I was able to get a hold of a relatives old nexus 5 and was able to get ubuntu touch running on it more updates to come.
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Nice
They seem to be silent right now.
They regularly post production updates on their blog, including a post yesterday regarding the latest batch.
Unsure how is the production going through with their ānon-betaā hardware.
Dogwood (current batch) is effectively the last beta, and saw some hardware updates to make the device more refined. The next batch (Evergreen) begins following the LTS software track that final release will use.
Shipping estimates were bumped back due to production distruptions because of COVID-19, but thatās not unique to the Librem.
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@regulareel Purism is still developing both GNOME Software for touchscreen and the GNOME Shell fork Phosh UI. Itās going along, but being open source, you can use that on any device that runs Linux, including the PinePhone.
@imhigh.today True about the postponing, but Purism had issues with delays before without any crisis going on, but Iām not and havenāt been affect by this personally.
Overall, Iām still holding my position that having no phone to carry is better than having one, but Iām a āāāradicalā"" (I guess thatās what you call people who donāt want to carry something to be contacted on 24/7)
I would caution against buying a Librem device at this point. Iāve given them money 20 months ago, was placed in the final delivery ābatchā after about a year, and now that I no longer believe that they will ship anything they are refusing to refund any money.
Meanwhile this tiny company is doing things that no one asked for, like an app store and some cloud offering.
Donāt drink the Kool-Aid, stay away from this company until they deliver to their existing customers.
PS. Friend bought a laptop from them that turned out to be defective. They are refusing to fix it.
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I have a red flag on Librum, preimarily down to the type of securityā¦ i mean, marketing, that theyāve been doing. I posted about my concerns in another thread, i can link here if people are interested.
The big issue with these phones is being realistic, what you do want from it, becuase you simply wont get the same experance and you have to be able to compromise, or pay $1500 for a phone of comparable quality to mainline phones. (which no one will)
Has anyone had any experience with CalyxOS Iāve been thinking of giving it a go
I do not have any experience with CalyxOS, but since it seems to run on the Pixel series almost exclusively you could also have a look at: https://grapheneos.org/ which is focused on security.
Graphene is what led me to find Calyx techlore did some interesting videos about each. I think I may pick up a pixel and give them both a go. My Note9 screen is being a little off and I would like to move away from Samsungās version of Android.
Thereās a privacy-oriented youtube channel who reviewed it (Techlore), Calyx seems to be more like a middle ground between Graphene and Lineage. You could search this channel for both Calyx and Graphene review. But I still recommend people try to live without phones and if they really need some platform in their lives (like for mobile banking) keep your phone at home, pretend it is a landline, foss or not.
Young people cannot live like this. 
I am quite old and for me it is normal to function without a phone or a smart spy. I still use ericsson g502 every day and it is enough for emergency situations. I never liked to talk for a long time or send text messages because big brother is watching.
For other needs, I have PC / Lap, despite the fact that Meizu M6t and Tab are collecting dust.
If there was a decent new G502 phone on the market only with linux and matched to the realities of 2020, I would rather buy something like this than any smart one.
Iām pretty young and I live like this, I doubt others canāt. They just havenāt tried and are too afraid too, because thatās what they grew up with and gotten accustomed to.
Unfortunately while having a smartphone might not be a necessity for some it has become a big part of our society and for some it might be as much or more of a necessity then a desktop or laptop computer. I find it amazing that cellphone companyās have gotten away with the amount of control that they have of the software and how locked down the hardware is. I think that it would be really cool if there was an operating system that you could install on smartphone hardware that could compete with the apple and googles offerings. Unfortunately implementing something like this presents a lot of problems current software is lacking in development and a cohesive user experience. Beyond the software however, a much greater problem is the hardware. While the software can be fixed with more refinement and development the hardware comparability issues are not so easily fixed. Many manufactures lock down the hardware or use largely different hardware depending on the manufacturer. For example, If you try to install a new OS on your iPhone your going to have a bad day. I think that the only way that we can ever see open source on the phone become a reality is for people to value it more then the convenience that companyās like apple are producing and pressure them to open up there hardware. Unfortunately, I donāt see that happening anytime soon, which is really a shame because Linux and open source projects on the phone have some really cool things that it can offer and a large community that would be likely to support it unfortunately the hardware platforms largely do not.
