The Librem 5 can make its own videos:
https://puri.sm/posts/a-librem-5-video-made-on-a-librem-5/
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the following video was made completely on the Librem 5 phone.
does that mean that the actual recording was done with the Librem 5 phone camera or that it simply was put-together on the Librem 5 hw in convergence mode ?
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The hours of raw footage came from a DSLR camera recording in 4k. I simply transfered the sd card and mounted it.
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how much did the whole ordeal take if you don’t mind me asking ?
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From the article:
“The Librem 5 is a full-blown quad-core desktop computer, that is also a phone.”
That’s quite an exaggeration, there… Don’t do that, please.
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Yes, not the best wording. We already have too much “fact bending” in this world, please do not add to it. Or at least make it obvious it’s an advertisement with huge exclamation points and irritating colors.
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How is it wrong?
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Yes that’s what I don’t understand either, it is a quad-core desktop computer that’s also a phone. It’s a full-blown desktop computer using real convergence and running real desktop applications, not a phone blown up to a large screen running only phone apps. Does it have fewer resources than full-size gaming desktops w/ high-end Intel processors? Sure but isn’t that to be expected given the size difference? I personally intend on using my own Librem 5 with a laptop dock to replace my personal laptop so it’s a full-blown desktop computer to me.
The video demonstrates it acting as a desktop computer and we also have videos demonstrating it as a phone. If you are objecting because there are other quad-core Intel processors that are faster than our ARM64 processor, you could make the same argument against our Librem Mini promotion, since there are certainly desktop computers out there that have a faster CPU than its Intel CPU.
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Or, indeed, against any desktop computer except the one that, today, is the absolute top-of-the-line.
Oppinions may vary and I don’t consider this somethign that can be absolutely clear cut.
As I see it, the statement: “The Librem 5 is a full-blown quad-core desktop computer, that is also a phone.” does not give a good impression and it is hyperbole. It passes for marketing speech - why not - but sounds a bit dubious on the blog, represented as fact. Never mind that other marketing stuff has been presented there but until now I haven’t noticed that it wouldn’t have seemed to be either more factual sounding presentations or more clearly tooting company’s own horn. This just caught my eye.
The hyperbole part is, that it’s a phone that can be attached to peripherals that give it features making it close to indistinguishable from a what a desktop can do. No real desktop is limited to only one port - even the Pi (most of them, if memory serves) has separate power and monitor. Can’t think of a desktop witch has primary monitor built in (maybe a tablet or laptop). Processing power versus modern top-of-the-line is irrelevant in this in my mind (L5 goes beyond minimum requirement on that).
I understand the sentiment - I like convergence too - but saying it’s a desktop… No, I call foul. I don’t mind it being said it can do desktop or it can be made to be desktop or something like that. Words mean things. And to suddenly start claiming that L5 is actually a desktop is just a trumpism to my ear, to put it bluntly. Maybe in the future desktops will morph into something like L5 and it can then be included into that category but that change is still a ways away.
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I believe that most people when hearing the phrase full-blown desktop computer they have in mind something like this and expects certain perfomances.
I see that Librem 5 can be described as a compact desktop computer which implies also the low power low perfomance aspect of it.
Librem 5 needs at least a dock to make it a full blown compact desktop computer…
But if you like your original classification, then I guess my Raspberry PI Zero deserves the same one since it can run every desktop applications too (having enough swap memory configured). But I wouldn’t call it a desktop computer even if it can provide that role.
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So your sticking point is that you must connect a USB-C hub to the Librem 5 to make it function as a desktop, and in your mind a desktop computer has to have multiple and separate ports (specifically separate monitor and power ports) to qualify?
I don’t agree with your definition, but I suppose we can agree to disagree. I define a desktop computer not by resources (because those change every year so you would be drawing arbitrary new lines each year that would disqualify computers that qualified previously), nor by number or type of ports, but by whether you can connect it to a monitor and input devices and run desktop applications.
To another person’s point, yes this would qualify the RPi as a desktop computer, but it is marketed as one! The big success of RPi is that it has brought desktop computing features in a low-cost, low-power, and small package so people (in particular kids) can learn software development in an easy, low-cost way. The RPi certainly has more resources than some of my own desktop computers in the past, so again, this points to the problem of using the sliding scale of computing resources to qualify something as a “desktop computer” versus qualifying it based on functionality.
Picking an arbitrary game or high-resource-consumption application you might rely on but others might not, to qualify something as a desktop computer or not is also not the best definition, because, again, you would be disqualifying plenty of existing (and past) desktop computers.
