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Thanks for writing all that! Of course I knew that the Librem5 existed, but at the time I was thrown off by the price and the smell of "impending shitstorm" th

by fooqux 1mo ago

Thanks for writing all that! Of course I knew that the Librem5 existed, but at the time I was thrown off by the price and the smell of "impending shitstorm" the device reeked of. Afterwards, I was too deep into the Pine side of things to pay attention to what was going on over at the Librem side. It's sad that these two devices have derailed open phones so much. Obviously there's a ton of things to figure out, radio chief among them. But I fear that the corporations have learned from what happened during the "PC compatible" era of computing and openness will be a thing of the past. I hope I'm wrong about that.

handedness 1mo ago
> It's sad that these two devices have derailed open phones so much. Agreed. Those two have made such a mess of things that I think if something interesting does sprout up, it'll come from somewhere else. I think one issue is that the hard-liners who are willing to make the compromises necessary to daily drive one of these things as an actual phone aren't interested in any solution unless it's fully open, and certified as such. Which I get, but desktop Linux more or less evolved on hardware containing significant proprietary blobs and closed code, and at many levels. It wasn't perfect, but the OS had room to mature on genuinely good and useful hardware. Instead, these two companies are trying to push molasses up a sandy hill. Virtuous though it may be, it seems kind of doomed to failure, and this doesn't feel like one of those situations where the glory is in the trying. Eschewing genuinely excellent hardware because it's imperfect, all while running a hot mess of an operating system, also strikes me as a losing strategy. Give me a modern SoC with modern radios, strong contemporary security features, all running a well-supported distro, and I'd be there in a heartbeat, despite whatever misgivings I held about the non-FSF-approved nature of the hardware, because that's exactly my current desktop, laptop, and server computing situation (modern security features aside). If I saw a viable open phone hardware project happening I would be happy to support it, but for some people there's a real "you are either with us, or against us" mentality about it, and if someone's going to make me choose... > I fear that the corporations have learned from what happened during the "PC compatible" era of computing and openness will be a thing of the past. We both hope you're wrong, but some things certainly seem to be trending that way, and quickly.

by fooqux 1mo ago

handedness 1mo ago

> It's sad that these two devices have derailed open phones so much. Agreed. Those two have made such a mess of things that I think if something interesting does sprout up, it'll come from somewhere else. I think one issue is that the hard-liners who are willing to make the compromises necessary to daily drive one of these things as an actual phone aren't interested in any solution unless it's fully open, and certified as such. Which I get, but desktop Linux more or less evolved on hardware containing significant proprietary blobs and closed code, and at many levels. It wasn't perfect, but the OS had room to mature on genuinely good and useful hardware. Instead, these two companies are trying to push molasses up a sandy hill. Virtuous though it may be, it seems kind of doomed to failure, and this doesn't feel like one of those situations where the glory is in the trying. Eschewing genuinely excellent hardware because it's imperfect, all while running a hot mess of an operating system, also strikes me as a losing strategy. Give me a modern SoC with modern radios, strong contemporary security features, all running a well-supported distro, and I'd be there in a heartbeat, despite whatever misgivings I held about the non-FSF-approved nature of the hardware, because that's exactly my current desktop, laptop, and server computing situation (modern security features aside). If I saw a viable open phone hardware project happening I would be happy to support it, but for some people there's a real "you are either with us, or against us" mentality about it, and if someone's going to make me choose... > I fear that the corporations have learned from what happened during the "PC compatible" era of computing and openness will be a thing of the past. We both hope you're wrong, but some things certainly seem to be trending that way, and quickly.