Librem 5 Phone Review

Purism is a scam / cult. Louis Rossmann talking about it. Them being a cult Techlore explaining why Purism is garbage.

Do not buy their shit.

All the links don't work for me, getting a "server not found".
- Fixed, thanks for the heads up!

$1299

Shipping through backorders

Good for Librem I guess...

They are crazy charging that much for a phone with a crappy screen and hardly any memory.

I get the privacy argument, but I will be sticking with Graphene OS for the foreseeable future.

That's probably a smart choice
Some of us went in on Copperhead OS, and it's still stings
- I don't think the name matters, I also don't care about the drama with the (former) lead developer.
  
  I just want to use the best OS option for my phone, and at the moment I believe it's Graphene OS.
giving google hundreds of dollars to then degoogle it and deduct a few dollars of potential earnings, in total making google a net positive. getting ahead in the game, I see.
- No one was talking about buying a new phone from google.
- Yes I'm happy to pay money to Google when they make a reasonably priced phone with decent hardware and don't restrict the ability to install a custom OS.
- If the only thing you care about is how much money Google makes, then you are not even in the game.

Any interest i've ever had in this device completely vanished when I saw the price. Let alone the USA cult edition

it's obscenely over priced and this cultist shit doesn't make it any better. to me shift mq6 is miles better.

and i almost forgot, didn't they try to pull "copying free software verbatim and slapping a different logo on it"? for a whole group of software?

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=-IjUryQOlgk

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I don’t know what event you refer to but their OS is quite vanilla, entirely open source, and they do contribute upstream a good amount.
So you're blaming a company for a person not on its payroll writing a weird and dumb email? Ok.

They did do a "slap a logo on things"-thing with FOSS Android apps for their librem.one service. On the other hand, they do actually pay for software development for the Librem 5 in a way that helps the entire #linuxMobile ecosystem - a PinePhone or a Snapdragon 845-powered Android phone running postmarketOS would be way less useful without Purism's investment. It's all quite grey.
- My first point was "it's obscenely overpriced". So let's dissect that:
  
  Quadcore CPU (4x1.5 GHz Cortex-A53)
  
  3 GiB ram
  
  32 GiB storage
  
  720x1440 px resolution.
  
  That's almost worse than my 2015 idol3 which has an octa-core CPU. And it's freakin' $1.299!!
  
  On the other hand let's look at Shift6MQ:
  
  Octacore CPU (4x2.8 + 4x1.7GHz)
  
  8 GiB ram
  
  128 GiB storage
  
  1080x2160 px resolution.
  
  And it's €577 (which makes $627) which is less than half of what Librem 5 goes for. Would you call Librem 5 overpriced now?
  
  You somewhat agree with my third point but add that Purism develops software for mobile Linux (which I don't deny) and say that running pmOS would be less useful without it (which I don't agree). There's Plasma Mobile, there's SXMO (which I love the most) and lately even Gnome Mobile feels more snappy than Phosh. FOSS always finds a way.
  
  Let's talk about my second point. I said that "this cultist shit doesn't make it any better" referring to the Louis Rossmann video. If you've ever watched the video, you would've seen that there's a real person with a real problem and being stonewalled by Purism (which is not a singular incident by the way, I have seen numerous people saying the same shit). The thing you should've done would be to sympathize with that customer instead of coping for the company (if you're not the person that wrote the e-mail, of course). But here you are debatelording with semantics. Not on its payroll? What the fuck does that even mean? Why would I care about who's on whose payroll? I care about the community.

I too really love my new phone. Posted from Voyager on my L5.

Edit: Downvote me if you want but you're downvoting a fellow Linux nerd who's happy about using Linux so....

This guy gets it: it's an investment. Expecting a full-fledged product equivalent to existing mobile phones is incredibly ignorant. It just shows how little people understand about what goes into software and hardware development. Even worse are people who understand just enough to consider themselves experts yet actually know next to nothing on the topic. Yes, they know much more than the average rando, but they know very little compared to those who work on these things.

People dunk on Purism and the Librem 5 because:

Purism is shady AF (Louis Rossmann talking about it. Them being a cult Techlore explaining why Purism is garbage.)

Their phone is way worse specs than similar products, such as the PinePhone Pro, the Pro¹ X, the Fairphone 4 and the Volla Phone, and for a significantly higher price (in fact, the Librem 5 is more expensive than even the iPhone 14 Pro Max, the Galaxy S23 Ultra and the Pixel 7 Pro).

Even though they are years behind on their preorders, they are now launching a "new" phone with pretty much the same specs and double the price ani, you guessed it, it's available for preorder, although it's not even developed yet.

To summarize, Purism is a cult that sells iPhone 8's for more than iPhone 15 Pro Max prices and then doesn't deliver or refund them. My old Huawei P10 Lite has better specs in every single way, and it cost one sixth of their price when it was released six years ago.
- Yes, the Librem 5 is expensive and Purism treat consumers poorly.
  
  But, the comparison and the focus on pure specs make it seem that you don't understand the appeal of the product, which is to run a GNU/Linux stack on a phone with a very-close-to-mainline kernel. Among the devices you compared the Librem 5 too, the only one that's comparable is the PinePhone Pro (yes, the others support Ubuntu Touch, but they are essentially standard Android hardware featuring a Mediatek or Qualcomm SoC. The vendor kernel is then being used with a compatibility layer to run Ubuntu Touch on it.
  
  The PinePhone Pro (as the only other mainline smartphone in your comparison) is significantly cheaper, but that's in large part due to PINE64's modus operandi: They supply hardware, and the community makes that hardware usable by supplying the software. This model has worked okay for the OG PinePhone, may be due to the Community Editions, where PINE64 partnered with distributions/software projects, but it has not worked so well for the PinePhone Pro. The PinePhone Pro also has - depending on how you want to spin it - a too power hungry SoC or a undersized battery. Thanks to standby, it can last a day, but you can't really use it for much during that day then - e.g., browsing the web rapidly drains the battery. Also, without Purism's efforts, there would be way less user space software to make use of the device.
  
  The Librem 5 is not without flaws, it's a really complicated hardware device (they were aiming for some FSF stamp of approval) - while the (socketed) 4G modem has GPS support, Purism also added a dedicated chip for that so that you can navigate while the LTE unit is "killswitched off". The NXP i.MX8M only has Cortex A53 cores, and the GPU is not amazing, either (at the time when design decisions were made, it was the only GPU with decent blobless mainline driver support though), but at least the battery is large enough to make the Librem 5 a phone I can reasonably use as a daily driver these days.
  
  Regarding the Liberty Phone: I hate the name, but given that this is just the Librem 5 USA with as much RAM as the SoC supports and a larger eMMC, there's no technical excuse to delay that product, as these hardware changes are very, very minor.

Librem 5 Phone Review - August 2023