Librem 5 smartphone (Q3 2019)
Posted: Thu Jun 27, 2019 4:39 pm
The moment is fast approaching that Purism (an SCP from California) will finally offer the world a genuinely Linux native smartphone, after 2 years of initial crowdfunding (a tiny $2m+ btw) and incessant hacking the core since then.
Just who is waiting for (or else eagerly anticipating) this product launch just remains to be seen IMO. The price point is not cheap at all at about $650 for a fairly rudimentary-specked phone.
2 or 3 years old tech albeit with an internal and SoM facelift qua features. Smartphones are however incredibly complex animals with accelorometers, gyrometers, magnetometers (and all 3x just determine pitch and angle and attitude or orientation alone).
Then you get into the ARM cpu, the gpu the radio, baseband, cellular, peripherals. No wonder Linux has always tried to piggy-back upon an existing Android installation, within a container environment. Android itself however adds up-to 3 million lines of out-of-tree code to the Linux kernel used (mostly years out-of-date).Plus up-to 8x fabless construction partner companies then use that code to eventually configure their own stuff to work with it (and almost none of that code is publicly inspected or vetted) and the product launch is thus determined by last to the party and the proverbial weakest link in the chain.
Plus how often does any Android phone ever get updated? If you are lucky maybe once or twice. Many attempts to go with Linux-ways-better here -like postmarketos or cyanogen or Jolla, Sailfish or Ubuntu Touch ... but nothing ever really viable.
Purism might well be different here. The enormous number of commits hitting Linux kernel 5.2(/3) this week alone indicate a very eminent release date. As does daily youtube teaser videos. Entire chipset (nxp) plus the etnav gpu, plus glemasco, plus radios, baseband all hitting the Linux-next mainline kernel branches. I am just very, very excited here. Just 5 seconds to boot a full Linux on a smartphone (one penguin btw shown for each second). OK Oreo boots in 15 secs and who powers down anyways (me maybe haha), pobably also easy to dual-boot it too, to adapt any Linux like Arch/Tumbleweed (or whatever, MX too). It will use Gnome libs and tools ootb, but kde plasma mobile should also work just as good semi-ootb. MX would surely work too - if say stuff like tpm, trousers, various gnome libs, various specialist pure libs, posh etc and quite a number of other gnome native libs added were ported ...plus it could be running an almost nightly build Linux-next style mainline kernel (version 5.2 or above) all pre-loaded - this almost sounds just too crazy good to me.
Anyone else already per-ordered this phone or maybe even looking to do an MX build cq spin on this phone? It is not cheap at all, quite clunky and big, and it is not bling either and the production run is very tiny and it's only raison-d 'etre is to give you Linux on a smartphone (with no added extras at all).
The rest is work in progress stuff. Privacy is being touted of course as a reason to buy, but that comes with going with the Linux way anyways.
Quite intriguing stuff though end-of-day, to not only be able to run Linux on a smartphone - with it 99% being piggy-backed on top of Android, but to actually run full Linux in all of it's intended glory and speed and it's utter power too. The price is very steep though here and the apps available very limited and even basic functions being available are almost a miracle to have, as this ecosphere is so incredibly hard and complex to code upon. Endless chains of partner companies all delivering just a a stepping-stone element to the entire final product. This one phone though does offer an all-in-one Linux solution, mostly anyways.
About 90% core functionality, limited app functionality, real kill switches and replaceable batteries etc. If you order online most specs are just "tbd "(like yet to be determined stuff) even now, but most of those ordering will not care one jot about either price or actual specs ...just that it will boot 100% Linux natively and that it can run Linux mainline kernels ootb and with no android to be seen. I'm very excited here myself and await delivery sometime soon, full specs still fairly unknown (will have 8gb ram, though all the dev-kits shipped with only 4gb). Very rare that I would ever think to buy something, with limited actual shipping specs included and without full and circa 99% research ...but this phone is just THAT important to some people (me too). Android is sort-of maybe Linux-based, but only with some millions of added codelines and a few more millions by contracted associates (who use closed source models only). Not quite the same thing.
