Librem 5 "Birch" Linux Smartphones Begin Shipping To Consumers

[GI_Jack]

Damn. Linux Desktop has gotten good enough it replaces windows, for all but the most niche use cases.(that includes filthy windows gamers)

However its terrible to still see that a Community Linux project is just as bad as you'd stereotype it to be.

Shit battery life. Radios don't work correctly. Doesn't handle calls, and the camera doesn't work.

Ummm. No. I understand it doesn't run the latest apps, or doesn't have the fastest chip. Don't need that. But I DO need base functionality to if not be perfect, be pretty damn close.

I need it to be:
GPS
PDA(Calendar, Contacts, todo, needs to sync with DAV)
Comms tool(phone, slack, whatsapp, signal, email, IRC, jabber, whatever dumb hipster flavor of the month)
Web Browser
Digital Camera/camcorder.
Music Player.

It also needs to sync with my linux desktop, and linux servers.

Anything else is really extra. Getting this all working on Linux is doable. Nokia's Maemo did this back in 2009 with the N900. I had one. It had some rough edges, but overall it worked pretty damn well. It was very much GNU/Linux on a smart phone.

[Toggleton]

Shit battery life. Radios don't work correctly. Doesn't handle calls, and the camera doesn't work.

Ummm. No. I understand it doesn't run the latest apps, or doesn't have the fastest chip. Don't need that. But I DO need base functionality to if not be perfect, be pretty damn close.

Well the Roadmap for the Batches does point out that Batch Evergreen(AFAIK starting somewhere April or so) should have all Basic Functions in Software(And Battery time Improvements). That will be the Mass Produced Batch. But the Hardware was good enough to send the first devices to Bacher and will improve with the next Batches. Would call it a "Early Adopter" stage.

I need it to be:
GPS
PDA(Calendar, Contacts, todo, needs to sync with DAV)
Comms tool(phone, slack, whatsapp, signal, email, IRC, jabber, whatever dumb hipster flavor of the month)
Web Browser
Digital Camera/camcorder.
Music Player.

Most of that stuff is already there or is planed https://puri.sm/posts/the-librem-5-application-compatibility-chart/ with GPS you mean Navigation? There was the Plan to Port Pure maps https://flathub.org/apps/details/io....nigus.PureMaps but not sure how well it does work on the Librem5 already
Not sure if we will ever see a whatsapp, signal, version maybe as a Emulated Android App with Anbox or so. Time will tell
Will be Interesting to watch the Improvements over the next Months

[pemartins]

This is amazing! The privacy this device will offer is unparalleled! No calls? No bluetooth? No cameras? Battery life lasting for a very short time? Amazing! This is well worth $700 dollars and multiple lies! Oh, and that transparency report they are legally supposed to release every year (Since 2017), since they are a SPC, where is that? In a software update perhaps?

Indeed these Purism guys are giving the NoPhone guys and snake oil salesmen a run fot their money!

https://www.thenophone.com/

[blackiwid]

I need it to be:
GPS
PDA(Calendar, Contacts, todo, needs to sync with DAV)
Comms tool(phone, slack, whatsapp, signal, email, IRC, jabber, whatever dumb hipster flavor of the month)
Web Browser
Digital Camera/camcorder.
Music Player.

You understand the name right? "Librem" it's a play on the name Libre aka Free software. And it's clearly privacy focused you pay a high price for that, and then you want to install a whatsapp? and make it again a spydevice. You don't need such expensive device if you give a shit about privacy. Buy a good android phone install some debian starter or whatnot and you are good to go.

Librem never advertised their product for your needs (whatsapp) so why do you expect them to deliver that?

[DrYak]

1. Nokia with Openmoko

what is this jumble of keywords ?
What does Nokia have to do with Openmoko ?

Or do you mean the Neo900, a project for same-case motherboard replacement for the motherboard of Nokia's N900, project by the same guys - Golden Delicious - that also provided (successfully, though expensively) the GTA04 replacement motherboard for the NeoFreeRunner smartphone by OpenMoko ?

