12-07-2020, 01:09 AM
Hello crujones4,
The Librem 5 has somewhat better hardware than the Pinephone, but as far as I can tell, it might be even less ready for use than the Pinephone at this time, for the simple reason that not as many phones have been in the hands of volunteers and community developers as the Pinephone, which has sold thousands of units in the past year (I'd be interested to know a more precise figure on that).
Hardware for hardware, it may seem that the Librem 5 does not warrant such a huge price difference with the Pinephone, on the other hand it is widely understood that this pricing difference is partly due to the fact that Purism invests in software developement in addition to the hardware itself (Pine64 relies on the community for the software side). Purism develops the GNOME-based Phosh UI, which is quite popular on Linux distributions available for the Pinephone.
As for the Fairphone, I believe it has even higher specs that the other two phones, but their approach is quite different. It's designed and produced for minimal environmental impact and fair labor conditions along the supply chain. They ship it with Android. Which means it must probably rely on more proprietary blobs (closed-source computer code and firmware). There's currently a port to Ubuntu Touch, but I think it's a community effort, the Fairphone company may not be involved. There may be other ports. You may not have as many choices of operating systems as with the Librem 5 and the Pinephone.
Hope this makes sense, and that I haven't strayed too far from the actual facts. I'm still quite new to all this.
The Librem 5 has somewhat better hardware than the Pinephone, but as far as I can tell, it might be even less ready for use than the Pinephone at this time, for the simple reason that not as many phones have been in the hands of volunteers and community developers as the Pinephone, which has sold thousands of units in the past year (I'd be interested to know a more precise figure on that).
Hardware for hardware, it may seem that the Librem 5 does not warrant such a huge price difference with the Pinephone, on the other hand it is widely understood that this pricing difference is partly due to the fact that Purism invests in software developement in addition to the hardware itself (Pine64 relies on the community for the software side). Purism develops the GNOME-based Phosh UI, which is quite popular on Linux distributions available for the Pinephone.
As for the Fairphone, I believe it has even higher specs that the other two phones, but their approach is quite different. It's designed and produced for minimal environmental impact and fair labor conditions along the supply chain. They ship it with Android. Which means it must probably rely on more proprietary blobs (closed-source computer code and firmware). There's currently a port to Ubuntu Touch, but I think it's a community effort, the Fairphone company may not be involved. There may be other ports. You may not have as many choices of operating systems as with the Librem 5 and the Pinephone.
Hope this makes sense, and that I haven't strayed too far from the actual facts. I'm still quite new to all this.