Linux Phones

It's quite explicitly a phone for people who are either ideologically behind the project, aren't afraid of tinkering, and have a bunch of disposable income.

Many crowdfunded devices are delayed for years, many of which are never released. The global pandemic and chip shortage certainly did not help move things along any faster.

The Librem 5 Kickstarter was in 2017, and it wasn't until c. 2023 that they were actually apparently able to start shipping phones at a reasonable rate. Not only that, but by the time that happened in 2023, the price had ballooned to a staggering $1300. Moreover, the problem isn't just the delivery timeline: it's that people would wait literal years for a refund, which is a joke. It was Purism's responsibility to give a reasonable timeline for delivery of the phone, and they failed catastrophically over and over again as they kept delaying it (one could even imagine that each delay was deliberately shorter than what they needed to generate fewer refund requests). When people correctly identified this pattern and wanted their money back from the money pit, Purism left them high and dry.

Purism also funded/developed phosh and many other libraries which allow mobile Linux to be where it is today. Competitors are mainly hardware vendors and rely heavily on community support, many of which never provide any financial support or direct contributions toward FOSS development.

I'm well aware that Purism put money into software development. I'm even aware that PinePhone started shipping Phosh in 2021. However, it was Purism's choice to start their own Debian-based PureOS instead of just helping develop PostmarketOS or another existing OS for less money (this existed by the time of their Kickstarter and certainly would've been on their radar over the next several years). It was Purism's choice to start Phosh instead of just helping develop GNOME Shell which Phosh appears to be heavily based on. When you say financial support for FOSS, I want to qualify that this is them developing FOSS they started and continue to be the maintainers of, not them giving back to extant projects like GNOME Shell which they so clearly based Phosh on. And that they decided to do these things does not an $800 smartphone make given dogshit specs and given that it apparently still drops calls left and right (the most basal function a phone is supposed to be able to handle).

Purism certainly could have done a better job at proactively constructing a more clear and comprehensive refund policy, clarifying crowdfunding vs pre-order (and what is meant by "pre-order"), etc. Purism also could have done a better job being transparent and communicative about its refund queue.

As noted, though, I think this was deliberate. It took people literal years to get their refunds, and I'm betting this was because Purism had mismanaged funds so spectacularly that they couldn't even refund people who had been left waiting for a product for years (keeping in mind that each year that goes by makes the specs they paid for more obsolete). So instead of just coming clean, they decided to rugpull their pre-orderers and change the wording of the refund policy as people were trying to get refunds. This isn't just an "oopsie"; this is an illegal bait-and-switch in many countries. To be crystal clear, by the way: a crowdfund on the premise that you'll receive a device and a pre-order on the premise that you'll receive a device are functionally not different things; Purism was playing a semantics game to try to underhandedly stem the tide of refunds.

Despite the phone taking much longer to release than anticipated, it was eventually released. How is that a scam?

• The final product is a barely usable piece of shit.
• It took half a decade to really start releasing in earnest. At what point does something become not a scam for releasing too late? If I ask you to pay me money to write a book (on the condition that you'll get a copy) and release it 25 years later (it's an incoherent mess, but it is words on pages), having given you no reason to believe it would take nearly that long, have I scammed you?
• They're shady as all hell and played that game with people seeking refunds, literally running the delay, deny, defend playbook to a 'T'. Even if I desperately wanted a Librem 5, I wouldn't buy one for fear nearly $1000 would vanish into a black hole.

This is not the common trend. Many software improvements have been developed since, and most users report much more than "a few hours" of battery life - especially with auto-suspend enabled.

We're 8 years on from the Kickstarter. That battery life has allegedly become serviceable on an $800 commercial product isn't something to be celebrated or even the bare minimum: that's still a terrible look. Keep in mind the previous thread I linked about the battery life was from I think a couple years ago. Note, by the way, the comment in this mid-2023 thread reading: "I still have 0% of my refund for my Librem 5!!" Purism is absolutely shady as fuck. With 4500 mAh of charge and those booty cheeks specs, the Librem 5 should be running circles around modern smartphones in battery life, not hobbling behind them.

A higher resolution would consume more power, thus exacerbating your previous complaint.

And? My S23 Ultra has a 4K display and gets much better battery life (AMOLED helps a lot with that, but Purism uses a cheap piece of shit IPS display). It's not my fault that Purism is too incompetent to have at least a 1080p display and a decent battery life at the same time. It'd be like having a car that gets 1 km/L and goes 30 km/h, and then when someone says it should go faster the response is "well but then the fuel efficiency would be worse."

The Librem 5 uses removable WWAN and WLAN/BT modules, as well as a removable battery. Waterproofing would require a fully sealed system which would be much less user-serviceable.

I'm keenly aware. I am of course just pointing out that the Librem 5 lacks a major quality-of-life feature present on modern smartphones as a tradeoff for the modular design. What does concern me with that tradeoff however is that there's not even an IP rating (e.g. even my wireless earbuds have a published rating of IP54), and so I genuinely have zero idea using this thing how waterproof I should expect it to be. I would be paranoid to even take out my $800 smartphone in the rain because I don't know where the boundary is. This is one of the most baseline specs I expect to know about a smartphone, and yet instead of this, the specs page is spent touting: "Notification LED: Yes (RGB LED with PWM control per color)".

Rockchip, Allwinner, and NXP chips have the best mainline Linux support for any FOSS-focused Linux device. 3 GB is the memory limit for this CPU, which is often used in commercial/industrial/automotive environments.

I am aware that it's not just Purism saying "fuck it, use garbage". Computing power is probably the place where I have the most sympathy for Purism, since, like, what are they supposed to do? Push RISC-V two decades into the future and start their own fab? This complaint is taken from a more hollistic point.

1. They're charging $800 for this in 2025 when a $500 smartphone in 2014 could compete with it on performance.

2. These specs were announced in 2017 for $800 (maybe it was the A53 back then? Which wouldn't be much different in price), and yet eight years later they're still selling it for $800. Inflation tells me $800 in 2017 would be about $1000 today, so the price has deflated by about 20%, but that's not even close to acceptable nearly a decade later with the same specs. I'm looking at an LG V20 64 GB (removable battery and microSD card slot in all their glory) on eBay, and I'm seeing $40 from its original price of $700. When I see the same specs eight years later, I expect a price drop of 50–80%, not 20% (let alone that they randomly decided to jack up the price to $1300 in 2023 only to roll that back).

3. Purism did still decide to create this product and went into it understanding the paucity of options. For having a noble stated goal of creating a privacy-oriented smartphone, it nonetheless is very poor for daily driving. (I remember watching one of their demos years back of using Firefox on the phone, and it was scrolling at like 4 frames/sec. It was excruciating to watch.) If Purism were a non-profit trying to advance the market solely out of altruism, "I did the best I could" would carry a lot more weight for me. Of course they're not, though; they're a "social benefit corporation", or a for-profit company with the goals of a traditional non-profit (cooooool). They decided to launch this product, they did it for a profit motive, and they gathered over $1 million to do it, so "they did the best they could" only goes so far.

Purism also hires staff across the globe, and this abbreviation may differ within the author's country.

To my understanding, no. Rather, this is a naive mixing of 'M' – the usual abbreviation for for 'mega' – and 'px' – the usual abbreviation for 'pixels'. Which is a pathetic oversight for somebody trying to manufacture a smartphone.