This is supposed to be a phone Richard Stallman can use. A phone that doesn't betray your freedom is more valuable than a phone with a PDF viewer, at least according to some people.

At the same time, the whole point of free software is that you can hack on your own computer. If you need some missing feature, you can just port it over from Gnome. That can be either exciting or annoying, depending on whether you have a hacker mindset or a consumer mindset. They are banking on enough people having a hacker mindset.

My fingers are so crossed on this one. I've never wanted a phone to be anything else. (Nor been willing to put up with proprietary extortion and anonymous blobs.) I have been waiting (seems like forever) for a phone-sized computer with an FSF-approved philosophy.

I'm sure I'm not alone. I rather imagine that (as with the early 8-bit era) such a device will be adopted quickly by thousands of us. It's just so ... BASIC. To hell with tollbridges.

You are not alone.

What makes you think that? The application developer docs for the Librem 5 (https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Apps/index.html) are pretty clear that its default environment is based on GNOME, and that it will run apps built with both GTK+ and Plasma Mobile...

They say it on their site:

Upon initial shipment of the Librem 5 in 2019, it will offer the essentials: phone functionality, email, messaging, voice, camera, browsing. The featureset will expand after shipment and over time to more free software applications. Your user experience will improve as we incrementally add commonly requested applications and features (such as calendaring, notes, calculator, PDF viewer, etc.) while keeping performance in mind.

That sounds less like "this device will never do these things" and more like "it will take some time for us to port software to do these things to this device." Which doesn't strike me as unreasonable, given the scope of what they're trying to accomplish.

And since they're building on existing open-source systems like GTK and Flatpak, if you don't want to wait for them to port a calculator to the device, you could presumably port one yourself. The source for GNOME Calculator is right here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-calculator ;-)

The phone is going to be niche regardless, and its likely users will be able to solve those problems their own way if GNOME apps are usable.

Everyone is different, but for me, 90% of my phone usage is: phone calls (I have no landline phone at home), text messages, and maps/navigation.

If there's no maps, I'd pass on this phone.

Calendar, notes, calculator, etc. are relatively unimportant for me.

Other apps are relatively unimportant to me. I don't use Facebook or other social media on my phone. I don't use ride-hailing services. I don't rent bikes or scooters. I don't use my phone to make retail payments. So none of that stuff matters to me.

I'm willing to go back to paper maps, I just want a damn Linux phone and I will gladly pay more than iPhone prices for it.

Fortunately nobody will have to, as this phone supports the internet. In addition, I am sure there are many OSM maps that will work on it anyway.

It would be really nice to get an OsmAnd port. Doubly so, since that would also make it available as a Gtk app on desktop Linux with minimal changes.

What about the location and GPS hardware and the security and privacy concerns that come with them? I'd rather just give up nav. Again, I'd still pay more than an iPhone without the location hardware. Could still do manual direction searching on the web, though I secretly want to go back to paper maps.

That's only a problem if you don't control the software.

When you're using web maps, you do not control the software - they request location, you give access to it (because you want your maps to show where you are), and you don't control that location information once it leaves your phone.

You don't need webmaps. OSM data are free to download and render locally. Navigation devices have offline maps, typically.

GPS is passive. Ideally they would just know which place you're requesting data about.

What are the chances that phone calls are unreliable in this mobile?

There most recent update was discussed on HN just a day ago[1], and showed the basic apps running.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18866533

I've been following the software side of things fairly closely. Pretty sure most of the gnome apps have had work at least started to make them mobile friendly.