Your reasons for choosing Librem5?

Hardware Librem 5
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As a matter of fact only 10 % do not have a smart phone in Sweden. The big systems are Apple and Android (and a few Windows) which together amount for about 85 % of the population. But there is a ongoing discussion if the banks should be forced to accept cash - at least for a period of time. Now several banks have made it impossible to handle cash except for a few places. So it is fairly vital that Librem5 can use the Android Bank ID app (well isolated). All the Nordic countries are moving in the same direction. We have wireless stations covering about 99 % of the population with fairly good Internet connections through 4G (or 3G). 5G is coming but it will be a disaster because of the short range it has. People do not realize that yet. The operators are renaming 4G into 5G and sell “5G connections” which have the same capacity as 4G - of course.

In our sparsely populated countries there is however a need for good antennas in the mobile phone. My old Moto 3 is fairly good but my new Moto 6 is rather useless in many places. I certainly hope that Librem5 will have a good antenna. If not I cannot pay for a ticket in a bus in a remote village.

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I’m pretty sure that it’s against EU’s antitrust laws, or at least forcing you to buy something when it’s not to prevent a life threatening situation should be illegal.

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This is such a dystopian present, I don’t even think the Librem 5 makes it much better :worried:

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this is what is meant by digging your grave with your own hands. first we put our government infrastructure into the hands of non-free software/hardware then we fold our rights to banks and yeld under the pressure of copyright + patents and generally sleep well enough when we hear that <<It was the ethical ideals of free software, not “better software,” which persuaded the presidents of Ecuador and Brazil to move government agencies to free software. They are not geeks, but they understand freedom. >> https://www.fsf.org/faif/

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It’s Free as in freedom. Yup, that was the big selling point for me (although I’m sure I’m going to love convergence, the privacy aspect, etc. etc. too)

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Not anymore… Since 2016, for obvious reasons, Brazil’s govt. doesn’t use free anymore.

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I am looking for a solution to moving away from the giants(Apple, Google, Samsung). I was hoping that Librem might be a solution but for me it wont be.

Every one of us is different and uses our devices in different ways. For me, outside of phone calls and messaging with Signal(encrypted messaging) the most important features are the camera on my phone and tokenized payment(apple pay and google pay). I now refuse to shop anywhere where I cannot use a tokenized payment. I have a few friends who work digital security for some US banks and have been assured that if you have a credit card and you have used it in the past three years to make a purchase there is a 99.99% chance your card was stolen, it just may not have been used yet.

It’s a strangle hold because even if Purism were able to include nfc payment options they would either have to license an existing platform or create their own. Creating their own would also mean getting bans to support it.

Other than that I would be so on board with the Librem5. Maybe someone will come up with just a digital wallet that works in lieu of a phone then I only have to figure out a solution as the camera system is defiantly inferior to modern phone camera systems. But that I’d have to wait and actually se the quality of unedited photos off the device to really compare.

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please indulge us …

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You do realize the irony, do you? You cannot have it both ways.
Maybe what you need to understand is that tokenized payment is bad for exactly the same reason why all the other stuff of those companies is bad. First, you bind yourself to that company. Second, you give that company the information about everything you buy for free, for them to profile you. Lastly, none of your purchases is in any way anonymous, you’re an open book for the authorities. Please have a look what @nhu wrote above. This development is really depressing and very orwellian.

Of course, credit cards share all the same problems. The one additional problem, to me, is neglectable. Why? Because usually you can prove easily that your card was misused. Then, the creditcard company pays. They make so much money with the system that they rather pay for abuse than fighting with their customers about who’s at fault, because then customers would look for something else, which obviously they don’t want. (If you know a case where it was a problem for the customer, I would still assume that’s the exception).
In Europe credit cards are much less common than in the US. People here love their cash money. (I didn’t know Scandinavia was different)

Currently, I use a mixture of cash (annonymous), bank card (company A) and credit card (company B, mostly for things where this is the best way to pay). Very rarely I also use PayPal (company C). That’s my compromise between convenience and privacy.

The other point, the camera: I surely understand that. It would be awesome to have the “bestest” camera available. But I assume the camera is at least as good as the best of 5 years ago. I use a “real” camera if I want to make “important” pictures.
Again, you’re willing to trade privacy for convenience.