Basically you're confusing and conflating multiple companies here. Also companies not experienced in shipping hardware on large scale (unlike Pine64 and Purism).

3. Firefox OS, nonfree android drivers as far as I know not to mention the modem that spys on the rams device, also abdondend

again mixing tons of things:

- nonfree android drivers: most of the chipset vendors do only provide binary drivers for android platform. If you want any chance to run full blown GNU/Linux on cheap off the shelf parts, you need to use an adaptation layer like Jolla's libhybris to reuse these drivers. This is valid not only for Firefox OS, but also for Jolla's Sailfish (which is why they developped it in the first place), Ubuntu Touch (the first big 3rd party consumer of libhybris) or Luna OS (the decendent of Palm/HP/LG's webOS). This has nothing to do with Firefox OS, and entirely to do with the sad state of embed chipsets.

There are currently very few ARM chipset that have opensource drivers (and could be run blob free):
- Freescale iMX6 and 8 are the oldest, which is why Purism selected the old and underpowered iMX8 for their smartphone project: back then it was the only available.
- Some Rockchip chipset can be used on panfrost, thanks to the work of people like Rosenzweig - which is why Pine64 is using this for the Pinebook Pro.
- Some Allwinner chipset can be used with Lima - which is why Pine64 is using it ffor the Pinephone
- the broadcom family of chipset used in Raspberry pis can since recently be used with opensource drivers, thanks to the work of Eric Anholt and since the Raspberry Pi 4, V3D mesa driver is one of the available official options, and the chipset is arranged differently with the GPU being a slave to the CPU and not vice-versa. (Thus no firmware in charge of your RAM)

- modem that spys : that has nothing to do with Firefox again, and entirely to do that the current chipset manufacturer that has near monopoly of smartphone hardware - Qualcomm - uses a peculiar architecture where the Cell modem is part of the main processor and in charge of RAM (functionnally, it's the northbridge) - for various energy (modem can handle audio routing while OS sleeps) and space (everything on a single contained chip). Saddly means that's it's trivial to abuse as by radio-spectrum licensing reasons, it's forced to run closed source blobs.
this is mostly due to Texas' OMAP (which did not use such architecture, but relied on discreet modem) departure from the field. (this had also serious supply implication to the Golden Delicious devices).

- Firefox OS : isn't actually completely dead, yet. KaiOS is a distant decendent and its currently being considered by some manufacturer.
But it's hard to compete in a world where two ecosystems (Android and iOS) share nearly all the market share.

4. Jolla: A scam they showed a disabled developer to be seen as trustworthy good people, and promised that the OS will be 100% free software. Now it's worse than Android because the latter itself is 100% opensource while Sailfishos is not. Not to forget the scam they did with the Tablets.

Whoa, so much to unpack there:

- Marc Dillon isn't just some public stunt about being inclusive to disabled people or whatever:
He was a Nokia employee and thus part of the R&D crew that was laid of when the whole Microsoft and Stephen Elop plague was cast upon Nokia.
He was the co-founder of Jolla.
He just left to eventually move to other projects (last I've heard he was jumping into the cryptocurrency bandwagon)

- Free software:

In Jolla's Sailfish the whole core (the GNU/Linux base, the oFono telephony middleware, etc. what used to be called Mer Project until it got reabsorbed back into Sailfish) is opensource. There are parts which aren't opensource yet, but those are mostly the interface a some user apps - I'm not saying that to pretend it's cosmetic only, but saying that because Sailfish happens to be build on Qt: A lot of its components are actually human readable QML and Javascript, and thus the 'not yet open-sourced parts' actually have readable source and your freedom to tinker isn't blocked as can be attested in the PatchManager ecosystem.
(It's somewhat reminiscent of Palm/HP webOS whose app running on HTML/CSS/Javascript where similarly hackable - that's where PatchManager was actually born)
Also Jolla is still progressively opening bits (the browser has been made opensource)

Android from this exact perspective, if you're comparing orange-to-oranges isn't 100% opensource neither.
The core Android system is opensource - see AOSP.
BUT a sizeable chunk of the API that most App rely upon *is NOT*. Those API aren't part of AOSP, they are provided by the Google Play Service - a proprietary Blob.
(Though alternative like microG do exist).
In a way, the situation is worse, because it's not even human readable and extremely hard to hack and patch. Much more reverse engineering needed.

