Not recommending Purism
This is just a quick note to mention that I have updated my hardware documentation on the Librem 13v4 laptop. It has unfortunately turned into a rather lengthy (and ranty) piece about Purism. Let's just say that waiting weeks for your replacement laptop (yes, it died again) does wonders for creativity. To quote the full review:
TL;DR: I recommend people avoid the Purism brand and products. I find they have questionable politics, operate in a "libre-washing" fashion, and produce unreliable hardware. Will not buy again.
People who have read the article might want to jump directly to the new sections:
- Libre washing
- Bullshit anti-interdiction
- Bullshit crowdfunding
- Hardware reliability (or lack thereof)
I have also added the minor section of the missing mic jack.
I realize that some folks (particularly at Debian) might still work at Purism, and that this article might be demoralizing for their work. If that is the case, I am sorry this article triggered you in any way and I hope this can act as a disclaimer. But I feel it is my duty to document the issues I am going through, as a user, and to call bullshit when I see it (let's face it, the anti-interdiction stuff and the Purism 5 crowd-funding campaign were total bullshit).
I also understand that the pandemic makes life hard for everyone, and probably makes a bad situation at Purism worse. But those problems existed before the pandemic happened. They were issues I had identified in 2019 and that I simply never got around to document.
I wish that people wishing to support the free software movement would spend their energy towards organisations that actually do honest work in that direction, like System76 and Pine64. And if you're going to go crazy with an experimental free hardware design, why not go retro with the MNT Reform.
In the meantime, if you're looking for a phone, I recommend you give the Fairphone a fair chance. It really is a "fair" (as in, not the best, but okay) phone that you can moderately liberate, and it actually frigging works. See also my hardware review of the FP2.
Update: this kind of blew up, for my standards: 10k visitors in ~24h while I usually get about 1k visitors after a week on any regular blog post. There were more discussions on the subject here:
Trigger warning: some of those threads include personal insults and explicitly venture into the free speech discussion, with predictable (sad) consequences...
Second update: the laptop is basically dead, case is broken without replacement parts available, see this followup for details.
Third (and hopefully last) update (2023-05-29): people are now having trouble getting refunds from never-shipped or DOA Librem 5 phones, see this thread. Purism's last take on this (2022) is that "your Librem phone is coming", "currently shipping backlogs", "20 weeks lead time", and "Buy now".
Pine64 deserves our praise exactly for that: they are a hardware company, and they make good hardware, with open schematics, that we can write software for. They don't pretend that they will build a hardware platform, and operating system, and liberate the universe all at once, because that's unrealistic, and they know it.
And Purism knows it too.
Why not?
Really? Probably not much, actually. Most people do not use PureOS on their PinePhone, as far as I know. The reviews I have seen use either PostmarketOS or their own distro on top of it, see for example Drew Devault's review.
Arguably, not much. But that's not their job and they don't pretend it is: they're building a phone, a piece of hardware. They try to make it as open as possible so that people can write software for it.
The entire point of my article here is exactly the opposite of that. I believe we are in a better situation with Pine64 not faking it and creating real, working, everyday hardware that people can use instead of promising the moon and then failing to deliver.
Besides, I'm not sure that "Praising Pine64" is an honest characterization of my article. I just said they did "honest work". If that's praise, our standards are very low indeed...
How many of the people running PostmarketOS (or any other distribution) are using Phosh and other apps that were developed for it?
You are consistently leaving important details out of the picture. That makes your statements unfair and reflects badly on you. As I said I’m all for criticising and you make good points against Purism, but you must apply equal treatment to all.
Frankly, I don't know... I had to lookup "Phosh", just to give you an idea. I sense this is a rhetorical question and that the answer should be obvious, yet it is not at all, to me.
I am probably leaving out a lot of details out of Pine64, system76, and Fairphone out of this picture. But that's the point, isn't it: this is not a review of Pine64, it's a review of Purism and its hardware. Believe me, when I end up with Pine64 or system76 hardware, I will do a similarly merciless review and hordes of their fans will come accusing me of being unfair to them then. Maybe that will be a consolation? :p
As you have correctly asserted, I lack information about Pine64. I just felt they are more honest about their work, and I do not believe I have explicitly compared their free software work against Purism. What I said in the original post is:
Emphasis added. Maybe you misinterpreted my comment as saying that System76 and Pine64 were contributing more to the software part of the ecosystem. That is not what I am saying. I am saying that by contributing cheap and somewhat open hardware that works well on Linux, and being honest about what their promises are, they are being more useful than Purism.
I will be happy to apply the same, hopefully fair, treatment to other manufacturers when I end up with their products falling apart in my hands, when they do.
I will also point out that you seem to get stuck on a tiny part of the lengthy review I (re)announced here. There are way more problems with Purism than their free software contributions. I did not even mention them in the original review, a year ago...
A comment questioning the fact that Purism allows racism was removed. (The word racism was "quoted" in the original comment, which makes me believe the author was also questioning the existence of racism itself, which I find to be just despicable.)
People interested in criticizing my stance on Purism's "tolerance" of neonazis and related ideologies are welcome to read my previous post on the topic and generally, just shove off somewhere else.
Yes, you have found a Social Justice Warrior. Don't wet your pants too much, there's plenty of us out there.
Sorry, but I have the same negative experience with System76. System76 don't have anything on their own, they are just put stickers on the laptop and in the box. And when the ordered laptop has some defects, they are trying to charge from you money if you want to give them back they non-working peace of shit (motivating this by the fact that they will not be able to re-sell it - do you understand the level of their hypocrisy). All laptop models created by Clevo.
iFixit posted a comparison of the repairability of the hardware between the pinephone, purism and fairphone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCccpgposh4
It looked to me like the fairphone had the most advanced, repairable hardware of the choices.
Unfortunately it's only available in the EU.