Purism is having another go at trying to create a phone with private and secure software.
However I am sceptical about them reaching the funding goal. Canonical tried this with Ubuntu Edge and failed. So I call you people here and ask you if you can throw some money at the screen. I will be donating $100.
EDIT: I ended up ordering the whole phone for 599$ If they fail to reach the goal they will not charge our debit cards.
https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
Interview with Lunduke
Ah, this should be fun. I’m skeptical about the project overall, including their hardware choice. However, I do hope they succeed, and I’ll be donating to them in hopes it helps. I don’t really think it’s a device I’d ever buy for myself, I’m rather interested in what’s going on with UBPorts, but I think it’s great to see them pushing this for those that really want it. 
Definitely something I’ve been keeping my eye on.
This is pretty much my only issue (the other one being there heavily restrictive target audience they seemed to have marketed for).
I recon they can do it, and make a decent phone. Software im not to bothered about as that evolved over time and would only improved.
Hardware though. I worry this fund raising is to early considering it seems the only peice of hardware they have agreed on is the CPU.
Literally every other piece of hardware is subject to change/availability/anything else you can think of. They haven’t guaranteed any minimum specifications except very general terms for ram, storage, and “Bluetooth 4” whatever that means.
It worries me that they don’t seem to have any idea of what hardware they will use yet somehow managed to come up with a monetary number for how much they need.
If it was further along in the project, id probably say go for it. But as it stands… As much as i think they could make a phone, I wouldn’t back it in the way they have presented it.
I looked at the whole thing but they lost my interest at the part where they are going to pursue using the i.MX 6 and try to see if they can use i.MX 8.
Hardware is not important, after all it’s a mobile phone not a server. What is important is that it runs free software and has kill-switch for microphone and camera which is something I always wanted. No other phone that i know of has this.
I agree with Grim_Reaper that the hardware is not so important (beside that they are willing to putt physical kill switches on the side).
Unfortunately I cant afford one right now (student with plans to kill skynet) but this is so important for me so I’m probably going to donate some money to the campaign. 
What a massive waste of time. Android is a fine system. All we need is an alternative to gapps and an easy way to distribute security updates.
I’d be more worried about how they over promise and under deliver. Remember with the notebooks all of the changes that happened? How about how they claimed they were going to use libreboot instead of coreboot and not use binary blobs(which didn’t happen). The early models didn’t even use coreboot from memory. Libreboot actually recommends you avoid purism in their faq.
I’d like to see purism do well but after they lied like crazy on the first system I don’t have much faith in them.
I’m excited to see it happen. But it has to happen first 
We already have alternative to gapps mostly. Google translate is the only exception i think. Android is only fine system when it’s rooted and stripped down from all the bloat. However pre-installed Android is crap. You lose updates after 2 years and you have no control over it. Furthermore it’s pain in the ass to install custom ROMS on many phones. I will be the last person to buy a new phone every 2 years only for a new software. I need something that will update continuously like Windows or Linux.
Interesting they say it should be able to run windows, but have not tested it. But the CPU is ARM based and one windows almost certainly will not have encountered or had to run on before.
I wonder what makes them so confident in that idea.
What does it matter? Nobody will want to use windows on it anyway.
I get that. But have they made some wonder thing that can trick windows to run on arm CPUs. If so that is a whole other thing that is very interesting to a lot of people.
Either they know something else no one, even microsoft, does. Or it it lies. Either way it takes away from their other claims.
It will happen with the help of your moneyz.
Oh boy! A thing I don’t have!
They’re getting there. $981,589 as of this post. 19 days to go. I’m going to be throwing my money at them after my next paycheck, so they’ve got another $1400 from me. I do hope they do finish this. I wanna get off of android more and more every week.
My phone has started turning on my GPS randomly for about 5 seconds and then turning it off automatically. Scary shit.
1400 is a lot. You could have got an Iphone X for that much. 
At the moment they are few % behind. I really do hope they make it in time. We need to break out of the 3 walled gardens and this is our chance.
600 gets you the phone. 1400 is the phone + a 24" monitor, keyboard and mouse. So you can use the phone as a PC basically.
That’s the thing. We really need to get out. I’ve been wanting to run Linux on my phone for a long time and have been eagerly awaiting UBPorts to get a usable release on the OP3, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.\
I’m all in on this one. I’m cautiously optimistic about it’s chances and I’m willing to risk burning a bit of money to give it a chance and I do understand that not everyone who wants to is in the position to do so, so it’s more of a reason for me to do so.
In fairness LineageOS already allows you to break out of Google’s walled garden.
Android at its core is good, it’s all the Google spyware … ermm … apps that turn it into a surveillance agency’s wet dream. Get rid of those and it’s a different experience really.
That being said, I’m tempted to back the Librem too.