[Hackbraten]

> Kudos for using Linux, but that alone (and the hardware gimmicks) is really not enough to justify the cost.

Much of that cost went into Linux driver/app/phosh development. It made libhandy happen, which become libadwaita. Future Linux-based mobile OSes will be able to stand on the shoulders of all that.

So it’s really more of a donation, plus I got a Linux phone on top of that.

Besides, if I’m lucky and the hardware and battery last long enough, I’ll be using the Librem 5 as a daily driver for a decade, which would help amortize the cost even more. During those years, I won’t have to worry much about software obsolescence. All the drivers have been mainlined into Linux so I’ll always get to use the latest kernel version – even if something happened to Purism.

[chriswarbo]

I could have written this same comment in 2008 about my OpenMoko. It certainly did some useful low-level work (especially when Maemo/Meego/etc. increased the importance of standardisation), but its biggest own-goal was repeatedly throwing away the user-facing stuff (jumping from GTK, to EFL; when QtMobile/Qtopia was actually the most usable!).

Still, that did last me a decade; although I replaced it with a PinePhone rather than a Librem ;)