Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Librem 5 dev kits are shipping

puri.sm

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 98 posts

Re: Librem 5 dev kits are shipping

#71

Post by walrus01 »

subsubsub wrote: post #7

Every time Purism is mentioned on HN there are always people chiming in with negativity around how it's not open or secure or free enough, based on some unachievable metric of those things and with an side dose of utopian fantasizing. Buy one of these phones because you - Want a 'free' phone to exist in the future - Want an open source phone to exist in the future - Want a secure phone to exist in the future It may n…

Realistically the only way I can think of to have a purely open source phone, is to not implement it as a mobile phone at all. You can do voice and interface to the pstn with a purely open source asterisk and sip softphone software combination. If you're a super gpl zealot, do it on one of the few thinkpads that can have its bios flashed with a open source version.

Sorry it's not very portable, beyond whatever subnotebook sized x86-64 system you can run it on. Where your phone calls meet ss7 and the pstn is still going to be totally closed source and opaque to you.

Re: Librem 5 dev kits are shipping

#72

Post by curt15 »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #55
pjmlp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just went through their SDK docs. https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Apps/index.html Looking at their guides, the app APIs usability is a joke from Android point of view, even Tizen has better docs. https://developer.tizen.org/development/api-references/nativ... Best of luck I guess.

a.) This is all very much WIP. b.) As long as you develop a standard GTK app for Linux, it should be easy to adopt it for Librem 5. c.) Are you seriously comparing their WIP docs to someone who has put billions of dollars and over a decade into their platform and has a JetBrains powered IDE?

Is GTK intended to be the programming environment aimed at typical developers? Writing object oriented code using lots of boilerplate C macros seems quite a bit more tedious than using a language designed for object oriented programming from the ground-up. At the very least will GTKmm be a first-class citizen?

Re: Librem 5 dev kits are shipping

#73

Post by kelvin0 »

mlok wrote: post #61
simias wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm impressed and very much respectful of what the Purism folks are trying to achieve but I just don't think their business plan is viable as it is. As such I really don't really believe that getting a few geeks on HN to support the project will really make much of a difference. They need a much broader market share if they want to have a chance to survive in the long term and I don't see how they can get it. As it s…

The difference could be : a phone that you're not supposed to throw away after two years. Something that would be maintained over the long run. Lots of people would buy a phone that can last 5-7 years. I am one of them. My mother is one of them. My father too. Not everybody is fond enough of phones or tech to want to change often. If it runs apps and has a good camera, it's fine. A phone that lasts 5-7 years would al…

Maybe being a little bit too cynic, but markets need consumers to 'renew' their products. Otherwise, how can you have never ending growth and capitalist wealth. It's all tied together, pre-planned obsolescence comes with our current economic system. I would gladly discuss this opinion with any sensible arguments and nuances.

Re: Librem 5 dev kits are shipping

#74

Post by wtmt »

subsubsub wrote: post #7

Every time Purism is mentioned on HN there are always people chiming in with negativity around how it's not open or secure or free enough, based on some unachievable metric of those things and with an side dose of utopian fantasizing. Buy one of these phones because you - Want a 'free' phone to exist in the future - Want an open source phone to exist in the future - Want a secure phone to exist in the future It may n…

I agree with these points, but the device also needs to offer a good experience (like responsiveness, speed, camera/photo/video quality) and a starter set of apps. The former is where Firefox OS went wrong (IMO) by going low end and having a terrible experience. The latter seems to be an issue with the Librem phone since it comes with very few apps that most people generally use. I seriously wish this project the best, because we need good alternatives for people outside the two main smartphone OSes. But I personally cannot use this phone as my only device at this point.

Re: Librem 5 dev kits are shipping

#75

Post by admax88q »

subsubsub wrote: post #7

Every time Purism is mentioned on HN there are always people chiming in with negativity around how it's not open or secure or free enough, based on some unachievable metric of those things and with an side dose of utopian fantasizing. Buy one of these phones because you - Want a 'free' phone to exist in the future - Want an open source phone to exist in the future - Want a secure phone to exist in the future It may n…

"Buy one of these phones because its a stepping stone to what you really want."

Part of the backlash against purism is that they market themselves as a fully libre platform when they are not. Many viewed that as trying to cash in on the desire for a truly libre laptop.

From their website

> Purism’s Librem products are the only modern high-end devices where you are in control and have complete visibility into the operating system, all bundled software, and the deeper levels of your computer.

