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 âexpectâ indeed. But you also donât 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.
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Yes, exactly.
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, âŚ) 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 âboot modeâ, 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 âtrust this computerâ. 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 Iâm sure some users would get socially engineered anyway).
Yes, that sounds like a good solution. Now it âjustâ 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.
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It seems that exporting the uSD card can be done. A search reveals: Transfer files between the L5 and networked computers
but you need to be something of a USB config guru (thatâs 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 sheâs 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 Iâll probably never use and I find that with most apps on my rooted nexus 5 with crDroid on it, I just donât 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. Itâs like crypto, the genie is out of the bottle and itâs not going back, ever.
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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 canât even flash them with custom ROM. This will probably happen with normal laptops/desktops too.
uuuuh ! thatâs spicy ! so letâs ask the majority of people in the world what a Black-Box is ⌠shall we ?
most of them would probably answer ⌠âuh, you mean like an airplane Black-Box ?â
I am really no expert but there is some stuff.
Hydrogen sequencer. Multiple synthesizers IIRC.
https://ubuntustudio.org/tour/audio/
Also I saw a short article about another commercial DAW. I donât know if it was FLOSS to be honest but Linux was supported. Unfortunately I donât remember the name.
Also see the FLOSS sections of:
Actually âprofessionalâ could be defined by earning money with it. I donât see a reason why that canât be done with audacity even if it doesnât 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 donât 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 â2017 State of Linux Kernel Developmentâ, 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 ânoneâ (8.2%) and âunknownâ (4.1%) categories.[197]
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel
8.2% of contributions didnât 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 isnât 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/
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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 donât find what you are used to
You said âpeople donât want to be volunteersâ 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, Iâm not telling you to conform to it
Omg 
⌠again a complete ignorance of the FOSS history and the K.I.S.S. principle
But letâs 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, thatâs sarcasm !)
There is too much to say about some other bold statements you made, but I wonât 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 âthoughts after few weeks of useâ are still interesting, because it shows what a non-GNU/Linux user could think about the Librem 5 at this stage of developpement
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heh ! i just remembered the question that the character Alan Bradley asked the CEO of present-day-ENCOM during the shareholders meeting : âwhat has changed in OS 12 ?â the answer was âwe put a new number on the boxâ. that answer came just as Kevin Flynnâs son was releasing OS-12 source code to the world ⌠
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I think youâre missing the point. Donât 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.
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My guess is that only legit means to sell FOSS is like âSure, here it for free take as much as you want. Oh but if you want some support itâs gonna cost ya.â (As not everyone who has the source code can understand what it does.)
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We still donât have any FOSS music production software that professionals can buy and use.
Just in case someone runs into this thread because they searched for music prodution stuff:
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Iâve seen a model where people are basically buying pre-built binaries. Whoever wants to go through the trouble of building the thing doesnât have to pay.
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these guys have found a solution for people who donât want/need to build from source but the source files are still there along with all the instructions on how to do so > https://github.com/UltimateHackingKeyboard/agent/releases/tag/v1.5.11
they have ALMOST the same business model as Purism but arguably ⌠BETTER ?
@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 âterminalâ 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 âthe marketâ. 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 donât 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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Mobile internet isnât working either. I tried using O2 sim card that has data plan and I could not make any internet connection.
And what would that be? 99.9% of people donât know how to code or have time to change existing program. They just want to back up their files.
Why would you even want that? Using veeam though command line would be a nightmare. By the time you would figure out the right command with correct flags you would have finished the same task using GUI 10 times over.
Obviously no because itâs proprietary software. This is both good and bad depending from whoâs perspective you are looking at it. Veeam developers make good money for their work, whereas the person who made rsync has to work other jobs. Someone who wants to make his own backup tool cannot copy their code so itâs bad for them.
I donât know about that one. But then again you donât really need backup program for your smartphone. On Android you just move all stuff your SD card manually and thatâs it. Apple people use iCloud or some other cloud service because they donât have SD cards.
Elementary OS needs be paid for before you can use it. And I think itâs the same for RedHat workstation. I should have rephrased that sentence. I wanted to say there isnât any professional music production software available for Linux. Regardless whether itâs free or not.
I donât know why you are still in denial. People might contribute something to some projects if they find it interesting but they will never work on it full time. They have bills to pay and families to feed. The Linux kernel development is bankrolled by large multi-national companies like Intel, Sony, AMD, Google, Facebook, Oracle, RedHat, Erricson etc⌠they all have paid employees. There are some individuals who contribute code too but without the commercial backing it wouldnât be as successful as it is today. On the other hand you have FreeBSD project that is mostly developed by volunteers. And look at the state of it. The development is so slow itâs unusable for almost everything except few edge cases.