Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

That is exactly what this Purism project is trying to achieve.

And you are wrong, there are opensource drivers for many chipsets. Quite a few Qualcomm and Allwinner SoCs have mainline linux support (https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=99357). It is just that most drivers are made for the Android kernel and Android stack. It is hard to port them to the vanilla kernel and GNU stack.

I'm convinced we are going to get a phone one day that can boot the vanilla kernel.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

That's a no-brainer, I can boot a mainline kernel on just about anything.
For it to be useful beyond having anything else as serial terminal for I/O; well, that's another thing alltogether...

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Sure, but they have no reason to choose mer over the PureOS distribution that they already maintain

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

That says right on the page in their FAQ:

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Just stumbled upon it via phoronix. [1]
Some months ago I took a look at Librem's x86 PureOS (not to be confused with PureOS [2] ;) ) which they ship with their laptops.
It seemed to me like one of those many largely pointless "yet another Debian spin" distributions, that simply take vanilla Debian, add their own artwork repo and call it a new distro.

While I usually don't like that approach, in this case however I'd call that a big plus if they go the same route for their mobile OS, because it would mean that even vanilla Debian should run on it.
This in turn would eliminate the one big flaw of Maemo: dependency of the user on the device manufacturer

From a SW POV this looks nice. I'm a little concerned about the HW design though. Librem has a tendency of mimicing the Apple design. So I'd expect a non-replaceable battery, which would just shift the point of planned obsolescence from SW to HW.


[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...purism-phone-5
[2] http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=pureos

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

So, will this be able to replace the Neo900?
Actually... What happened to the Neo900?

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

According to their website, that should not be a problem:

https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

I must say I like the idea of this phone. I'm seriously interested in investing in it, but I also invested in the Jolla Tablet. We all know how that went.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Lunduke show interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SwE9W8JasA

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

I really need to find a way to express more clearly what I consider a "replaceable battery".

I mean a battery that I can swap out "on the road" without any tools.
Like with the N900: pry off back cover, take out old battery, insert new one, reattach cover
Or with my old laptop: unlock lock switch, hold back spring switch, take out battery, snap in new battery, lock lock switch

I can't do that with any of the Librem laptops (or a lot of "modern" laptops for that matter). I need at least a screw driver for that which in turn means I wouldn't want to do that in a crowded rocking train where I'd lose half of the screws in the process.
That's what I'm afraid of will also be the case for the Librem 5.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Yeah nobody is making things like this anymore, and with good reason too. Most people don't bother buying secondary batteries for things, and so the benefits of having them quickly replaced is lost on them.

It's cheaper, more secure, and easier to seal against the environment to keep the battery internal, and so long as the thing isn't epoxied into the frame then that's good enough for me to replace it when it gets a bit old.