[camjohnson26]

If you want good software you simply have to pay more. These are small teams with no prior experience trying to do something huge, it makes sense to expect to pay even 5 times more if the direction of the project is good. Hopefully future versions will be cheaper as they learn and gain experience.

[ThreeFx]

That was my motivation as well when I prepurchased the phone. Even though you might not get a $600 phone, Purism and the entire Linux community gain a lot of experience about the difficulties of designing hand-held hardware, applications and operating systems.

In my opinion their progress has been fantastic, and I am quite excited for the future of Linux smartphones.

[TylerE]

It isn't close to a $600 phone. The $180 Nokia 4.1 has near identical specs....except it has an 8 core, 2ghz CPU and not a 4 core, 1.5ghz cpu

You can actually get under $100 if you compromise the specs just a little.

[sverige]

How much does it cost to keep everyone who wants to from gathering your personal data from that $100 phone, though?

[joenathanone]

Free if you know how to use ADB and Fastboot.

[voltagex_]

So I checked, and there are no "official" current LineageOS builds for any Nokia phones (unless I'm missing something on https://download.lineageos.org)

There don't seem to be any builds anywhere for the 4.1 (is it an uncommon phone?)

For argument's sake, let's say you bought the 6.1, now your option is to download an "unofficial" ROM from some pseudo-anonymous person with an anime avatar from XDA, hosted on whatever free file hosting they can find today.

Don't get me wrong, I used Lineage when it was called Cyanogenmod, and it saved one phone from landfill which is great. But I'm older now, and I need my phone to work and work well - I really don't have time for problems like https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?s=76595163ac85.... For some people, that's worth the money.

Edit: here's all the proprietary blobs that'd need to be reversed to be audited to make sure they're not selling you out, too - https://github.com/nokia-dev/proprietary_vendor_nokia/tree/a.... Props to HMD for publishing them, though.

[bscphil]

Similarly, I've pretty much given up on LineageOS ever getting the Nexus 5X to the 16.0 version. Their list of supported phones looks decent, but when you realize they can't keep even those phones up to date the project starts to look like a failure.

I'm hoping to find an alternative for friends and family who still have the 5X - it's been dropped from Google's security updates for a while, because their support ends abysmally quickly.

[willtim]

My time is not free

[wayneftw]

Yes, who complain that the software might not be that great, but who also want freedom, your option would be to buy without expectations as a way of donating to the project or to simply donate money directly to the project.

That's the great thing about open source! People form groups and spend their own time/resources to build what they want instead of waiting around for the corporate big brother to build it.

[TylerE]

Purism is a for-profit corporation.

You aren't donating - any more than you're "donating" to Comcast when you pay your cable bill.

[burk96]

You're correct, it's not a donation. However Purism right now is important in a way Comcast is not. Their work on the software side is making the GNU/Linux phone a reality and it will help both vendors and makers a like in the future. Supporting the company is indirectly supporting the GNU/Linux phone ecosystem and may be one of the best things to throw your money at right now to push development forward.

On the Comcast side, they can get fucked. My whole city pays them a crazy high fee for internet and more a month with very little improvements being made in infrastructure. Sure they now a have a remote with voice commands, but I and most people I know are almost never near the advertised speeds. At least the latency is good.

[nickpsecurity]

Not quite. They are a social-purpose corporation incentivized to use their profit for public benefit. Which they are doing.

https://puri.sm/about/social-purpose/

[jammygit]

Purism is a social good corporation. It changes things a bit, but I’m unclear how

[giaour]

B corps are allowed to prioritize specific values enumerated in their corporate charter, even at the expense financial gains. Regular corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, which in recent decades has been interpreted as requiring companies to maximize short-term shareholder value

[cannonedhamster]

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fiduciary-responsibi...

There is no fiduciary requirement to put profits above all else. In fact there is no fiduciary duty to make profits, just basically to do what's best for the company. There is no short term time frame listed. If there is a requirement to make profits it's not because it's a responsibility. Shareholders may want it but no one gets punished if a bad decision for the long term success of the company doesn't pan out. There's numberous examples of CEOs that attempted to pivot when it wasn't the most profitable course of events and then receiving a nice severance more than most employees make in a lifetime of work for failing.

[checkyoursudo]

It's almost as if the more and more you compensate your c-suite execs with your own shares, the more you would expect to see them chasing short-term profits regardless of the degradation of firm longevity...

[RandomBacon]

Does Comcast support the Linux and "privacy" ecosystems?

[ImprovedSilence]

Donation, no. But it’s a vote. You’re paying to vote for the type of “freedom” many of us here want to see.

[TylerE]

You're making the rather giant assumption that the software is good - where good means something besides "open".