Librem 5 Smartphone Now Plans To Ship With KDE Plasma

[diriel]

Perhaps off topic, but I have often wondered if the Sparc T2, which is open sourced, would make a good mobile phone chip if a person were to break out 1 core and add in the needed bits. Port it to perhaps 22nm SoI LP... Be really nice to have fully open hardware.

[sverris]

Normally I'd agree, but you have to keep in mind this is an ARM platform, and a phone. Installing ARM is relatively difficult compared to x86. Installing any OS on a platform without a mouse/keyboard can be difficult or tedious, and may require you to buy extra accessories. Pure Linux isn't commonly found on phones, so people might not know what to do/get to make phone calls or text messages. In order for this product to be a success, it needs to be polished and user-friendly. Supporting a different UI at last minute is going to act as a distraction, and having people customize which UI they want detracts from user friendliness.

Personally, I wouldn't mind this - I have experience working with ARM devices, I have the accessories needed, and I'm willing to put in the time and research to make it work for my needs. But I am a small demographic.

All true, yet there is also a possibility that such changes or additions create new/more media attention, and therefore momentum for the campaign. (Personally, I do not think that they will reach 1,5M$, although I would like them to succeed.)

[L_A_G]

I'm probably going to get blasted by some for this, but making a rather major change like in the middle of the campaign makes it look like they didn't really plan things properly and may not be able to plan things properly if they get their funding and get going on actual development.

Not that this doesn't make sense. No reason to re-invent the wheel when there's one that fits your needs better than the wheel you were planning to build right on the shelf, but not seeing what's on the shelf makes people doubt your judgment.

[blackiwid]

I have no good feeling about that such moves creates problems and angry customers, I should maybe not over prioratize Chris Fisher from Jupiter broadcasting but he ordered a librem notebook with nvidia graphics and then they send him one with intel graphics.

The situation was complicated cause he would have get a nvidia version if he would have reacted to the updates, and the community requested or demanded it, but still people that order such extreme expensive hardware tend to not like if they ordered a peach and get then delivered a cherry.

And that even feels a bit cheesy first you promise X then all fans of project x back it. Then you switch to Y and now you get the their fanbase but still only one will be supported primary.

I can't belive that they will support bot plattforms on a similar level. It must not be even true that they did this strategicly, but it creates that suspician.

For me its a to expensive and has b no keyboard. If they would at least have such keyboard dock option like the Jolla phone had it would be more interesting.

I just can't belive that the primary audience geeks prefer touch over keyboard so they might neglect 90% of their audience. But maybe I am wrong the high prices target maybe hipsters more than geeks. But since when do Ulster's care about privacy?

[rtfazeberdee]

I'm probably going to get blasted by some for this, but making a rather major change like in the middle of the campaign makes it look like they didn't really plan things properly and may not be able to plan things properly if they get their funding and get going on actual development.

Not that this doesn't make sense. No reason to re-invent the wheel when there's one that fits your needs better than the wheel you were planning to build right on the shelf, but not seeing what's on the shelf makes people doubt your judgment.

Maybe they are expanding the options just to try and get more investors

[Uqbar]

Have they managed to get a blob-free handset?
That'd be the real shift in the mobile market. Anything else, to me, is just old-fashioned won't-ever-succeed stuff.

[L_A_G]

Have they managed to get a blob-free handset?

To make a completely blob-free handset they'd have to design both their own wireless chips (WiFi and cellular) and GPUs (I think) so I'm pretty sure you didn't know how tall of an order that was...

Maybe they are expanding the options just to try and get more investors

Maybe they'll get more clueless investors, but anyone who knows anything about software development knows that a lack of focus is absolute poison to deadlines, budgets and the quality of the end product.

[gbcox]

Sigh... This isn't a "big shift in course" nor are they "abandoning GNOME" From reading their website, they said they would evaluate both platforms and then make a decision. Plasma mobile is a thing, GNOME mobile, not so much. This isn't as much of a decision as going the path of least resistance.

[Uqbar]

To make a completely blob-free handset they'd have to design both their own wireless chips (WiFi and cellular) and GPUs (I think) so I'm pretty sure you didn't know how tall of an order that was...

So they aim to a niche "Security and Privacy Focused" user base while not being able to provide for an actual "Security and Privacy Focused" product.
If I were a "Security and Privacy Focused" user, I'd then rather turn to either a feature phone or an iPhone.
In the former case there would be little privacy to control without any IP communication.
In the latter one I would focus/rely/be concerned on a single EULA (Apple's), which is better than SoC EULA (like Broadcom's) plus the manufacturer's EULA (like Samsung's) plus Google's EULA (Android's).

[ZeroPointEnergy]

So they aim to a niche "Security and Privacy Focused" user base while not being able to provide for an actual "Security and Privacy Focused" product.
If I were a "Security and Privacy Focused" user, I'd then rather turn to either a feature phone or an iPhone.
In the former case there would be little privacy to control without any IP communication.
In the latter one I would focus/rely/be concerned on a single EULA (Apple's), which is better than SoC EULA (like Broadcom's) plus the manufacturer's EULA (like Samsung's) plus Google's EULA (Android's).

There is no open baseband that you can use outside a test lab. And even if there was one you could not use your own builds legally because of regulations which require you to certify the firmware. And even if you could solve that, baseband has always the major flaw that you are track-able and there is no end-to-end encryption, there is simply no way around that no matter what modem you use.
However, you can disable the baseband completely and just use anonymous WIFI since the librem 5 phone stack will use matrix.
The included baseband and wifi will probably have proprietary firmware but it is completely separated from the device and only connected via USB without memory access.
This is the best solution I have seen so far apart from no phone at all, even feature phones.