from Hacker News

Librem 5 general development report – October

by ProfDreamer on 10/17/18, 11:56 AM with 42 comments

• by newnewpdro on 10/17/18, 5:27 PM

  The decision to develop the first GNOME phone while also developing a hacker-friendly privacy-respecting physical device is going to be the death of this project.

  I don't understand why they didn't just focus on the hardware, make it very hackable for the community to develop the GNOME (or any other) OS for it.

  Isolate the baseband from the application processor and all the other privacy-respecting hardware decisions, land all the changes required for a mainline kernel to support everything upstream, and release it with AOSP running on it.

  Then invest in the community to replace AOSP (and sell more of your hardware to said community as it grows).

• by gehsty on 10/17/18, 1:17 PM

  I really worry about the sustainability of this company? Is it a sustainable business model? How secure will your phone be if they can't afford to pay developers or go under? Who do I contact if there is a hardware issue? So many questions.

  Also why do they have 'Buy now' links that take you to their kickstarter page, where you can 'pre-order' a phone that may or may not ship in Q3 2019? Seems a little shady. Also price jump of $800 for a compatible 24"monitor and a keyboard + mouse is insane...

  Does anyone think this has any market appeal outside of its kickstarter audience?

• by nsomaru on 10/17/18, 12:47 PM

  The last news I read on this, the Librem 5 was slated to launch in April of 2019. Is this still the case? Is it usual for an ambitious project like this to be doing this sort of development (i.e. core dev, not polish) within 6 months of release?

  I'm really looking forward to this phone and will almost certainly move over if there is are decent mail, Whatsapp and Signal clients. Despite the cost and early adopter pains I'm likely to face :)

• by shmerl on 10/17/18, 6:36 PM

  They should have used Plasma Mobile and Qt. Not Gnome/GTK.