Emphases added. This is false, or at best misleading. You don't have complete visibility into the Intel Management Engine. Only after their initial release have they managed to strip the ME down to a fraction of its original size, but its still there doing who knows what.

Purism started during a time when concerns behind management engines were gaining a lot of traction. They capitalized on those fears by marketing a laptop with "complete visibility" without actually delivering on that.

They are a step in the right direction, but they don't market themselves as that. It makes things harder for people like Raptor Computer Systems who actually deliver "completely visible" machines as from the marketing its easy to assume that their products are equally free/libre, so why pay extra for the Raptor products?

> If you have the money to spend, then spend it. Consider it a donation to the cause.

If you have money to spend, spend it on a Raptor machine that is _actually_ completely visible, or donate it to a reverse engineer working on libre drivers, or a hardware engineer working on libre designs.

Re: Librem 5 dev kits are shipping

#76

Post by chupasaurus »

voltagex_ wrote: post #11
louib wrote: post #2

They're still aiming for a first release of the phones in Spring 2019 (this is from the newsletter, not the blog post)

For anyone not in $DEFAULT hemisphere, I'm assuming this means Q2/March-ish 2019.

April as a target month was declared 2 or 3 months ago.

Re: Librem 5 dev kits are shipping

#77

Post by czbond »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #56
czbond wrote: post #16

I'm in love with the mission - but don't want to really have to switch ecosystems again (from Linux --> Apple --> PureOS). I love OSX - could I not do the same with OSX by tightening it down?

> The really tricky problem is when a package must modify an existing shared resource. Such as appending lines to an existing config for example. A big part of Librem 5's mission is to be secure and private, but perhaps even bigger part is to be FLOSS and hackable, so one could use any host and any stack to develop pretty much anything they could on a standard GNU/Linux distro. Locking down iOS/macOS may improve secu…

Great reply - thank you.

Re: Librem 5 dev kits are shipping

#78

Post by dcbadacd »

mlok wrote: post #61
simias wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm impressed and very much respectful of what the Purism folks are trying to achieve but I just don't think their business plan is viable as it is. As such I really don't really believe that getting a few geeks on HN to support the project will really make much of a difference. They need a much broader market share if they want to have a chance to survive in the long term and I don't see how they can get it. As it s…

The difference could be : a phone that you're not supposed to throw away after two years. Something that would be maintained over the long run. Lots of people would buy a phone that can last 5-7 years. I am one of them. My mother is one of them. My father too. Not everybody is fond enough of phones or tech to want to change often. If it runs apps and has a good camera, it's fine. A phone that lasts 5-7 years would al…

Until they can say "Mainline Linux kernel can run on the device without modifications", I don't believe them about the "don't throw away after a few years"-aspect.

Re: Librem 5 dev kits are shipping

#79

Post by dcbadacd »

nonbel wrote: post #15
123919239 wrote: post #5

Is there any document where they describe how their focus on security shapes pureOS? I'm seeing stuff like bundling some add-ons for the browser, and kernel patches. In my mind, securing users in 2018 means to have a decent password manager with an up-to-date browser, make sure that apps are sandboxed and prohibit the browser from accessing all my user's files. Do they tackle this?

Edit: Sorry, I realized you were only asking about the OS after making this post. Feel free to ignore. I think it looks like an interesting project and will buy one. I especially like the hardware kill switches. > Here are some benefits and key differentiators of the Librem 5, the world’s first ever IP-native mobile handset and the only user-respecting mobile phone product offering on the market: - Privacy protection…

I don't see any MAC mentioned, that's a bit sad.

Re: Librem 5 dev kits are shipping

#80

Post by pksadiq »

curt15 wrote: post #72
AsyncAwait wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a.) This is all very much WIP. b.) As long as you develop a standard GTK app for Linux, it should be easy to adopt it for Librem 5. c.) Are you seriously comparing their WIP docs to someone who has put billions of dollars and over a decade into their platform and has a JetBrains powered IDE?

Is GTK intended to be the programming environment aimed at typical developers? Writing object oriented code using lots of boilerplate C macros seems quite a bit more tedious than using a language designed for object oriented programming from the ground-up. At the very least will GTKmm be a first-class citizen?

> Writing object oriented code using lots of boilerplate C macros seems quite a bit more tedious ...

If you are not aware, recently (since GLib 2.44), the boilerplate code required in C is a lot less than it was required before. Say for example see app.c and app.h files at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/tree/master/examples/appl...

Post reply on HN