It's great to see the LibreM5 finally shipping. I'm glad to hear that it worked out. Yes, the past 1-2 years the company behind it obviously struggled financially when looking at the pricing and aggressive advertising the twas taking place.
But at the end of the day, we have to admit that Purism has done a lot of ground work for Linux phones. Pinephone and friends of course have also massively worked towards Linux phones. Still I'm happy to see yet another one making it.
On the same note I want to mentioned that I think that using package-based update system on a phone, as they appear to do, will cause problems in the long run.
There are enough more robust update mechanisms known from the embedded world, which could have worked around the upcoming problems. But let's see how things go :)
@sheogorath Can you explain that line of thought a little bit? I don't know enough about it to have an opinion. Hoping to get my Librem 5 in the next few months!
@daniel I had a longer thread about problems of package-based setups a few weeks ago:
https://microblog.shivering-isles.com/@sheogorath/105024116124798746
TL;DR: package based upgrades are not deterministic, subject to corruption in case of power loss and package conflicts.
All those require quite some knowledge to fix and manual interaction. Something one usually tries to avoid when shipping a device to customers that are not system admins. In the thread above I focus on OSTree but of course there are alternatives.
@daniel to extended and my thoughts a bit: I think the basic concept of Fedora Silverblue would be perfect for those devices. OSTree for base systems has technical limitations, such as not being able to install additional kernel modules to /opt, but for a system like the librem5 you don't need that, as you can build a kernel just for librem devices containing all drivers.
It would also make updates more bandwidth efficient and all of that without restricting any freedoms.
