Where is librem 5?

Keneda

It was in the list and now it is not anymore?
Something went wrong with purism?

domubpkm

@Keneda Maybe in the Deleted Items Recycle Bin... ??? ! strange indeed.

arubislander

I guess no one is working on it, so rather than leave it in to languish and lag behind the rest the choice was made to remove it.
Last I heard none of the devices promised to the devs by Purism ever materialized. And with the totally outlandish price point (in my opinion) purchasing one just to port would seem out of the question.

Keneda

Very sad story, can't understand purism behavior...

arubislander

In hindsight it would have been better if Purism had partnered with a hardware company like Pine64 to make the phone. There are people who said so early on.
They did good concerning the software, it's open source and upstreamed for the most part. That is why we can see Phosh coming to the PinePhone too. I think the PinePhone will contribute more to the popularity of Phosh than the Librem5

trainailleur

It also would have helped if they had been honest about timelines from the beginning, instead of waiting until the last minute to mention delays, and to have been honest about problems and failures instead of blatantly lying about having met deadlines, shipped devices, etc. Their founder/CEO seems to have bitten off more than the company could chew but also seems unwilling to admit to that or to any of the consequences.

I pledged to the Librem 5 not expecting Purism to succeed but thinking it a worthy cause, and I had intended to leave my money with them come thick or thin. In the end however, the endless deception and spin coming from their leadership so turned me off that I requested and received a refund, back when they were still giving them.

That I and so many others did that can't have helped with their problems (and is likely the reason they no longer offer refunds), but they could have avoided it by being open and honest instead of ceaselessly patting themselves on the back for things they claimed to have achieved but had not and trumpeting about their own transparency when they were being anything but transparent.

Though it's probably not a direction I want to go myself, Phosh seems like pretty good work for such a short timeline, and I too believe they should have partnered with hardware vendors with mobile and ARM experience, and that more people will end up running it on the PinePhone, even if Purism doesn't go bust.

MV

Really sad to read these things. I joined the Librem5 crowfunding only because seemed there was an agreement with UBports. I'm using an Aquaris E5 HD that works fine but with a 'old and slow hardware'. I was really excited from the Librem5 idea. I should receive my phone for the end of this summer (I hope). Reading your messages seems me to understand that I'll not see UBTouch on it

trainailleur

@MV said in Where is librem 5?:

Really sad to read these things. I joined the Librem5 crowfunding only because seemed there was an agreement with UBports. I'm using an Aquaris E5 HD that works fine but with a 'old and slow hardware'. I was really excited from the Librem5 idea. I should receive my phone for the end of this summer (I hope). Reading your messages seems me to understand that I'll not see UBTouch on it

Purism claim that once they start shipping final devices they will again enable refunds for pre-orders. I cross my fingers on behalf of people who still have their money locked up with Purism and hope this comes true. Maybe Purism will ship a good device in the end, but if not, it would at least be good if those who supported them from the beginning could get their money back out.

Fla

@MV Librem will be a Linux phone, so you should be able to install UBPorts on it, helped with the work done on the PinePhone. If not yet, it will come one day for sure.

ThePossessor

Just in case you guys missed it here , there is an interesting article that @3T_Ed pointed me to.

The article is quite long and not everything may be of interest, possibly also some facts might not be 100% reliable, but the article gives a good overview of what all went wrong. Judge for yourself.

Thanks again @3T_Ed .

david.boddie

I thought that at least one Birch or Chestnut model of the Librem 5 had made it to a UBports developer since this blog post. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Fla

@david-boddie it has reached them but as the pinephone was ready sooner, it is the one with the focus right now. As both device are running a real linux kernel, work on the pinephone (for example wayland) should greatly help the librem.

arubislander

@ThePossessor That is an insightful article by someone who clearly is a fan of Phosh. And why shouldn't they be! But the article does have some unintended misrepresentation on the activity on the UBports GitHub account that I don't want to leave unchallenged.
Ubuntu Touch and Lomiri (formerly Unity8) consist of dozens of repositories spread out under the ubports github account. The author only looked at the 'main' repository which consists only of several markdown files with documentation. Of course there wasn't going to be much activity on that one.

And yes, the core team is small, but there have been many code contributions to the project by members of the community. So much so that there were more contributions than could fit in OTA-13!

ThePossessor

@arubislander Thanks for clarifying things about this. Actually the main interest I saw in the article was to have some insight to many misunderstandings and miscommunications that happened in this collaboration and how this is still somehow hindering things now. Until this article I was not aware of some of those things.
And yes - unfortunately one always needs to be careful when people state things as facts.

flohack

@david-boddie Yes we finally received at least one device, but with the other activities which we had to start earlier (ongoing from last year already) we made a list of priorities, and Librem5 is in the queue. That said, a working Pinephone image will almost likely work immediately also on the Librem5, so there is not much to do basically. Anyone who has a Librem5 can try to follow the steps of Pinephone and see how far they get.