- the tablet "scam"

Hardware is hard. Jolla failed (and actually, if you pay attention to the detail, they failed multiple time. They just managed to recover better from the phone fiasco, and shift to android-based hardware for the Jolla 1 phone)
Unlike the typical "got the money and ran away with it" Kickstarter/IndieGoGo scam, Jolla did invest the money trying to produce something, and even if the hardware failed, they managed to salvage the effort they hard put into the project and Sailfish benefited from newer versions.
Also, unusual for a crowdfunded effort, they have pledged to do refund and have even partially done so.

Last but not least, they are a small team. Don't execpt they'll successfully complete opensourcing overnight, managing to get enough money to reimburse everyone the second half of the tablet, etc.

6. Pinephone the big alternative:
I see on the website only a photoshop photo no one running any software.

Pine ARE shipping hardware, though currently concentrating on people who want to develop for it and suicidal users who want to be part of the debugging process.
There is, as mentionned by other, software being developped for it:
there are even demos of Sailfish successfully running a Community port, while relying on the opensource linux kernel + opensource lima driver.
Pine are also using separate modem, with ability to cut power to enforce privacy.

Releasing hardware is not enough because only the company write the drivecs nobody else magically reverse engineers all that shit. Either there exist free drivers for everything or it's a brick (or you use blobs and then your privacy is gone) I am not totally informed about that hardware.

Concentrating on releasing only hardware is a way to avoid the 'chasing too many rabbits' situaion.

Pine is doing a couple of things right:
- they have built a vibrant community starting back from their SBC business.
- they are picking up chipset that can have opensource drivers. The allwinner they use in the Pinephone can run on Lima and this actually how the Sailfish port is doing.

So even if they only concentrate into getting the hardware right, their community can help porting software from other project which are concentring on OS.

Warranty: 30 days nice

welcome to china...

We will see if they make their release plans, I think they don't even have a hard date on when they deliver devices for consumers?

Check the blog and forums:
They are currently still only doing the 'brave' edition, for users wanting to be part of the testing process. (The hardware is alreadz in final or near final form, but they are aware that the community hasn't finished with the software).

Hardware is trivial on this devices

Oh, sweet summer child...
Most of the delays were due to hardware subbtleties.
(but given the delay, they had time to polish the design further, and the current brave edition should more or less look like the final product, minus the software).

I believe only that they have free functional drivers for real linuxes (without any android driver compatibility bullshit) when I see it.

Check the Sailfish demo on youtube, it's running in such configuration.

[blackiwid]

...

Except the statement about Nokia where I am not 100% sure how they were involved but I know they were involved all I said was true.

1. You say it's not the fault of the other companies that they used proprietary drivers, which is wrong because it's a question of priorities Librem had the priority to not use blobs and they got it done. You can say they just had the right timing, but I doubt that Mozilla would not be able to do so. The only hard problem to solve was the modem thing. The rest was doable 10 years ago, too. Even if that would have meant no 3d support like the Replicant phones showed.

2. You claim that android is not free because of Google play, yet you don't need it, I USE android without Google play and it runs fine, still has more functionality with it (more running apps) than Jolla as example. You imply that google play services or any replacement is needed but it is not, it's a perfectly functional system without it.

3. Jolla had enough time to opensource their shit, if they didn't do it till now that was a active decision to keep stuff proprietary for evil reasons.

4. Yes the hardware is also hard to do, but it's solvable especially if you don't care about 100% free software and modem separation etc. As hard as hardware is to do, software for those things is harder.

5. I understand their idea that the community should write the software in history it just never worked. I bought a Cubitruck back in the past there existed a demo or for some players video acceleration worked that was I don't know 5 years ago if not longer NOW they got finally reasonable video acceleration stack. The same with AMD they released even hardware specs nobody wrote a driver for them till they hired people to write mostly them self the drivers.

