I realize you’re half joking but the v1 actually sockets both the modem card and the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth card. The v2 will continue to socket the modem at the very least.
I wonder if the K1 is going to be an appropriate chip for a 2028 smartphone?
Will it even be able to drive an external 4K display like the i.MX 8M Quad on the Librem 5 v1? If not, the convergence feature becomes moot. Life is too short to deal with blurry text on your monitor.
I want Purism to succeed, they’ve been an important catalyst for the Linux phone ecosystem. But this is just eye watering. $1600 plus taxes and shipping to the EU amounts to 2000 EUR.
I like phones with user controlled root of trust. I like phones that can run mainline Linux (let's not get into the debate over security, it's not there yet, but they'll get there eventually). This, however, is going to be ewaste on launch, and knowing the way the Librem 5 launched (has every order been fulfilled yet?), getting it will be an unmitigated disaster. 8 A55 equivalent cores running at 1.6ghz, RVA22 instead of RVA23, launching in 2028! It will be quite literally the slowest phone you could spend money on at its launch date, given that the by-then ANCIENT Snapdragon 4s Gen 2 you can get in a $20 flip phone from Walmart Right Now has performance cores that look like F1 cars in comparison.
Dawg I am literally an FSF associate member, I own a Talos II, I port phones to mainline Linux, I had their sticker on my car!
On your first point:
Reading around (you can find a lot of these experiences on HN itself), it seems pretty obvious that order loads reduced later in the Librem 5's lifetime due to chargebacks, allowing them to fulfill all remaining backer orders. Even if they did, why the fuck would I want to play that roulette again! Receiving a phone with 2015 specs in 2023 because you expected it several _YEARS_ earlier isn't any sort of consolation. I don't even necessarily like Pine64's approach to hardware development and the Pinephone has similar problems but at least those ended up in people's hands way, way sooner.
On the rest:
The specs are worthy of complaining about, you freetard. What point is any phone, even a libre one if I can't reasonably expect to do anything useful with it as a computing device! 8 slow ass in-order cores aren't going to handle even basic tasks like web browsing well anymore (judging by my MSM89x7/MSM8953 mainlining experiences). So you get your freedom phone in 2028, the bloat isn't ever getting better, and the result is a blob-less dumbphone that can't accomplish any of the tasks a phone is expected to be capable of, plus you spent flagship money on it!
We're not even on step one of freeing phones, which is most phones being capable of running user-modifiable operating systems that have reasonable user freedom. This is "cool" but really a waste of money unless you're the very specific kind of person that values "zero blobs" over "literally anything else". What good does freedom do me if it can't spend?
And that $20 flip phone? That's a TCL Flip 4 5G. It's root-of-trust is the AOSP test keys, so you can run whatever the fuck you want on it provided you're willing to port it.
I also feel completely puzzled about their choice.
I've been daily driving the L5 v1 since 2023, and while it's true that performance has improved since then, it's still a huge regression when you come from any flagship or even mid-tier phone.
Examples:
1. Can't scroll on some websites that use CSS effects because they render at ~ 1 fps so you can no longer tell where your scroll position is.
2. The browser keeps alerting me that my password manager extension is slowing it down. (It's never done so on other phones)
3. The Signal app (Flatpak, based on Electron) has a startup time of several minutes.
I'm now used to it but come on, Purism is going to pick a SoC for its next gen with less memory bandwidth (and possibly weaker single-core performance) than the i.MX M8 Quad?
The only plausible explanation I've been able to Stockholm together from all this is that some of the engineers at Purism must have vastly different phone usage patterns than I do.
Ad 1 & 2: Are you using Firefox? WebKitGTK is much snappier. Firefox doesn't even use the GPU at all unless you run Mesa 26.3 which was released last week.
Ad 3: That doesn't sound like a performance issue, there must be something weird going on as Electron apps usually launch within seconds for me (never used the Signal app though). Or are you perhaps launching it from an SD card?
