service online paid professional software till software for Librem 5 will be optimized enough for you. Librem 5 is the best “terminal” compared with most of the rest of HW and OSes.
FOSS/FLOSS is not better/worse than proprietary software in any inherent, generalizable way, and should not be viewed as separate from “the market”. FOSS is part of the market. It is an extremely important part of the market, too, because it permits users to opt-out of the profit models that they don’t like. It is slow (as a consumer product), because it is not fueled by money that anticipates or drives demand, but by the decay of demand for unpopular profit models, or the need for features for which there is no current market. To put it another way, if Purism rolled out products as fast as Apple, we would all have to worry about who was actually bankrolling it.
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… again a complete ignorance of the FOSS history and the K.I.S.S. principle
