Checkout @TheLinuxGamer’s impressions (far from an extensive review however) on the “final” hardware of the Librem 5 - it’s nice to have a video instead of a Purism forum post to read. Unsure if this is his own unit due from backing or if Purism sent him the device (he mentions it’s a review device im the video so I assume the latter?) but nice to see either way.
This is seriously not me being a jerk. I have been following this project for years. At this point can you actually just buy a phone from them or do you buy one and get stuck on some wait list for an unknown period of time? From the video shared a few things are sort of shocking out of the box for a consumer release. first of all no account creation on login or at a minimum a prompt to change your password on login seems not great. Sure you can just change your password but having 1-6 be the default password that doesn’t get updated on login is so easy to fix I am surprised it’s still like this. Next that keyboard is definitely overly cramped and seems very difficult to use. To me that is a bit of a deal breaker for a phone now a days because typing is so essential. 1300 for a phone that is essentially beta and a project phone still seems unobtainable for most people. Again I don’t want to hate on this as I really want it to work but there is so much working against it at the moment in my estimation.
@drascus
If you want to get it semi-quickly, you buy USA edition. I preordered Standard edition in 2019, got it this May. Software state is “fun to tinker with, but if you give this to a normie they will probably kill themselves in a matter of minutes.”
There also still is some software essential to my workflow that doesn’t fit on the phone screen, so I needed a dock to set it up with external display, mouse and keyboard.RN it’s a toy and a devkit, not an end-user product.
@AxaoeMany people expect it to be a privacy oriented daily driver phone, and consequently end up getting very disappointed. The marketing doesn’t help either, because Purism is not pitching it as a tinker phone.
@Hamartiogonic
I don’t know who expexts it to be daily driver. You only need to spend like 15 minutes lurking, which seems reasons for a $1k purchase.
Purism markets it as the phone they aim for it to be, not the phone it is right now. Which is misleading, but in several years I hope it won’t be anymore.
To be fair, I daily drive it. It just isn’t my main device, I have an /e/os FP4 doing the heavy lifting an L5 doing /some/ stuff. And I charge L5 3 times as often as FP. But it’s getting better.It’s true that most buyers probably know what they’re getting into, but back in the good old days of Reddit I saw there quite a few dissatisfied comments too. Those customers obviously didn’t realize the product was far from finished.
You’re absolutely right that lurking just a little while will give a better idea of the current state of development, but some people decided to skip stage entirely. They just went with the marketing, imagined they would get a finished product, and ended up with something more geared toward developers and tinkerers rather than normal consumers. That is very unfortunate for Purism, because these comments aren’t doing them any favors.
@Hamartiogonic
Well, I don’t want to sound like I’m victim-blaming, but I find it essential to research anything more significant than a pencil before purchase, not just premium (price-wise) phones.
In an ideal world you could trust marketing, but we don’t live in that world, so even soviet monopoly marketing that didn’t need to lie (or exist, because monopoly) did oversell it’s products.
So I try to promote the idea of “lurk before you buy” any chance I get.