> it seems pretty obvious that order loads reduced later in the Librem 5's lifetime due to chargebacks, allowing them to fulfill all remaining backer orders
So obvious it's completely wrong. Once the final production run finished there were enough phones produced to fulfill all the orders and have plenty to spare. It was actually refund requests that were the problem to handle due to limited cashflow. If you look at all the "I've got no phone yet" complains over these years, most of the time they turn out to mean "I requested a refund at some point and got no money back yet".
> Receiving a phone with 2015 specs
2018. Many key components, including the SoC itself, did not even exist back in 2015.
While the page is publicly accessible, I think this is still meant to be under embargo and not shared broadly. From their newsletter: “Contents of this campaign page are under embargo. They are not to be publicly shared prior to our official launch on November 17th.”
Thanks for pointing that out. My apologies. I did not and do not see that notice on the website.
I received an email regarding the announcement. It didn't include any specifications so I searched "Librem 5 v2" and found this page.
After looking again at the unsolicited email I received - I see the disclaimer at the bottom in italicized text which I've been trained to ignore. It's regrettable the embargo notice was not the first paragraph of the email.
I'm not really sure what to do now. It doesn't appear I can delete a post.
I also received this email, presumably because I bought the original Librem 5.
Recipients aren't under any obligation to respect their request for an embargo if they're just cold-emailing people like this, and it's newsworthy for HN, so I don't see the problem?
Yeah I agree it's not a big problem, and OP shouldn't feel bad.
I only call it out to note this page shouldn't be taken as reflecting the level of polish Purism would want in a broadly shared release. Especially given the lack of a video and narrative launch announcement.
I had the first Librem 5 in hand. It kinda-sorta took photos with random acts of green lightning obscuring most of the image.
Now, at double the price, what do you think we'll get? I'd be the first to buy something proven that runs Linux and that I control from ring -1 and up… but I'll eat Paul Stamet's amadou hat off his head if that happens.
Very low spec on every point, expensive, and most of all, not sure they can deliver. But very interesting to see them trying to do a Risc-V phone. I will follow this closely and hope they will succeed.
I had the first one. After literal years of delays, the delivery was still an unfinished product. Only a few cell networks were supported. The phone calls had terrible echo problems, and the picture quality from the camera looked like a disposable camera from 25 years ago.
Never again. I waited 3 years to receive the v1.
The software was somewhat nice so I had the best expectations. Then I found out it becomes a paperweight in 2 hours due to battery life.
These "purists" might be willing to accept a device that is a the mobile equivalent of the clanker car in the name of "pure" FOSS code; most people wont.. especially not at that price. I'm convinced this is some millionaire's pet project.
39 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 31.1 ms ] threadWill it even be able to drive an external 4K display like the i.MX 8M Quad on the Librem 5 v1? If not, the convergence feature becomes moot. Life is too short to deal with blurry text on your monitor.
I want Purism to succeed, they’ve been an important catalyst for the Linux phone ecosystem. But this is just eye watering. $1600 plus taxes and shipping to the EU amounts to 2000 EUR.
Yes, and it's mentioned in TFA.
> the slowest phone you could spend money
https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/
> ANCIENT Snapdragon 4s Gen 2 you can get in a $20 flip phone from Walmart Right Now has performance cores
And you will not control your main computing device, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24463347
Are you missing the whole point of computing freedom? I suggest you to read the FSF: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...
If the device isn’t useful, what’s the point?
On your first point: Reading around (you can find a lot of these experiences on HN itself), it seems pretty obvious that order loads reduced later in the Librem 5's lifetime due to chargebacks, allowing them to fulfill all remaining backer orders. Even if they did, why the fuck would I want to play that roulette again! Receiving a phone with 2015 specs in 2023 because you expected it several _YEARS_ earlier isn't any sort of consolation. I don't even necessarily like Pine64's approach to hardware development and the Pinephone has similar problems but at least those ended up in people's hands way, way sooner.