Driver development works for simple things with the community but GPU drivers only can be developed by companies. Or else they are garbage like Nouvou. And even to reach this garbage status they needed several years.

6. so expect the Nokia thing everything I said is true, you don't like my framing of the truth, because you make excuses for not making everything free, but factual I said nothing wrong.

7. that you find excuses for the Kickstarter Jolla campaign where they not refunded everybody is beyond me, that's close to criminal if their would be any evidence that they could know that before they did it they would probably go to jail.

But even if you think well it sucked hard but that can happen, it's still worse than anything that Librem ever did, and they got less hate for it. That should make you think a bit imho.

[danmcgrew]

Except... but I know they were involved all I said was true.
...
...
...

...That should make you think a bit imho.

(1) No, what he said was that you don't have any facts--only personal opinions. There's an old, old saying: "...as full of s**t as a Christmas goose...". Ring any bells?
(2) Casey Stengel's famous quote applies to you, in spades: "I never said all them things I said."
(3) "..."imho..."--you have never had, don't have, and probably will never have "...a humble opinion...". You need to change that to, "...imao...": "...in my arrogant opinion...".

Best regards...

[blackiwid]

(3) "..."imho..."--you have never had, don't have, and probably will never have "...a humble opinion...". You need to change that to, "...imao...": "...in my arrogant opinion...".

Best regards...

You are a hateful person that only can insult people in every comment block your garbage from now on, bye.

Fuck is there no filter option in this forum?

[danmcgrew]

Fuck is there no filter option in this forum?

Sure is, rocket scientist--
Any time you see a comment preceeded by

"danmcgrew
Senior Member",

...don't read it.

"There's no problem so hard that it can't be solved very simply if you just think about it the right way."--Douglas Adams.

[DrYak]

1. You say it's not the fault of the other companies that they used proprietary drivers, which is wrong because it's a question of priorities Librem had the priority to not use blobs and they got it done. You can say they just had the right timing, but I doubt that Mozilla would not be able to do so. The only hard problem to solve was the modem thing. The rest was doable 10 years ago, too. Even if that would have meant no 3d support like the Replicant phones showed.

You need to remember that we aren't just talking theoretical concept. We're talking real product, and eventually the reality of world are going to catch up with you.
Everything require compromises and balancing.

- making a 100% opensource OS requires work, even more so if it is for a different class of use case where there isn't a giant install base. Smartphone are typical of that. It's not your usual server/workstation/laptop or embed router, and thus your garden variety Debian/Fedora or OpenWRT aren't 100% ready for the task.
Having a good functionning OS is going to require ressources and time, even more so that there isn't a ready-to-deploy solution. You'd need to reuse the work of most of the "almost there" OS available (Sailfish is currently in full production and available on several product, but hasn't finished opensourcing everything and - let's be real - is probably a decade away from finishing this - if they're still around. UbuntuTouch, LunaOS, etc. are all interesting concept but are currently mostly in zombie state with only some comunity enthousiat installing them on 3rd party smartphones).


- making hardware is also hard, specially if you're not used to ship hardware of this class. See the countless crowdfunding project that sound cool on the paper but eventually die out. There are very few community projects that eventually succeed and they all come from companies with moderate experience in shipping hardware (Planet Computer is an example). Even repeating success is hard (see Jolla Tablet).

Wanting to tackle both of the above is a HARD task, that broke several companies.
There's a reason why the Jolla Tablet fiasco was "too much" for Jolla and they decided to exit the hardware market and concentrate exclusively on software.

