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Comment by amosbatto

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Comment by amosbatto

> Linux doesn't mean systemd, polkit, glibc, GCC, binutils, GNOME, pulseaudio/pipewire, Wayland/X11, etc. It makes no sense to claim these are Linux phones when the vast majority of smartphones run Linux. It's marketing spin. If you want to call it a GNU/Linux phone, go ahead, but what you're doing is a deliberate attempt at misleading people on their part.

I was simply following the standard convention of saying "Linux" to mean the entire OS that is found in popular distros like Debian, Arch and Fedora, whereas people generally say "Linux kernel" to refer to just the kernel. Saying "GNU/Linux" is problematic because most distros contain software which isn't part of GNU and isn't approved by the FSF, but I will use that term for lack of a better one.

By the way, it is just as problematic to say that GrapheneOS is "Linux" because GrapheneOS is using a kernel which has been substantially modified by Google, and Qualcomm's drivers for the Snapdragon which GrapheneOS uses are only designed to support an Android kernel, not a mainline Linux kernel. GrapheneOS doesn't use mainline Linux kernels and it usually takes 3-4 years for the mainline kernel to fully support new Snapdragons after they are released, so I don't know why you are even bothering to make this argument.

> There's a far larger and better ecosystem of open source apps for Android than there is for the products that you're marketing...

Just to be clear, I'm simply a customer of Purism and PINE64 who owns the Librem 5 USA and PinePhone, so I don't represent these companies and I'm not marketing their products.

I'm not sure whether there is a larger ecosystem of open source apps for Android rather than the GNU/Linux distros that run on the Librem 5 and PinePhone. If we are talking about apps which are designed to run on mobile phones, then you have a point, since it will take a while to adapt all the desktop software to be mobile-friendly, but Kirigami or libhandy/libadwaita is getting added to a lot GNU/Linux desktop software to make it adaptive. Google purposely does not label software with FOSS licenses in the Play Store, so it is hard to count the number of FOSS apps for Android. I count 4472 apps in F-Droid (https://f-droid.org/repo/index-v1.jar), whereas Debian 11 "bullseye" (which is what PureOS and Mobian are based on) has 59,551 packages. I know that not all FOSS apps make it into the F-Droid repo and the Debian repo includges the entire operating system and many of its applications use multiple packages, so we are comparing apples and oranges, but I don't see much evidence that the Android FOSS ecosystem is "larger and better" than the GNU/Linux ecosystem.

I often find that I need to install proprietary apps when using LineageOS because I can't find what I need in F-Droid, whereas I generally don't install proprietary apps in my GNU/Linux systems, so from that point of view, GNU/LInux is "better". Also a sizeable number of the FOSS apps that I encounter in F-Droid contain some code which was originally written for GNU/Linux, whereas I rarely find code in GNU/Linux which was originally written for Android.

> This is not accurate. It still has an SoC with a ton of components aside from the SoC despite your inaccurate claim that it doesn't, and those components still need to be isolated with an IOMMU.

I stated that "the Librem 5 doesn't need an IOMMU" to isolate the WiFi/BT, cellular modem, GNSS and USB controller, but in case you are worried, the i.MX 8M Quad SoC in the Librem 5 does have a Resource Domain Controller (RDC), Arm TrustZone and On-chip RAM (OCRAM) secure region protection, which does isolate the CPU, GPU and VPU. See section "3.2.2.4 Resource Domain Control and Security Considerations" in the "i.MX 8M Dual/8M QuadLite/8M Quad Applications Processors Reference Manual". (NXP requires registration to download the manual.)

> Those are minimum guarantees of full security updates, not end-of-life dates and the number of days you get those for the Librem 5 is ZERO. The only recommended devices for GrapheneOS are the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, which means that there is at least 5 years of full security updates for the devices we support.

The GrapheneOS FAQ lists the Pixel 3a released in May 2019 as a "supported" device, but the Pixel 3 released in October 2018 is listed as "end-of-life" because it no longer gets full security updates, so that tells me that most people are using GrapheneOS on devices that have a 3 year lifespan.

I downloaded the Pixel 3a's "bonito" kernel (https://github.com/GrapheneOS/device_google_bonito-kernel) and I see that it is using kernel version 4.9.292. Mainline Linux 4.9.292 was released on 2021-12-08 and 4.9.0 was released on 2016-12-11. Call me crazy but I prefer to use an up-to-date mainline kernel rather than one that is over 5 years old and takes 3 months to get the latest security patches from kernel.org. (To be fair, I should mention that the Librem 5 issn't yet fully supported in mainline Linux, so you can't run the latest mainline kernel on day one of its release, but the Purism devs say that mainline support is coming.)

> Your claim of lifetime security updates is completely bogus and demonstrates the extreme lengths Purism goes to in order to mislead people and profit from it.

Purism says that it went way over-budget trying to develop the Librem 5 and its software, which is why it has been raising its prices. Considering the roughly 20 companies that lost their shirts in the past when trying to develop mobile Linux, it is unrealistic to think that Purism is doing this for profit. (See: https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2020/07/17/mobile-linux-tra...)

Granted that NXP will stop providing firmware updates for the i.MX 8M Quad in 2033, and I expect that the firmware updates will end much sooner than that for the RS9116 WiFi/BT, BM818 cellular modem, Tesio-Liv3 GNSS, etc, but there is no reason to not expect lifetime software updates, because the Librem 5 should soon have mainline Linux support. Purism has worked hard to upstream its code changes to parent projects (Linux, wlroots, geoclue, ModemManager, GTK, GNOME libraries, GNOME applications, etc.), so that future releases of these projects should run on the Librem 5 with minimal work. Phosh was designed as a thin overlay on top of standard GNOME libraries and applications (which have substantial support from IBM/Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical and Google) and roughly 176k of the roughly 250k lines of code that Purism has created for the Librem 5 are now incorporated as official GNOME projects. (see: https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2021/12/15/amount-code-libr... ) What this means is that it shouldn't cost Purism much to keep providing future software updates. In addition, postmarketOS and Mobian developers are now participating in the development of Phosh which has become the most popular interface among PinePhone users, so even if Purism dies as a company, it is likely that the community will maintain the interface. For more info, see: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...

Replies amosbatto · 2022-03-24
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