On the rest: The specs are worthy of complaining about, you freetard. What point is any phone, even a libre one if I can't reasonably expect to do anything useful with it as a computing device! 8 slow ass in-order cores aren't going to handle even basic tasks like web browsing well anymore (judging by my MSM89x7/MSM8953 mainlining experiences). So you get your freedom phone in 2028, the bloat isn't ever getting better, and the result is a blob-less dumbphone that can't accomplish any of the tasks a phone is expected to be capable of, plus you spent flagship money on it!
We're not even on step one of freeing phones, which is most phones being capable of running user-modifiable operating systems that have reasonable user freedom. This is "cool" but really a waste of money unless you're the very specific kind of person that values "zero blobs" over "literally anything else". What good does freedom do me if it can't spend?
And that $20 flip phone? That's a TCL Flip 4 5G. It's root-of-trust is the AOSP test keys, so you can run whatever the fuck you want on it provided you're willing to port it.
(insert gahnoo/car meme here)
I've been daily driving the L5 v1 since 2023, and while it's true that performance has improved since then, it's still a huge regression when you come from any flagship or even mid-tier phone.
Examples:
1. Can't scroll on some websites that use CSS effects because they render at ~ 1 fps so you can no longer tell where your scroll position is.
2. The browser keeps alerting me that my password manager extension is slowing it down. (It's never done so on other phones)
3. The Signal app (Flatpak, based on Electron) has a startup time of several minutes.
I'm now used to it but come on, Purism is going to pick a SoC for its next gen with less memory bandwidth (and possibly weaker single-core performance) than the i.MX M8 Quad?
The only plausible explanation I've been able to Stockholm together from all this is that some of the engineers at Purism must have vastly different phone usage patterns than I do.
Ad 3: That doesn't sound like a performance issue, there must be something weird going on as Electron apps usually launch within seconds for me (never used the Signal app though). Or are you perhaps launching it from an SD card?
So obvious it's completely wrong. Once the final production run finished there were enough phones produced to fulfill all the orders and have plenty to spare. It was actually refund requests that were the problem to handle due to limited cashflow. If you look at all the "I've got no phone yet" complains over these years, most of the time they turn out to mean "I requested a refund at some point and got no money back yet".
> Receiving a phone with 2015 specs
2018. Many key components, including the SoC itself, did not even exist back in 2015.
It looks like there are so few people caring about freedom and privacy that it is not worth making a phone for them otherwise Chinese would make it.
DoA.
Nonsense. Impact comes with numbers.
At $1600 this will only cater to a tiny club of enthousiasts. And thus have negligable impact on the overall ecosystem.
Want impact? Make it cheap.
4 years for a kickstarter phone is not okay.
I received an email regarding the announcement. It didn't include any specifications so I searched "Librem 5 v2" and found this page.
After looking again at the unsolicited email I received - I see the disclaimer at the bottom in italicized text which I've been trained to ignore. It's regrettable the embargo notice was not the first paragraph of the email.
I'm not really sure what to do now. It doesn't appear I can delete a post.
Recipients aren't under any obligation to respect their request for an embargo if they're just cold-emailing people like this, and it's newsworthy for HN, so I don't see the problem?
I only call it out to note this page shouldn't be taken as reflecting the level of polish Purism would want in a broadly shared release. Especially given the lack of a video and narrative launch announcement.
Now, at double the price, what do you think we'll get? I'd be the first to buy something proven that runs Linux and that I control from ring -1 and up… but I'll eat Paul Stamet's amadou hat off his head if that happens.
This was fixed a while ago, and even before that you could just take the photo and develop it however you liked as raw DNGs are stored by default too.
> that runs Linux and that I control from ring -1 and up
I've been using such phones since 2008 and I believe I've got much more out of them during that time than I could ever get with Android.