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by fghtr 2690 days ago
>You do realize that phone is only available for preorder?

Yes, it is only for preorder, but the devkit already exists [0].

> They may not even be around in 3 or 5 years.

If they manage to make the final version of the phone (which is quite likely), it won't matter anymore, since the OS is just GNU/Linux. Correspondingly, the updates do not so much depend on the phone manufacturers.

[0] https://puri.sm/posts/how-we-designed-the-librem-5-dev-kit-w...
1 comments
SketchySeaBeast 2690 days ago
So how does that solve a problem lineage os doesn't?

You're buying into a phone that should get continued support for years to come, assuming the company survives, and they don't end up finding the maintenance burnden utterly untenable (once they on model version 3, I can't see it being the easiest thing to support the older models - Apple does, but Apples huge). It seems to be relatively underpowered (though that's really up to how many resources the system uses), and I can't imagine will age well. There will be little to no mainstream app support (they seem to be touting "just run it in a browser" as a solution to that - I thought we left those dark ages).

It seems like a neat, niche product, like a raspberry pi phone, but it doesn't give me a lot of hope for the future.

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fghtr 2690 days ago
> So how does that solve a problem lineage os doesn't?

LineageOS depends on the proprietary drivers and/or undocumented devices, which will never get any updates. If there is a security bug in your WiFi driver, game over. This phone is being designed to work with free software, anyone could do updates.

>assuming the company survives, and

Again, free software gives us the freedom to do updates ourselves (or pay to someone to get them). GNU/Linux supports most of the old computers quite well.

>There will be little to no mainstream app support

"We will test the capabilities of powering Anbox or Shashlik to allow users the ability to run Android applications within PureOS on the Librem 5", https://puri.sm/faq/

>It seems to be relatively underpowered

True, but one has to start somewhere. Personally, I think this phone brings a lot of hope for the future.

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