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A lot of stuff goes into a phone to be made and when space is at a premium, you pay a bigger price. I think it would be very easy to build a DIY phone platform around ācommodity hardwareā like the Rock64 or the readily available Pi. The software is there, we already have Plasma Mobile and Phosh, not to mention Lomiri (Ubportsā Unity 8), for normies it should be fine. The Linux side of things and the drivers are also there (for the most part). But people would be very inconvenienced by chunkiness and clunkyness (especially if you have weird cables dangling around your phone that looks like an improvised radio for an IED rather than a phone).
Canonical tried addressing this by making the original Ubuntu Touch (not the first crowdfunded Ubuntu phone), which was supposed to use Androidās kernel or something. If a company like them couldnāt make it, I think it would be much harder for people to make a good OS to just install on other phones. Jolla seemed to have achieved it to a greater extent than Canonical with Sailfish OS and their proprietary GUI. Enthusiasts managed to do port it for a few Xperia phones, the old Nexus 4, the Fairphone 2 and some other things like Motos .
The first problem, like you mentioned is adoption. People donāt care about having control over their hardware and software (like, people actually leave auto-updates enabled and actually enjoy it, if they donāt care about basic stuff like versioning of their favorite programs, then they definitely donāt care about more āesotericā things like what OS and hardware they are using).
PinePhone seems to be a really impressive piece of hardware with a lot of support from FOSS enthusiasts, but the availability seems to be the problem (and when dealing with such a low scale and basically 0 profit margins, you wonāt get really far).
I donāt think there will be any shifting from the current Google or Apple or Y (whatever) offerings in the next 5 to 10 years. A paradigm shift isnāt easy to come by. We currently only see enthusiasts who seek FOSS alternatives on phones. TBCH Calyx and Graphene have the biggest chance of becoming relevant on phones, because they are based on AOSP. Linux? Not so much, outside a few number of people who arenāt necessarily concerned with privacy, but rather with using Linux and its environments on phones.
I am very pessimistic about phones (aside from the fact that I donāt want to have to carry one anymore, not even for āāānecessityā""). Iām not saying I donāt wish for a Linux boon to happen on the phone space, but I think people arenāt ready, nor willing to accept a huge change in their life with little to no immediate perceivable benefits. People moved from feature phones to smart phones because the later added some value to the table (doing more than just calls and alarm clocks), even at the detriment of battery life (which still plagues current smart phones today). But people wonāt move from proprietary software to FOSS just because itās FOSS. People need to discover a better utility from FOSS. In my case, why I moved to Linux was itās speed and stability at first and only later I found more benefits like customizability and simpler design.
To see a migration to FOS phones, you need the FOSS versions to give people a good reason to move. Maybe Iām wrong and people will start āāāwaking upā"" and decentralizing their communication and throwing centralized control over their property in a fire pit, which would be a great reason to use FOSS. But I doubt people know about, not to mention caring about such things, so you need to go further, like maybe offering better battery life, or faster speed or working as an assistant or something that people may find desirable. I donāt know the answer. If I did, I would have probably been working on it to profit from it. But again, I want to see a movement away from carrying personal tracking devices in our pockets by our own volition (and there are other ways to track aside from GPS and cellular connections).
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Iām more and more at a loss on which phone to get. My Huawei P10 liteās battery is quite bad at this point and while I donāt leave the house nearly as often anymore, internet on the go is a necessary nowadays. I donāt particularly care that it should be FOSS, but anything else seems more and more like a designed expiry date.
Iām quite annoyed by my current phone. Battery is not designed to be replaced. Canāt unlock the bootloader anymore (I tried to get it before they shut it down, but they made it impossible to complete the request). Iām stuck in Android 8 because they donāt want to update it to force people to buy a new one instead. After an update, the app search/quick launch UI now requires me to accept an updated TOS to use, because they want to be allowed to harvest that data, so I canāt use it anymore (without accepting). Etc.
