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All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

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Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#81

Post by OfSanguineFire »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #65

I also got one and was pretty disappointed, so it has been left sitting on a shelf. I didn't fully understand what I would be getting. The software is unstable, in particular sometimes the app store equivalent just doesn't work. I really wanted to support the ecosystem outside of the existing duopoly but it just feels too unpolished and limited. Tried figuring out how to setup a development environment but it didn't…

You don’t need to use the app store. You can just SSH into the device and run the usual apt commands from the command line. Yes, this is obviously nothing the general public would ever do, but we are on a news for nerds site here.

> buy up some mainstream phone and sell modded versions of it with kill switches

Making the connections for the several different kill switches (cellular, wifi, microphone) on a phone whose form factor was not expressly designed for that, would probably result in a rather ugly-looking hack. Moreover, on the PinePhone at least, the cell modem is separate from the wifi chip, so you can kill one while leaving the other on, but I believe that on most phones they are part of the same SoC.

Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#82

Post by free_glamorgan »

afavour wrote: post #8
selectodude wrote: post #5

Why do they keep getting more expensive? $1299??

Sad reflection of the realities of manufacturing, I suspect. They won’t ever achieve the kind of scale you’d need to make it cheaper. IMO it is what it is. Especially when you consider the hardware kill switches etc this is a niche product that the right small audience will pay $1.2k for.

It's probably coming for us all. The increasingly saturated smartphone market will not provide the sales that manufacturers need to maintain the current economies of scale. That is, unless they perfect the art of phones engineered for a very particular lifetime.

Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#83

Post by free_glamorgan »

fevangelou wrote: post #80
afavour wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sad reflection of the realities of manufacturing, I suspect. They won’t ever achieve the kind of scale you’d need to make it cheaper. IMO it is what it is. Especially when you consider the hardware kill switches etc this is a niche product that the right small audience will pay $1.2k for.

The PinePhone guys must be marketing geniuses then to sell a true open source device for 150 USD.

They sure are. They are selling budget, cobbled-together hardware that "supports FOSS", when in reality you are the one providing that support.

Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#84

Post by not_your_vase »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #76
robrtsql wrote: post #45

I have a Librem 5. It's currently collecting dust in my closet. I was enticed by the idea of having a user-replaceable battery (my last phone upgrade was 100% motivated by battery life problems). However, the Librem 5's battery is basically as bad as my Google Pixel's was after degrading for several years. The evening I opened it, I set it down after tinkering with it for a little bit and came back the next day to it…

It would have been helpful to specify the time when you had that disappointing experience with the Librem, and then put in the closet. At least for PinePhone, going to 1% within a day was a flaw of very early software, and good hibernation settings were released years ago already. That said, I wouldn’t recommend the current Linux phones. Years after I got my PinePhone, the experience still pales compared to my old No…

  > good hibernation settings were released years ago already.
As long as you don't mind not receiving notifications (unless originated from an IRQ from the modem, assuming it didn't crash itself during hibernation), and if you don't mind not using tethering with turned off screen.

"Good" is very, very relative, especially when it comes to the PinePhone software.

Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#85

Post by aidenn0 »

afavour wrote: post #8
selectodude wrote: post #5

Why do they keep getting more expensive? $1299??

Sad reflection of the realities of manufacturing, I suspect. They won’t ever achieve the kind of scale you’d need to make it cheaper. IMO it is what it is. Especially when you consider the hardware kill switches etc this is a niche product that the right small audience will pay $1.2k for.

How do volumes compare to say the Unihertz[1] phones, which are also niche phones, yet all list for under $400?

1: https://www.unihertz.com/collections/smartphones

Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#86

Post by klardotsh »

robrtsql wrote: post #45

I have a Librem 5. It's currently collecting dust in my closet. I was enticed by the idea of having a user-replaceable battery (my last phone upgrade was 100% motivated by battery life problems). However, the Librem 5's battery is basically as bad as my Google Pixel's was after degrading for several years. The evening I opened it, I set it down after tinkering with it for a little bit and came back the next day to it…

I have three PinePhones... somewhere... for mostly the same reason. A BraveHeart or two and then one of the "stable hardware" versions which fixed a couple near-showstopper bugs on the BHs. It didn't matter - the software simply never showed up, even running nightlies of various stuff never got telephony, the entire point of a cell phone, working stably on US carriers with battery life over 4-6 hours (be that screen on or off time, it didn't seem to matter).