(Fairphone is a different example: making an open hardware with modularity and environment firendly ness is hard. So they concentrate on the hardware part, go for a off-the-shelf "evil" qualcom chipset, and slap a standard AOSP Android OS on it. You're free to make a community build of your favorite alternative OS, but don't expect much support from them, they don't have the ressources)

- wanting to make opensource-friendly hardware is even harder because suddenly you're adding extra constrains that complicates the task. You can't use the same chipset that the rest of the market is using. You need to go for more weird and excentic solution, which each come with their own drawbacks.
(for historical example you can even look back at the original OpenMoko and their Neo1973 and NeoFreerunner. Interesting concept but over-priced, under-powered, weirdly architectured and eventually crushed by the competition)

Librem is the prime exemple of what is difficult (and specifically how they are chasing too many rabbits at the same time).
They wanted to have both the software and hardware all developped inhouse. Despite them having a little bit of experience shipping hardware (mostly laptop) shipping hardware is hard - even more so because smartphone are entirely different beast.
They are suffereing from tons of delay, and by the time they finally ship their hardware, is going to be considered absolute shit by most people:
- because they started it a long time ago, and there weren't many chipset available. Freescale iMX8 was about their best option back then and that CPU is at best "lack-luster".
- now with the production delay they are releasing even later than expected and the CPU will seem even less adequate compared to other hardware on the market.

You'll end up with a platfrom that not many will like, except for the most hardcore people who are ready to trade the extreme openness of the platform (no blobs at all on the main system, modem on completely separate M.2 removable module talking over standard protocols) for absolutely else (large form-factor, price, performance, availability - even app eco-system: afaik (but I might be mistaken) there isn't some android app compatibility layer - e.g. Anbox - available on that phone yet)


I would love to have a "combo" :
Something as freedom thinking as purism, as cheap while opensource and semi-decent performance like PinePhone, with a nice and polished GNU/Linux OS like Sailfish, and modular and fair/eco-conscious with devent performance like a Fairphone.
(And I'm not even interested in the form factor. I happen to be born with gene giving me oversized hands, so I'm quite happy if the phone is a large slab).

But that's a ginormous amount of constraints, that not a single company is able to realistically tackle on their own.
If money was infinite, maybe, but not in the real world.
Even more so given that 99% of users aren't giving a crap about these weird features. All they want is thin, cheap and fast.
So the economy of scale only happens in these phone, not in my "dream combo".

So I'll have to pick a compromise (and in my case, it's running Sailfish on a Sony Xperia XA2).

Jolla had enough time to opensource their shit, if they didn't do it till now that was a active decision to keep stuff proprietary for evil reasons.

Jolla is currently operating on a shoe-string budget and is just managing to sell enouhg license (mostly to business, but also to Sailfish X users) to meet the ends and stay affloat.
They don't have the ressource to pay the extra man power to make sure that the open-sourcing goes smoothly while at the same time while keeping all their corporate licensee happy (and even less headroom to finish reimbursing the second half of "the scam" - common, let's be real, how many companies to even do the first half vs. "run away with the money" as real scams go ?)
Even things like just upgrading the core system (GCC, LibC) enough to be able to update their browser (more modern Gecko engine) takes ages (but have started and might further progress with the updates planned for early 2020).
Most of their investors (the business licensee) aren't even interested in the opensource (they're quite happy with the current status) and would be unhappy if Jolla "wasted" the money ressource they are paying on features that don't interest them.

Whenever you fit in one of the niche I mentionned above (open hardware, opensource OS, modular fair/eco hardware, etc.) you're in a very tiny niche, there are very few users interested in, the market is small there isn't that much money:
Thus it isn't a surprise that most of these company are small:
Purism, Pine, Fairphone, Jolla, etc.
Or even only loose community that aren't very active:
UBTouch, LunaOS, etc.

4. Yes the hardware is also hard to do, but it's solvable especially if you don't care about 100% free software and modem separation etc. As hard as hardware is to do, software for those things is harder.

Pine has extensive experience shipping embed hardware, mostly SBC (where a lot of the engineering is closed to phones and tablet) and even they have suffered multiple draw backs that they have extensively documented on their blog and forums.
They have the advantage of being extremely open and good at communitcation, and they have constitued a strong community thanks to multiple past success, that will be understanding.

Raspberry foundation is the giant mamoth of SBC, and even they are suffering from problems at each new generation (borked charging port on Pi4, "flash-shy" charge manager on Pi2, etc.)

