I'm a backer and I fully expect them to not hit the 2019Q3 mark. In fact, I find it highly unlikely and 2020Q1 seems a lot more reasonable.
Still, I think they are trying to do it right and made a lot of choices that are on the right track; thus I consider their effort the most worthwhile around and a project worth supporting.
However, they are clearly spending too little effort on the hardware and driver side, and trying to do too much high-level software.
This will cause more delays and I'm not at all sure if they can put out their intended software platform along with the hardware without delaying the latter too much.
However, if they don't manage to establish their software-stack right from the get go, we will once again see a lot of fragmentation issues.
The KDE/Qt guys are already working on a largely incompatible KDE based system and will push hard against the somewhat gnomish stack of Purism, which will make a unified system a lot harder to establish.
I think this effort will make it pretty much impossible for the Librem to become an actual Android alternative, despite good intentions in both camps.
It would be crucial to find a common ground, i. e. a middleware that both camps would be happy with, and allow both softwarestacks to coexist without fragmenting the whole platform; but KDE has its own middleware already and I don't see them moving to something else - nor the other camps to move to KDEs stack.
Still, I think they are trying to do it right and made a lot of choices that are on the right track; thus I consider their effort the most worthwhile around and a project worth supporting.
However, they are clearly spending too little effort on the hardware and driver side, and trying to do too much high-level software.
This will cause more delays and I'm not at all sure if they can put out their intended software platform along with the hardware without delaying the latter too much.
However, if they don't manage to establish their software-stack right from the get go, we will once again see a lot of fragmentation issues.
The KDE/Qt guys are already working on a largely incompatible KDE based system and will push hard against the somewhat gnomish stack of Purism, which will make a unified system a lot harder to establish.
I think this effort will make it pretty much impossible for the Librem to become an actual Android alternative, despite good intentions in both camps.
It would be crucial to find a common ground, i. e. a middleware that both camps would be happy with, and allow both softwarestacks to coexist without fragmenting the whole platform; but KDE has its own middleware already and I don't see them moving to something else - nor the other camps to move to KDEs stack.
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