It's just as if people weren't a single hive-minded entity and they all had differing needs and opinions.
Of course we need better phones. Librem 5, the one I personally still consider the best out there right now, is now 6-7 years old! It wasn't a low-end device back then, but it wasn't high-end either, and time flies. Yet at the same time I keep seeing people going "I wish we had XYZ" when XYZ was something I was enjoying all these years already. And you know, these better phones won't come out of the Santa Claus' bag. If all the people complaining about the need of better Linux phone had actually bought one, we would already have their successors in our hands.
There's still a lot of work to do, but the usual reaction when people are playing with my phone is being surprised at how usable it appears ("this is a Linux phone? it looks like a normal one!"), so I do think we need to put more effort into informing people of what's already there, even if it won't satisfy everyone's needs.
It's difficult to frame it as something that was mid-range in its time, as many, maybe most original backers probably didn't receive theirs until much later. COVID certainly compounded things and they can't be faulted for that.
Purism was a case study in how not to handle delays, and faulting consumers for being overly picky or not supporting the product financially ignores the broader context.
Some people may also object to buying a phone that struggled for years to...make phone calls. (And by some contemporary accounts still does.) It takes potato quality videos. It was an absolute mess as of 2025: https://forums.puri.sm/t/it-is-normal-for-the-librem-5-to-ha...
Its existence does not obligate anyone wanting a genuinely good device to exist to contribute to that project, and it's naive to think a lack of sales is what's prevented Purism from shipping a better device.
> as many, maybe most original backers probably didn't receive theirs until much later
Original backers got it in 2020-2021. It took until 2023 to catch up with preorders made already after the original campaign ended.
> Purism was a case study in how not to handle delays
Agreed.
> faulting consumers
I haven't faulted anyone. I just made a "if I had a dollar for each time..."-style remark.
> It was an absolute mess as of 2025
You linked to a post about a faulty unit and about how another unit with exact same software didn't have the listed problems...
> it's naive to think a lack of sales is what's prevented Purism from shipping a better device
It's exactly what prevented Purism from shipping the successor so far. It's also what prevented it from keeping a whole team of developers hired that worked not just on the specific device, but on the entire software platform and whose work is now being used across various devices. The Librem 5 project was a massive cost sink that left its fingerprints all over the place across the GNU/Linux stack, and more sales was exactly what would be needed to let it continue at that pace. The reasons why it didn't sell well enough can be argued, but the inarguable fact is that more sales would bring more progress.
Neither does mine. When I'm not rebooting into new kernels and don't let the battery go flat, I reach several weeks of uptime (eventually interrupted by one of the things mentioned).
Of course we need better phones. Librem 5, the one I personally still consider the best out there right now, is now 6-7 years old! It wasn't a low-end device back then, but it wasn't high-end either, and time flies. Yet at the same time I keep seeing people going "I wish we had XYZ" when XYZ was something I was enjoying all these years already. And you know, these better phones won't come out of the Santa Claus' bag. If all the people complaining about the need of better Linux phone had actually bought one, we would already have their successors in our hands.
There's still a lot of work to do, but the usual reaction when people are playing with my phone is being surprised at how usable it appears ("this is a Linux phone? it looks like a normal one!"), so I do think we need to put more effort into informing people of what's already there, even if it won't satisfy everyone's needs.