Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

and that is exactly the problem. None of them sticks arround long enugh so that us geeks culd sitck with them. Basically, every time I was changing the phone in last 10+ years I was also changing the platform. :( With hope thet the next one would be IT. And guess what....

Bottom line is, all that cost money. So unless some huge corporation comes up as a sponsor of other people dreams they have to make money in the end. Somehow.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

And you say it like it is a bad thing? :confused:

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Lack of support or longevity is a bad thing. And that is what exactly happens with these niche products usually.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

And again, the point of having an open platform is so that YOU decide which software to run on it, not the hardware's manufacturer.

It doesn't matter if Purism is gone in five years from now. If the Librem 5 is truly open, then there is nothing stoping you (or a likeminded community with sufficient resources) from supporting the software on your own.
And if all of a sudden some other manufacturer creates an equally open phone at that time then chances are high that you'll be able to port that well self-supported OS that you loved on the Librem 5 to the new device.

That's the beauty of FLOSS, it's (almost) timeless. I'm running Debian on a laptop that I bough just a few months ago. And I'm running the same Debian on an ancient PC that is from the last millenium. Purism's promise is basically, to port that concept to phones.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

the problem is that likeminded community does not exist in the long run. People just move on. In my 10+ years of linux on desktop I've seen enough of great ideas that soon became abandonware. On the other hand apps that still exist and are updated from time to time do that with a snails pace. Most of them are still stuck on GTK2 with no wayland in sight. DE moves on with their own apps but most of the SW outside of that stack does not. And on mobile things are 901275437x more difficiult.
Serious SW development takes time and needs money. Blobs free HW without usefull SW is still useless. But it's linux mantra. Choice. With not much to choose from. :(

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

This is (off-topic) but

Several posts here made me remember my teacher and boss at Informatics department, at University the past millenium. Every time I went to him saying things like: "Mr Carillo, The LAN is slow because of a lot of temp files in windows/temp on every client connected"

He always said: "Hmm, okey that is the problem. So, what is the solution?. What solution do you have in mind?"

This situation every time make me change, because I could not go to mention any problem, without at least a solution of my part.

So, the problem was mentioned. And what solution do you have in mind?

Freedom has a high cost, everywhere, always. If you want to use the pure and free Sun energy to supply your electric/electronic devices, you need to pay the cost of Sun/Solar Panels.

If you want get free of carbon emition's cars, you have to pay the price of an electric car (Tesla, of whatever brands that produce Electric Vehicles).

Freedom in software and hardware communication ... also have a cost you need to pay for.

edit.

I made a quick search on startpage : Purism Librem 13 hardware problems.

And I didn't find any on the 2 first pages. What this could mean?

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

well, solution isn't to start all over again just to end up with the same problem like before. And like everyone before.
Just a fact that we can install any or almost any distro on top of it does not make it exactly a dream come true. Unless the dream is blobs free device with a terminal.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Me too... please bear with me...

As a long time ITT/TMO person, I'll be completely honest - and this is only opinion. I thought for once, a big enough company - at that time the biggest in handheld communication devices figured out that FOSS, community and devices all could be a part of their offerings. I mean, imagine that. A huge company that finally "got it".

Nokia was the solution. Unfortunately, Symbian, politics, a board of directors that made odd decisions... well, on top of that, the start/stop iterations of Maemo where each device did not continue to receive updates all brought the momentum (and glee) to a grinding halt.

Will another big company get that FOSS, our wants and needs, our community might be a viable option?

Or will we continue to be rushed into supporting fringe, smaller companies that may/may not deliver?

The only solution I can think is if we get the support of another company, show them that it can be a good thing to offer some freedom to their users and move things into our territory. We need to convince some big company that we're worth a damn.

That's perhaps a solution.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

You hit it right smack in the middle of the nail here.
There were so many problems in the NMP of that time that it was it's destiny to fail to deliver. The people who were actually doing the work could not perform due to crazily fat upper-middle management that was engaged in pursuing personal gains and living in a self-created bubble of eternal success stories.
In the end the whole thing collapsed due to rigidity and internal fighting. The tragic thing was that actually I believe mister E. was correct in his vision that the thing has to be reorganized; he only chose the wrong path to follow.
(On paper WP could look attractive but the problem is largely the nobody in his right senses wants a device running a microsoft OS)


In reality there is lots of support to linux and open source in the lower levels of hierarchy in almost all companies; it is just the higher management and executive level that has problems to understand it.
Software developers use and understand the power of FOSS but there is a communication gap between the doers and the policy makers :p

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

I was under the impression we're in such a community as we write these posts. :confused:

I've seen the same things but while I agree, that it would be nice if some things moved faster, personally I don't see a problem in the slow development pace.
That's part of the reason why I use Debian and maybe it has to do with the fact that I work as a developer/maintainer for software that is older than myself at its core. Plus, I don't really want what we usually call a "smartphone". I don't care for Whatsapp, Facebook and all that "social media" stuff. I want a FLOSS pocket computer that gives me a decent terminal to ssh into my company's systems, replaces my phone and occasionlly allows me to browse the web.

True. But you have to keep in mind that FLOSS devs usually don't develop things they aren't interested in, because they aren't compensated for that waste of their life time. So if you want them to waste their precious time you need to pay them for it.
Developing smartphone apps for an open platform that doesn't exist is a waste of time.

I don't agree with you on that in case of desktop SW (and maybe we will soon have this choice on mobile devices once there is an actually open platform available).
On the desktop there's a plethora of DEs with different UI concepts to chose from and for most of the tasks you could accomplish on a FLOSS desktop you have multiple alternatives of software to chose from.
Of course there are also scenarios that can't be done on a FLOSS desktop at all which are possible on proprietary desktops, but the same is true vice versa.


Well, I only joined the Nokia community one year after the N900 release, so I can't really say anything about Symbian or the early days.
But for me it was clear from the start that while Fremantle might have been revolutionarily open for a mobile os, it was a huge disappointment in that regard if measured by desktop software's standards. If viewed from an advanced Debian user's POV, Fremantle is and has always been misconfigured beyond hope. It's the very definition of dependeny hell.
I still consider it the best phone but the worst computer I've ever used. So it was clear to me right from the start, that while Nokia might have been the most successful failure, it was not the solution. And the reason was, that Nokia did not "get it", because considering what amount of work they surely put in Maemo anyway, it would have been comparatively easy to design it in a way that would have worked in the long run. In that case we'd still complain about the slow CPU and the tiny RAM in 2017, but we wouldn't be complaining about outdated software because we'd be running plain upstream current Debian, like we do on any old x86 computer.