@luisfsr: I have to agree with reC. Everyone wants freedom, even an oppressor. He’s just unwilling to share it with the opressed. OTOH, why would an oppressor bring himself under the oppression of proprietary software?

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I just read about a poll in Sweden where a lot of people use SWISH payment (and it is increasing rapidly) but they still want to retain cash. Mainly because you are in real trouble if you do not have a network connection. About 75 % would like to have cash anyway.

SWISH is a bit different from Apple and Google Pay because it is a bank system i.e. all the big banks in Sweden are behind it. Thus you do not give away so much information about your payments except to the bank which has all the information anyway. I would like to have a payment system which is a bit more universal than SWISH that is only useful in Sweden. I live in both Sweden and Finland and a common EU system would be the best - independent from the Apple and Google of course. Not to mention a universal independent payment system. Maybe the block chain technique could be a solution in the future ?

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Back to my reasons for choosing Librem5 - or which reasons did NOT influence my decision. Camera is one of those features that I do not feel any need for. Mainly because I anyway carry around a small real camera in my pocket all the time. The display I have mixed feelings about. I never look at any videos but in certain cases it is useful anyway. Looking at maps is nice with a good display (although I have a real car navigator also). So it is nice with a good display but not an important reason to choose Librem5. Good antenna, long battery time and sturdy mechanical construction are more important to me. But of course the most important things are an open system, security and privacy. I find closed systems (Apple) and snooping (Google) most disgusting. But that is just my opinion …

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Many (not you) complain about it. Too big, too small, bad ratio, not ultra HiRes…
The thing is, for the first gen, the display is mostly dictated by availability, price (same for cam) and most notably the space requirements of the other components.

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These quotes pretty much sum it up for me. I really value the privacy aspects of the phone like the kill switches but it’s the freedom that most interests me. I’m just thankful to have a non-Android/iOS phone on the horizon. The choice was looking pretty grim…

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the thing is proprietary smartphones nowadays like the flagships (the high-end) are where they are because of Ai. sure some of them have multiple cameras built in (each with their own specialty - at the end they get combined into something useful) but the hevy lifting is all software-based.

the other aspect of it is that even if we use dedicated (bridges or DSLRs) they are still proprietary and closed by design (you can’t easily - for example - use a gnu/linux bash script to auto take multiple captures at different exposure-values with the same camera in real-time for HDR results). This is because the campanies don’t open up the design to easily integrate with allready available tools. the same stuff happens over and over again no matter WHAT we use as long as it is non-freedom respecting.

my point is this - imagine taking a DSLR connecting it to a Librem 5 and going to town with the power of BASH and just controling the hardware in the camera with terminal commands. yeah even cameras have microprocesors nowadays (wifi/bt/nfc - they are basically inteligent)

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That’s a good question, but it’s not speculation, it’s rather a fact.
This article states that in 2016 the Brazilian federal govt. acquired several licenses from Microsoft as substitutes to free software. The government sites related to free software are dormant since then, which indicates a change of attitude.
Why Brazilian govt. is acting against its own interests since then?

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i don’t buy it. something definately happened there at some high level position if they turned back from free software. maybe some blackmail or high level bribe. i don’t believe they would willingly and unanimously choose to turn back from freedom to slavery and the fact that something like that could happen AFTER they chose free software is a clear indication of something fishy going on.

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Hard to say without knowing the details, but I will admit that in many ways Microsoft Office is currently better than the free alternatives* for interacting with other businesses and governments.

It’s one thing for an individual to risk having a difficult time interacting with businesses/governments and dealing with some frustration. It’s another thing for a government to do that and risk being left behind by the others. Especially when that government is in a weakened state.

*One example I encountered today is selecting nested tables in a word/writer document. LibreOffice writer just won’t select the nested tables and in turn I’m going to spend many hours on a task that historically took minutes in word. This is worth it for me for this one thing but is only a single example of many that exist.

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what you are describing doesn’t apply to the above situation. you can’t compare a single use case situation with the whole infrastructure of the government.

usualy when a government infrastructure falls into “foreign hands” you suddenly have a huge problem on your hands that significantly outweighs ANY features which one single individual might feel are more desirable in terms of software efficiency and interoperability.

besides have you tried the latest libreoffice suite ? except the fact that out-of-the-box it doesn’t come with some desirable fonts there are actually very few things it can’t do as well or better than the ms version.