If you think hardware is so simple, why don't you start your own crowdfunded campaign ?
My prediction: 99.999% chance you'll fail and half of the internet will pile on you accusing you of being a scammer. Not because of your incompetencies, just because hardware is hard, and you'll hit multiple problems along the line (including manufacturer droping out support and availability for your main central chip of your project).

2. You claim that android is not free because of Google play, yet you don't need it, I USE android without Google play and it runs fine, still has more functionality with it (more running apps) than Jolla as example. You imply that google play services or any replacement is needed but it is not, it's a perfectly functional system without it.

huh... Sailfish runs more or less the same apps. It also has a Google-Play-less android compatibility layer, you know ? on XA2 and 10, the layer is compatible with apps targetting AOSP/Android 8.1 (Okay, that layer is proprietary and will *remain* closed souce)

The problem is that nowaday a lot of the common apps are utterly addicted to Google Play Service. Without those, you're limited to a couple of app whose developper have gone to great lenght to make sure they run without, and you'll still be missing functionnality (e.g.: WhatsApp and Uber are able to run bare).
Most of the critical day-to-day application (e.g.: banking) are going to be non functionnal on your stack.

Using purely the opensource part of AOSP severly limits you in which app do work and is far from what the majority of users expect.

5. I understand their idea that the community should write the software in history it just never worked. I bought a Cubitruck back in the past there existed a demo or for some players video acceleration worked that was I don't know 5 years ago if not longer NOW they got finally reasonable video acceleration stack.

I haven't heard about Cubietruck. That just shows you how large and active its community is.

People just completely under estimate the power of the Raspberry foundation (and to a smaller extente, effort such as Pine's).

The actual hardware is only half of the story.
Managing to gather and keep long-term a very active community is at least as important.

(And even the Cubieboard has armbian ports running on mainline kernel).

Regarding AMD: you clearly haven't been paying attention to the whole development of the drivers, despite the meticulous reporting by Phoronix (thanks MIchael !)
Driver development started even before specs, mostly reverse engineered back than. The limitation has always been the speed at which specs and reference code got cleared through the legal department at AMD.
Having devs on AMD's payroll certainly help, but it's far from being the main limitator.

6. so expect the Nokia thing everything I said is true, you don't like my framing of the truth, because you make excuses for not making everything free, but factual I said nothing wrong.

I'm just a little bit more warry of what happens when you hit the hard reality of the world.
Having worked on some project where I have gathered relevant experience (developping software distribution for scientific HPC), I know that if you want to be real you need to make tons of compromise and find the right balance.

that's close to criminal if their would be any evidence that they could know that before they did it they would probably go to jail.

You know how crowdfunding works, right ? You're not *buying* a *finished product*, you're investing money into a project and hope they'll manage to complete. Setbacks happen and sometime there are big delays or even project getting cancelled.
Sucks to be you, but you invested in a not very viable product. Short of stealing the money and running away with it, it's not illegal, it's just the hardships of trying to bring a project to completion despite all the unexpected problems that you'll encounter along the way.

it's still worse than anything that Librem ever did, and they got less hate for it.

I'm not hating Librem. I am just point that doing this type of thing is hard, doubly so for then because they want *everything* - both hardware and software - developped inhouse from scratch. This is guaranteed to bring tons of unexpected delays.
This will force them to release much later than expected, and their final hardware to look completely craptastic compared to anything else in the same market, while costing an arm and a leg (because they need to cover all the R&D, while having very small numbers).

On the other hand, I totally understand that for some people (not me, though) the premice of having such open hardware and software as *so* critical, that these people are okay tolerate the expensive price and lackluster hard for it.
(I can understand, I felt attracted to the original OpenMoko despite it having nearly all the same drawbacks - I just had more expendable income).


Succesfully finishing a hardware project is hard, tons of setbacks are going to pop-up. At some point some compromise are going to be needed.
You'll need to lower your expectation, either at the current state not being perfect (I'm okay with only half-open Sailfish running on android drivers) or being okay to wait an enternity and final product looking like crap compared to everything else despite costing an astronomical price (which is probably what you're going for. Good for you if that balance point makes you happy).