Librem 5 Will Begin Shipping In The Weeks Ahead, But Varying Quality Over Months Ahead

[danmcgrew]

...The reason the phone needs more ram, at least in the case of Android (on the Atrix), when docked the phone would continue to run Android as a windowed application within a Full Linux Desktop (a hacked up Gnome 2 iirc). However with only 1gb of RAM when you opened desktop Firefox on the Atrix (which was the killer app, desktop firefox + flash so Youtube worked) after 1-2 browser tabs were opened the browser would run out of memory and crash...

Thanks very much for the benefit of your experiences. Do you think that it is remotely possible that so much RAM is needed because of the use of Android, or is this a non-issue?
Asked another way: do you think the need for RAM would be diminished if the phone was/is a true-Linux phone (as opposed to a Google Android-Linux phone)? [let's leave the 'true-Linux' vs. 'Android-Linux' issue alone, shall we?]

[blackiwid]

Purisms target audience are gullible autists who will gobble up any supposed ""privacy"" snake oil.

I am really disgusted by this tribalism here. Instead of being happy to have 2 better choices in the future and deciding for yourself that you don't buy Purism for some reasons, you have a wish to destroy/hate purism and not even that is enough you people even hate the people that have different opinion about that product, their customers.

That has pathological dimensions, get to a shrink or get a live, something goes really wrong in your lives and it's not Purism.

I could understand if somebody of you would be a baker and be angry about the process (if you ask them to get your money back because of the delay, do they give it back?) but most or all of you aren't bakers so there is absolutely zero reason to hate on them.

But I forgot they dared to use Gnome and maybe even satanic Systemd, so they are your death enemy I understand, Maybe maybe they dare even to use btrfs. This unholy satanists....

For fucks sake. they release much much more information create more transparency and you attack em for being not transparent...

About Pinephone 1. they have to deliver their dates first... don't be to sure they have no delays. The Pinetab had also a delay as google just told me...
2. can you shut down all spy capabilities of the device? Do you have all drivers? If not it does not even compete on the same market. I am happy if somebody has more detail.

Of course for 600 dollar the librem phone is a phone for a specific demographic that has much money... I am not in that group but I don't have to hate on them just because I don't have enough money right now. It's pretty normal Airbags and other features like that also get first build into the expensive cars for rich people before they get slowly into the cheaper cars. And even if they would fail in the end... the software efforts they have done is great and will make some project successful in the future, so even if they file bankruptcy tomorrow that was a great project/success in my books.

For me in reality neither the Pinephone nor the librem phone is very interesting for the sole fact that they have no hardware keyboards but again just it's not for me at the moment doesn't mean that all is centered around my needs. with such pioneer in prototyping of hardware and software it would be easier to create other projects that maybe have then some day included some keyboards...

[dos1]

(the "glossy" "user-friendly" one, not talking about /r/unixporn level heavily customized setups here, they are irrelevant to "Linuxphones")

Why? There were people phoning and messaging from emacs on their GNU/Linux phones in the past. That's still a real possibility :P

[Danielsan]

I heard that UBports in order to work decently needs at least 4GB of ram, while I heard from Joe Ressington of LNL that I tried a prototype of the PinePhone and it was quite buggy. While I am convinced the best strategy for delivering Linux Phone is to create cheapest phones and make the tinkering playing with them, I am not quite convinced about the expertise of the Pine64. I used to have a Rock64 board and the OS support was so badly that I ended to resell the board, hence I don't know how they will able to handle all the mobile specifics issues.

[pal666]

It it looks like they have fundamentally underestimated the required effort to get this device out the door.

device is too low target, they are developing os

[pal666]

So better release early

that's a software development principle, they can't update hardware over the air

[pal666]

Depending on the exact definition of low-quality, it wouldn't necessarily be a deal breaker for me, as this device wouldn't be my daily driver, but a development and testing device.

are you valuing privacy during development and testing only?

[cynical]

I heard that UBports in order to work decently needs at least 4GB of ram

Nah that is nonsense. I used Ubuntu Touch back when it was available for the Nexus 4; it worked great, and that device only had 2GB of memory.

I think Purism is going to have a tough time because they took on too much at once. It would be a different story if the Linux community (particularly Gnome) had cared at all about mobile, but since they do not seem to, Purism has to invent the mobile interface themselves, make the GTK widgets adaptable, fix any papercuts involved in running Linux on a mobile device, and also build the hardware and upstream drivers.

Canonical had the better approach in bootstrapping off of Android. Yeah it's not ideal from the hardware or software perspective, but you can fix the other stuff once you have a functioning mobile OS. Purism's approach will leave the OS extremely unpolished from what I can see.

Like what about having OS images instead of updating using apt? I like apt, but it's not appropriate for a phone (imagine having to fix a botched update on a phone lol). Something like a base OS image (Fedora Silverblue/Ubuntu Core) and an app store (Flathub/Snap store) is the way to go. You simply must have atomic updates. And forcing apps to be contained by default (and very restricted) is mandatory for good battery life. You need OS-level services for applications to hook into for things like notifications or file downloads, you can't just have them doing what they want like they can on a desktop. Tight control is the only way to get reasonable behavior. Android has become stricter with every major release, but they don't go as far as I'd like tbh.

Canonical, if I remember rightly, didn't even have background activities in Ubuntu Touch. That's a great place to start!

[profoundWHALE]

1) No one complaining about $600 for a product that was effectively kickstarted AND kept people in the loop AND appears to actually be delivering on their promises.

If you didn't want the phone because of specs or price, then you wouldn't have backed the project.

And commenting on what is probably the largest Linux/open source news site about how bad this is hasn't been around in any tech thing for any amount of time. Ever try Windows Vista? 8? 98? They had all that money and resources and still ended up with that.

And just because you set a target date doesn't mean that you can't push it back when something goes wrong, especially considering that if they don't push it back, the alternative is going bankrupt and everyone's money going to waste.

2) Stop bringing up the Pinephone. It's like if every Debian news story had some idiot going "just run arch". We get it, you like the pinephone. If someone else is interested, they'll check it out. We don't need you preaching to the choir about the gospel of open source hardware/software. We get it. That's why we're here.

3) The high Ram requirement is largely due to the virtual machine that android phones have to run. It's one of the reasons why iPhones have always had less RAM. Even the Windows phones had less RAM. The second reason is JavaScript and other web languages.

[Danielsan]

Nah that is nonsense. I used Ubuntu Touch back when it was available for the Nexus 4; it worked great, and that device only had 2GB of memory.

I heard that from an interview to one of the main developer. The question was: "what did Ubuntu Touch need in order to make it more responsive?" And the dev replied than rather to have a better CPU it needed 4GB of ram to be fully responsiveness.