Anyone else feeling this type of buzz of excitement of a semi-imminent release of an actual Linux smartphone so very soon? Yes, so very expensive to acquire and not top-end of the market qua components ...but sometimes freedom is not as free as it should be.
Just who is waiting for (or else eagerly anticipating) this product launch just remains to be seen IMO. The price point is not cheap at all at about $650 for a fairly rudimentary-specked phone.
2 or 3 years old tech albeit with an internal and SoM facelift qua features. Smartphones are however incredibly complex animals with accelorometers, gyrometers, magnetometers (and all 3x just determine pitch and angle and attitude or orientation alone).
Then you get into the ARM cpu, the gpu the radio, baseband, cellular, peripherals. No wonder Linux has always tried to piggy-back upon an existing Android installation, within a container environment. Android itself however adds up-to 3 million lines of out-of-tree code to the Linux kernel used (mostly years out-of-date).Plus up-to 8x fabless construction partner companies then use that code to eventually configure their own stuff to work with it (and almost none of that code is publicly inspected or vetted) and the product launch is thus determined by last to the party and the proverbial weakest link in the chain.
Plus how often does any Android phone ever get updated? If you are lucky maybe once or twice. Many attempts to go with Linux-ways-better here -like postmarketos or cyanogen or Jolla, Sailfish or Ubuntu Touch ... but nothing ever really viable.
Purism might well be different here. The enormous number of commits hitting Linux kernel 5.2(/3) this week alone indicate a very eminent release date. As does daily youtube teaser videos. Entire chipset (nxp) plus the etnav gpu, plus glemasco, plus radios, baseband all hitting the Linux-next mainline kernel branches. I am just very, very excited here. Just 5 seconds to boot a full Linux on a smartphone (one penguin btw shown for each second). OK Oreo boots in 15 secs and who powers down anyways (me maybe haha), pobably also easy to dual-boot it too, to adapt any Linux like Arch/Tumbleweed (or whatever, MX too). It will use Gnome libs and tools ootb, but kde plasma mobile should also work just as good semi-ootb. MX would surely work too - if say stuff like tpm, trousers, various gnome libs, various specialist pure libs, posh etc and quite a number of other gnome native libs added were ported ...plus it could be running an almost nightly build Linux-next style mainline kernel (version 5.2 or above) all pre-loaded - this almost sounds just too crazy good to me.
Anyone else already per-ordered this phone or maybe even looking to do an MX build cq spin on this phone? It is not cheap at all, quite clunky and big, and it is not bling either and the production run is very tiny and it's only raison-d 'etre is to give you Linux on a smartphone (with no added extras at all).
The rest is work in progress stuff. Privacy is being touted of course as a reason to buy, but that comes with going with the Linux way anyways.
Quite intriguing stuff though end-of-day, to not only be able to run Linux on a smartphone - with it 99% being piggy-backed on top of Android, but to actually run full Linux in all of it's intended glory and speed and it's utter power too. The price is very steep though here and the apps available very limited and even basic functions being available are almost a miracle to have, as this ecosphere is so incredibly hard and complex to code upon. Endless chains of partner companies all delivering just a a stepping-stone element to the entire final product. This one phone though does offer an all-in-one Linux solution, mostly anyways.
About 90% core functionality, limited app functionality, real kill switches and replaceable batteries etc. If you order online most specs are just "tbd "(like yet to be determined stuff) even now, but most of those ordering will not care one jot about either price or actual specs ...just that it will boot 100% Linux natively and that it can run Linux mainline kernels ootb and with no android to be seen. I'm very excited here myself and await delivery sometime soon, full specs still fairly unknown (will have 8gb ram, though all the dev-kits shipped with only 4gb). Very rare that I would ever think to buy something, with limited actual shipping specs included and without full and circa 99% research ...but this phone is just THAT important to some people (me too). Android is sort-of maybe Linux-based, but only with some millions of added codelines and a few more millions by contracted associates (who use closed source models only). Not quite the same thing.
Anyone else feeling this type of buzz of excitement of a semi-imminent release of an actual Linux smartphone so very soon? Yes, so very expensive to acquire and not top-end of the market qua components ...but sometimes freedom is not as free as it should be.
