This phone is months from shipping and we haven’t even been shown multi touch have we? Is that even a feature being promised?
Ultimately the difference between this and the Raspberry Pin is tangible - $614 to be exact. I know that Purism isn’t out to sell a mainstream phone, but my doubts are seriously strong that they’ll sell enough of these to justify the effort.
I can build anything that’s missing in Linux as long as someone invents the fountain of youth so that I can spent a few thousand engineering years on implementation.
Secondly, there are a lot of things that one can do in an ordinary desktop-Linux environment that are much more complicated in the Android world. On my old Nokia N900, I frequently wrote Python scripts that interacted with the system D-bus to automate things, and I did not have to install a big development environment or download someone else’s solution.
I know I can theoretically compile my own ROM or something to customize the desktop environment, but... bleh. It's time-consuming for me to build things on Linux, but it is more time consuming for me to build things on Android. Android development is just a pain all around.
This on the other hand, isn't just a >$600 phone. It's a >$600 grimoire[0]. Expensive, and cumbersome, but nearly all magic is. There's an almost subconscious brand (for lack of a better word) that devices of this nature fit into. They're trading user-experience for dev-experience, which is not something LineageOS or Android is optimized for.
As to the rest of your criticism, all of your other points seem completely fair. I'm not sure what I would put the odds at of the device succeeding (note, succeeding means finding a stable niche, not beating any other device). And while I can forgive a lot of flaws in software, for the price they're asking the hardware/drivers need to work well.
I'm very much in the "wait and see" camp. But I do see a lot of potential.
I don't disagree that there are some suboptimal things about Android but to bootstrap a new mobile OS platform from almost nothing, and being on-par not even matching Android especially with regards to security (sandboxing, a proper permission model) seems like it would require a dedicated team several years of development time, which Purism doesn't have.
[0]: https://anbox.io/
I just don’t see that happening because I think the demos sort of show this for themselves. It may be fun to develop for but it doesn’t look enjoyable or practical to use. Wait and see we shall!
I agree; I think it will be successful.
> it doesn’t look enjoyable or practical to use
You can say that about any phone (an iPhone, flagship Samsung, etc) that is not in a case. I bet it will be enjoyable and practical once they put it in a case.
You say it doesn't look enjoyable or practical to use, I'm saying 'Duh, it's a prototype not in a case, sitting flat on a table.'
When you said "I agree" then followed up with a statement opposite to what he said, that also felt like a non-sequitur.
It might be terrible. I'm kind of on the fence about it. The hardware needs to be reliable, the drivers need to be reliable, it needs to be compatible with common carriers. There a few other things. But the software on this device just needs to be passable. I don't need it to be particularly good.
When thinking about the Librem phone, mentally move it out of the iPhone category and into the Raspberry Pi category. Even if it comes out and gets terrible reviews and the software is all half-baked, even if it can't replace my normal phone for most things, I still might be tempted to buy one even just as a secondary device.