Will it be any better if I get any other well known phone? Doesnāt seem like it. If it was more open, then they canāt force you to share your data and decide when you need a new phone. Google probably donāt want you to have more privacy options, which I believe is the reason for the awful state in Android in that regard.
We desperately needs an alternative, but without full combability with Android or iOS it is certainly not going to work out. How does the current alternative OSāes handle that?
Ya I would agree that people are not likely to adopt a new thing unless there is a clear benefit to it and minimal downsides. Maybe the way to do it is to start with the basics first and build up from there. It would take time and someone with a vision for it to work, but something basic that maybe could provide a foundation for future expansion might be what is needed. I might not even be Linux. As brilliant a Linux is it was never designed for mobile phone computing and much of the work that has gone into it has been focused on workstations and the data center. Maybe there needs to be a new mobile opensource kernel. Furthermore, with the way that desktop computing seems to be going the merging between desktop and mobile seems to be inevitable. Iām not a software engineer so I am not sure how you would even begin to do something like this or if this is even a good idea itās just a thought.
The short answer for you would be, funnily enough, to look at Google Pixels, which are more open to modification and try out either Graphene OS on it, itās a security and privacy focused Android, completely de-google-ified to the point that some programs may not even work correctly (those that require Play Services), or Calyx OS, which is trying to do something similar, but they have a replacement for Play Services (MicroG, which works on other Android projects as well). Both use F-Droid and through F-Droid, if you want normie programs, you can install Aurora Store, which gives you access to proprietary software apks. If those 2 OS exist, people donāt have a lot of incentive to make alternatives.
The alternatives like Sailfish OS and whatever other Linux variants for mobile (like PostMarket OS, or PureOS) work ok as replacements if you donāt have a necessity for random X program that can only be found on Android / iOS. You can technically use Anbox to run Android software on phones like the Librem 5 and PinePhone, but I think it may also be limited to programs that donāt require Play Services.
Battery life is a little worse, like @ifc2000 correctly pointed out, Linux was not designed with portability in mind, although optimizations have been made in the kernel to some degree (mostly because of laptops).
One thing Iāve been thinking was to try a version of AOSP that supports MicroG on a *Pi (probably a Raspberry) and remote into it through my VPN whenever I need something like my banking application, completely removing the phone side (and using a trusty ethernet cable). The other alternative is to try to strip a phone from its battery (I had a phone plugged 24/7 for a year, that I used as an IP Camera and its battery turned into a pillow), see if it powers on, if not, try to make a 3.3v PSU and wire it to the battery pins on the phone, then use ADB and scrcpy to remote into it. The last alternative would be a VM with Android x86, but not sure if all programs work correctly (maybe emulate aarch64 through QEMU and try to find a version of Android for ARM that will boot like a desktop).
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So its not really open source. It just runs on blobs and shims. I hope you know the distinction
At that point running lineage makes more sense to me but Im glad you got it running
excellent suggestion however the OS isnt updated all that much. The developer has had trouble
You can always buy a google pixel phone, unlock the bootloader, fastboot boot TWRP, and flash the latest LineageOS with Magisk. I then use Magisk to install Bromite system webview systemlessly (an open source, de-googled webview implementation), systemlessly install the open source microG project with open source location backends and address lookup.
I also use Bromite chromium browser in place of chrome, adaway adblocker with systemless hosts module, and osmand maps navigation app in place of google maps. Youtube vanced works great with this setup as well.
The firmware may not be open source, but google bundles firmware updates with each OS release for their phones, minimizing the attack vector. Couple all of this with file-based encryption and itās pretty darn secure, minus the bootloader being unlocked (hopefully future phones allow unsigned kernels to be installed with the bootloader locked, one can dream) And Snapdragon is a company on US soil, so thereās that as well. No chinese proprietary firmware involved.
Lol I see others have recommended pixel phones as well, but this is my reasoning for using them
I was considering a Google Pixel phone, only to find out they only sell them if a few countries. Sometimes they pop up in random webshops, but 800 USD is way to much for a phone with a non-replaceable battery and no SD card slot.
When you are not on US soil, China and NSA are equally sketchyā¦
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