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Please try to keep OT at the minimum. @reC, it’s perfectly normal. Yes, lobbying/bribery. Happened multiple times in Germany. Munich had their own Linux distro, new mayor, rolled back to Windows with flimsy arguments. MS moved headquarters to Munich. Coincidence. :rofl:

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I passionately believe in free software (although I often compromise in real life), so my biggest hurdle to crowdfunding the Librem 5 was spending $600 on a phone which is 3 times more than I have ever spent on a phone before. In the past I have bought used phones for $200 on ebay and installed LineageOS.

I really had to consider whether I wanted to spend that much on my ideals and whether I could live with all the inconveniences. I have tried to using LineageOS with only open source apps, so I know how painful it will be to use the Librem 5 with its extremely limited set of apps.

For me, crowdfunding the Librem 5 is about trying to help finance the reforms that I want to see in the tech industry, which is currently based on planned obsolescence, restricting user control over their own hardware/software and monetizing their data.

I hate the fact that it is no longer possible to buy a decent phone with a removable battery and the bootloader is locked and the firmware is proprietary, so I can’t update the operating system unless the manufacturer wants me to. It seems utterly wasteful to me to throw away a phone after 2 or 3 years because the battery which is sealed inside the case can no longer hold a charge. I hate the fact that most phones only get 1 upgrade of Android and they end support after 2 or 3 years. Phones should be able to last 5 years just like my PC running Linux.

I don’t care that much about my personal privacy. I don’t use a password on my devices. However, I do care passionately about not feeding more of my personal data into the servers of Google, Facebook and Microsoft so that they can be monetized. I’m less worried about the targeting advertising that is designed to colonize my desires, but how governments can access that data to track our activities and suppress dissent and free speech. I fear that we will construct an Orwellian future if we don’t start creating an alternative to the current business model in the tech industry based on monetizing users’ data.

I think that the deciding factor for me was when I wasted $220 buying a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 on ebay and discovered that I couldn’t install LineageOS on it because Verizon had locked the bootloader. I decided that I needed to start supporting hardware companies that respected my right to install any operating system that I wanted. When I searched for phones that allow me to unlock the bootloader without a special code from the manufacturer and install LineageOS, I only found a few models from Google, OnePlus, Fairphone, Razer, Asus, BQ, Archos and Essential, and most of the models were a couple years out of date. Once I looked at each available phone, I realized that every single one has drawbacks.

Google and OnePlus promote planned obsolescence by not including a MicroSD slot. I fundamentally disagree with Google’s business model of monetizing my data and OnePlus is part of B&K that sells millions of locked-down phones under the brands of OPPO and vivo, so I don’t want to support either company. The Fairphone 2 is very outdated and overpriced, plus it doesn’t sell outside of Europe and you can’t get it used. There isn’t yet LineageOS ports for recent phone models of BQ, Razer and Archos and only an old version of LineageOS is available for the Essential PH-1. The only good option I found with a decent LineageOS port was the Asus Zenfone Max Pro M2, which is half the price of the Librem 5, but has a mediocre camera, no USB-C, no fast charging and a sealed-in battery. The LineageOS ports for the Asus Zenfone 5 and 5Z still have major bugs.

With the Librem 5, I will get few apps, subpar camera/video, only 32 GB of SSD (although there probably won´t be enough apps available for me to need 64 GB), a weak and energy-inefficient CPU/GPU in the i.MX 8M Quad, a thick case, and no fast charging, but I won´t have to play the lottery hoping a community of modders will figure out how to make the phone work with a free operating system. I won´t have planned obsolescence and I won´t have the monetization of my data and secret deals with the NSA to obtain my data.

It is hard for me to justify buying the Librem 5 based on its hardware and functionality, but it is worth it to me because I want to help finance the creation of an alternative mobile device and mobile operating system that promotes user freedom, device longevity and an ethical business model. My hope is that other hardware companies will follow Purism´s example and also adopt mobile Linux, so we will have a whole range of better options in the future. Companies like Sony, HTC, Motorola/Lenovo and LG lose money with every Android device they sell, so hopefully some of them will be willing to take a chance on mobile Linux.

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