March 21, 2025:
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I don’t care that much of these fluffy corporate speak blogs they push out every now and then, and they kinda shows what angle the company seems to think matters - not aimed at the community or tuned well to the potential customer base (but towards customers that they’d like to have). It’s not even any actual engagement about issues brought up here.
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Oh the irony! What happens when you run MRP against a software BOM? Are some software components “make” components and are some “buy” components?
And will your components be “in stock” when it rolls up to the Top Level Assembly? Who does the part picking list? And are shipments stopped if the parts not in stock?
And who counts inventory?
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I agree 100%, Purism should try to win back the community support, instead they’re doing the opposite.
Trying to market Librem/Liberty Phone to goverment agencies even though these are operable only by the people skilled in GNU/Linux, making these nonsense blogposts instead of focusing more on fixing the issues/making sure that Crimson happens or have at least working calls and encryption + newest phosh in the beta or revisioning their existing devices (such as making Librem14 keyboard removable in newest iteration).
Come on Todd, you can do more. Please go back to us instead of trying to reach the people who dont (and never will) give a crap about free software.
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Not going to happen:
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I doubt that the Librem 5 can become mainstream unless significant changes are made to the operating system software. My comments here are as a long term linux user who can usually install and debug nearly any Linux OS or application issue. Just because I can do something doesn’t mean that I enjoy doing it. But most importantly, it certainly doesn’t mean that the average person can do it. Amongst my family and friends, I am an anomaly when it comes to Linux. None of my friends nor family would be good Librem 5 owners. This represents a big loss of sales revenue for Purism.
So the average linux user takes pride in their Linux proficiency and abilities to do things that others can’t do. I recall the TV commercial where a bunch of Linux geeks were gathered together, showing eachother how easy some new software was to use. One of them asked the question “…since this is so easy, what would keep my mother from using it?”. The presenter said “nothing”, and the whole room gave a disappointed “oooooh”. That culture actually hurts a company like Purism.
For the Librem 5 to make it big mainstream will take only a few geniuses and a very large number of relatively ignorant users. We need a small piece of hardware or software with a one-click method of wiping and reinstalling the operating system in a Librem 5. I don’t want to bring up a terminal window and I really don’t want to have to learn anything. I just want to launch a graphical application and let the software do the thinking for me. We need tools, GUIs, and killer apps that any idiot can launch and reap the benefits of. The opposite of that is the Librem 5 situation we have now. A few very seasoned users teaching slightly less experienced users on very advanced methods that actually make the phone a bit more usable over time. If you’re a rare Linux user who can actually meet their own Linux support needs, you should feel good about that. But you’re one in one-thousand people. Meanwhile, any idiot with an Android phone can use their phone intuitively for several daily activities that can’t be done on a Librem 5 yet.
So the idea should not be to learn esoteric methods to support your phone. The idea should be to make the phone do amazing things for relative idiots and less educated people. Those customers are much easier to find and to sell to. Amongst those less educated people, will also be a few very intelligent people, some of which will know how to write code and contribute. Question: How do I know this? Answer: Because that’s what Android and its large following has already done.
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