All of this is why I stick more to a functional definition, and why I feel the Librem 5 meets that functional definition. From the beginning we have wanted to make the Librem 5 a desktop computer that fits in your pocket and that goal is why we have made so many of the design decisions we have made from using PureOS instead of a mobile-only OS and focused on convergence from the beginning.
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I can. I still have an iMac gathering dust. It’s basicly a monitor with some tiny computer motherboard hidden inside the chassis.
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Yes and in addition to that and the other integrated desktop computers out there, on the other end are people who are given a laptop for work, but leave it lid closed, connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse the majority of the time. Their computer certainly qualifies as a laptop, but they are using it as a desktop computer and not as a laptop most of the time.
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Well, my Raspberry Pi Zero ran for a long time, 24/7, an email server an dns server and so… So if I apply your functional definition, that means the RPI Zero is a server not a desktop computer.
Let’s not confuse hardware with their functions/roles. According to puri.sm site, Librem 5 is “A Security and Privacy Focused Phone”.
The RPI is a single-board computer or system-on-chip type computer.
The computer I’m writing now is a laptop.
All of these hardware can function in different roles. Librem 5 is hardware not function.
In your case your computer functioned as a server. I’ve used many computers you would call “desktop computers” as servers in the past. The Librem Mini can function as both: many people use it as a desktop computer, I use mine as a server.
That’s what makes them general-purpose computers. And that is the point with the Librem 5. It’s not just a phone although that’s the form-factor. It’s a general-purpose computer running a general-purpose OS that can function as a phone but can also function as a desktop computer (with a hub + monitor + input devices) or a laptop (with a laptop dock) or even as a server! While a majority of our customers will probably use their own Librem 5 as a phone, I suspect there are customers who will use their Librem 5 for one or more of these other functions too.
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This is more or less how the Nexdock 2 I have would work (we are finishing up support for this hardware now). They are also advertising a clip that lets you mount the phone to the side of the monitor but I’m not sure how well that would work in practice.
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Just to highlight something that I think is more important than the digression into definitions, and is the thing that started the digression in this thread: there seems to be a belief by some that we were trying to be deceptive or exaggerating when we described the Librem 5 as a “full-blown quad-core desktop computer, that is also a phone.”
We are not trying to deceive or exaggerate anything. We truly think of the Librem 5 as a desktop computer in your pocket. It’s in a phone form factor and can make and receive phone calls, but it’s a general-purpose computer running the same general-purpose OS as our laptops and Librem Mini. This whole video demonstrates our using the Librem 5 as a desktop computer running desktop video and audio editing applications to make the video itself. All of this has been a fundamental aspect of our design and our goals since the beginning.
If you were to sit many people in front of the keyboard, mouse and monitor, and present them with phosh in desktop mode running on the Librem 5, they would be hard-pressed to immediately distinguish it from phosh running on PureOS on the Librem Mini or a Librem laptop. That is the entire point of real convergence. The Librem 5 is not running some “mobile port” of these applications, or a mobile OS, it’s running the same PureOS software on the same PureOS operating system (plus a few extra mobile-specific packages like Calls and newer kernels), just recompiled for arm64.
Perhaps some people apply a much stricter definition than we do for what qualifies a general-purpose computer to function as a desktop computer, and perhaps those people wouldn’t include a Raspberry Pi or anything else but something in an actual full-height desktop case. That’s fine. People (especially geeks) love to debate definitions. But I want to make it clear here, because this goes directly to the foundations behind the Librem 5 design, that we at Purism are not trying to deceive with how we present the Librem 5. We truly think of it and treat it as a general-purpose computer running a desktop OS in a phone form factor. It can function as a phone for sure (that’s one of the hardest parts for a general-purpose computer), but it can also function as a desktop, laptop and server. If all we wanted to do was create yet another phone running not-Android, it would have been a lot easier 
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if we’re striving toward generalizing then i believe that ALL compute-capable-device-nodes that feature a dedicated or integrated NIC can and should be called IOTs not just ARM devices … x86 and x86-64 and all the other architectures fall into that category and nowadays the vast majority of people get an IOT so they can have some form of ACCESS to the public word wide network (internet) … that’s also where by accident or by design they get spied and catalogued by different individuals/organizations with questionable goals …
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I would be surprised if the iMX8M is faster than a low-end new laptop CPUs due to significantly better IPC on intel processors and it’s pretty hard nowadays to find a laptop with less than 4GB of RAM (which the Librem 5 has).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge supporter of the Librem 5 and have been a backer since it’s announcement but be careful about what you state what it’s comparable to to don’t get customers who might then expect more than the product delivers.
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