I generated a bunch of e-waste trying to make Fetch (Linux Phones) happen. Never again. I'll just deal with the ever-more-restrictive-and-creepy duopoly until eventually I'm able to stop using smartphones at all and go back to a dedicated GPS or two, a dedicated music player, and LTE tethering a laptop if I need to look up anything. It'll be inconvenient, but I don't see another usable path out of the creepware spiral.

Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#87

Post by wmf »

fevangelou wrote: post #78

I have a hard time understanding how regular people in need of "security/privacy" would pay 1200+ USD for this device. I'm not even touching on specs etc. The only ones I can think of needing such "security/privacy" would probably make a great sidestory in Breaking Bad or get their own post-mortem show on Netflix. Kudos for using Linux, but that alone (and the hardware gimmicks) is really not enough to justify the co…

People in need of security and privacy would be far better off with GrapheneOS. For the Breaking Bad crowd there are specialized crimephones like Anom that are pre-compromised by law enforcement. Librem is more for people who want to run traditional GNOME/KDE on a phone instead of Android.

Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#88

Post by OfSanguineFire »

not_your_vase wrote: post #84
OfSanguineFire wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would have been helpful to specify the time when you had that disappointing experience with the Librem, and then put in the closet. At least for PinePhone, going to 1% within a day was a flaw of very early software, and good hibernation settings were released years ago already. That said, I wouldn’t recommend the current Linux phones. Years after I got my PinePhone, the experience still pales compared to my old No…

> good hibernation settings were released years ago already. As long as you don't mind not receiving notifications (unless originated from an IRQ from the modem, assuming it didn't crash itself during hibernation), and if you don't mind not using tethering with turned off screen. "Good" is very, very relative, especially when it comes to the PinePhone software.

> if you don't mind not using tethering with turned off screen.

Isn’t there a feature to disable the hibernation timer if tethering is on? That seems like something that could be hacked in just a few lines of code. For my own use, I already found on someone’s Github a systemd service that disables hibernation when the PinePhone is playing audio. (Of course, I agree with you on the last point.)

Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#89

Post by klardotsh »

danielnoiz wrote: post #73
chunk_waffle wrote: post #69

There have been a few "dumb" phones that have looked interesting lately but they have major issues or are really short run, two that come to mind: lite phone: https://www.thelightphone.com/shop/products/light-phone-ii-b... The reviews of this phone that I've seen have been pretty brutal so I've avoided it. mudita: https://store.mudita.com/store/mudita-pure-minimalist-phone-... Out of stock, but looked interesting. An…

The Light Phone not being open source killed it for me. Or at least having an easier option for alternative os.

Yep. Open source the OS and allow sideloaded applications for folks who draw the line somewhat differently for where to trade off "dumb" vs "smart", and the LightPhone would be a winner, but alas...

I met someone in Bellingham with one of these things once. It was pretty sweet, and they'd explicitly cited their having culled their smartphone addiction with it as a selling point, so I guess it works to some degrees. I forget off the top of my head exactly which feature I wish it had that I wanted to sideload on, but whatever.

Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#90

Post by wmf »

macinjosh wrote: post #34
afavour wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sad reflection of the realities of manufacturing, I suspect. They won’t ever achieve the kind of scale you’d need to make it cheaper. IMO it is what it is. Especially when you consider the hardware kill switches etc this is a niche product that the right small audience will pay $1.2k for.

With labor costs skyrocketing across the globe (for good reason) I sometimes wonder how long it will be until we get "flat-pack" electronics, i.e. where things come largely disassembled and you must put it together before using. Framework is kinda heading in this direction with laptops.

The Framework DIY model is fully assembled at the factory, tested, burned in, then disassembled back into kit form.
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