[Testannounce] The Librem 15 End of Year Sale!

Mon Dec 21 13:52:25 PST 2020

The Librem 15 Sale - End of Year Sale

Librem 15

  The Librem 15 End of Year Sale!

Get your new Desktop Replacement - the Librem 15 - *for $300 off!*

Ultra-portable workstation laptop that was designed chip-by-chip,
line-by-line, to respect your rights to privacy, security, and freedom.

Act fast - the sale ends December 31st!

Order Now <https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-15>

  Technology as it Should Be

In /Imagine a world without apps
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/technology/smartphones-apps.html>/
Shira Ovide asks “a wild question: What if we played games, shopped,
watched Netflix and read news on our smartphones — without using apps?
Our smartphones, like our computers, would instead mostly be gateways to
go online through a web browser.”

This question can be extrapolated into a larger question: “What do we
want from our technology?”

The power of control by Big-Tech in the app store is but a small example
of exploitation of our digital lives. If you don’t control the software,
the companies who wrote that software control you. You become a digital
prisoner.

What people desire from technology is well documented and can be summed
up with a series of buzzwords. The difficulty isn’t knowing what society
wants, it is knowing the path to get there.

What do we want from our technology?

  * We want the right to change providers.
  * We want the right to protect personal data.
  * We want the right to verify.
  * We want the right to not be tracked.
  * We want the right to access.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

        We want the right to change providers

This one is such an important right, and something I think is completely
missed by most journalists writing on the subject. As an example, let’s
look at when cellphone numbers were married to phone carriers. This was
a means of stickiness for the phone carriers. By preventing you from
moving your phone number to a competitor, the carrier locked you into
their network.

The US Congress—against the complaints of the phone carriers yelling
from the rooftops that changing to anything else would destroy their
businesses by introducing too much complexity—enacted law that required
interoperability. This allowed an individual to change providers freely
while keeping their same phone number. If Congress—and the media—applied
this example to the walled gardens of big-tech it would allow an
individual choice and freedom to move accounts from one provider to
another. Even if you could not transfer your exact handle within a
domain, you could—through interoperability—easily forward, export,
respond, and change providers.

Without regulatory assistance to protect this right, the alternative is
to use services that honor this right. Services that are decentralized
offer interoperability, such as Matrix (for chat, calling, video),
Mastodon (for social), XMPP (for messaging), and Email (for well…
email). Librem One <https://librem.one/> provides these services in a
decentralized manner.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

        We want the right to protect personal data

The ability to encrypt your personal data with your own keys on your own
device ensures that you fully control your digital life. With this as
the starting point, you can then choose (aka opt-in) to share what you
want with the people you want. This right is rooted in personal property
rights, and is one of the most egregious abuses by Big Tech and those
that have influence over them. If manufacturers, operating system
developers, and software developers took a Hippocratic-like oath, one
area society would agree on is the right that your personal data is your
personal property and something you must retain control over and consent
to share before it leaves your possession.

Without regulatory assistance to protect personal data, society is left
to fend for itself against the pressure from a multi-trillion dollar
industry to exploit that personal data. There is no way to resist that
pressure without the market creating convenient alternatives that honor
that right while completely avoiding Big Tech. Purism creates products
that are increasing in convenience daily, that fully protect you, and
these products are the market answer to the worst abuses of Big Tech
companies.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

        We want the right to verify

This right is simple, but often overlooked. If you cannot verify the
claims made by Big Tech companies, you are left to wonder if any claim
is true, and usually they are quite the opposite. Hearing “We care about
your privacy” from Facebook is a clear violation of that trust since
exploiting your privacy is inherent in their business model. Other such
claims from Big Tech would require verifying code, and to do that
properly all code should be released under freedom respecting licenses.
After 30+ years of the free software movement, we see that verifying the
source code is the proper answer to allow people to retain full control
of their digital lives. It is no wonder why the right to verify is such
an important right.

Without regulatory assistance requiring public money to produce public
code, we are left with addressing it by where we allocate our money
within society. If all those that cared about their digital footprint
spent money on products that protected that digital footprint the
positive feedback loop would solve this within the market itself. Purism
releases all our software under free software licenses and honors this
right.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

        We want the right to not be tracked

We simply want the right to have access to and knowledge of all
collection and uses of personal data; and to obtain, correct, or
permanently delete personal data controlled by any company and to have
those requests honored by third parties; to opt-in consent for only the
minimum personal data necessary to use a service; and to have all
personal data permanently deleted once the data is no longer required,
or upon request. If we couple this with the other rights above, we start
off with full protection that then allows opt-in sharing, with a
ratchet-back plan to remove what was shared from any organization.

Without regulatory assistance requiring the right not to be tracked, we
have to solve it by supporting products that honor this right from
hardware, operating system, software, applications, and services. Purism
honors this right.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

        We want the right to access

We as society do not want to be discriminated against nor exploited
based on personal data; to be able to access and use the internet
without internet service providers blocking, throttling, engaging in
paid prioritization or otherwise unfairly favoring content,
applications, services or devices; to have access to multiple viable,
affordable internet platforms, services, and providers with clear and
transparent pricing; and not to have any of these rights removed through
any terms of service.

Without regulatory assistance in this right, the market will have to
pick-up the slack and use, fund, and support companies and services that
honor this right. Purism of course honors this right.

If we look at all five of these rights, we know how to create technology
as it should be, but unless the market chooses alternatives or
regulatory assistance is provided or a combination of those two, we will
continue to complain about the abuses of Big Tech without doing anything
to solve it.

Purism is creating the alternatives that are ever improving with every
purchase of hardware, every use of software, and every subscription of
services. Thank you for changing the future of computing for the better
with us.

  A Media Center in Your Pocket

While the Librem 5 is a phone, it’s also a general-purpose computer.
This allows the Librem 5 to act as a media center, game station, server,
ultra-mobile PC, or whatever you can personally imagine.

Sorry, your client doesn't seem to support embedded videos. View the
video directly here <https://videos.puri.sm/promo/TV_display_out.mp4?_=1>

With every update, the Librem 5 gets even more features and apps. In
this video we demo a few open Blender movies Spring
<https://www.blender.org/press/spring-open-movie/> and HERO
<https://cloud.blender.org/films/hero>, we also show off a few
free-software games such as Super-Apocalux
<https://github.com/DanielTheSilly/Super-Apocalux>, Supertux, and
Supertuxkart.

  Librem 14 Status Update: EVT2 Sample Is Almost There

We truly think of the Librem 14 <https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/> as
our dream laptop here at Purism, and because of that and because this is
a brand new design compared to the Librem 13 we find ourselves
nitpicking a bit more than usual as our design becomes a reality.

As part of this nitpicking process we make EVT (Engineering Verification
Test) samples which allow us not only to fine-tune our manufacturing
process, it also allows us to physically examine the laptop. Using kill
switches, using the keyboard, examining the print on the case and
keyboard–all these and other tests help us refine things so that the
final product is something we are proud of. In addition to the more
cosmetic bugs we list below, it also helps us find larger bugs. For
instance we discovered issues not just with the microphone but also an
issue that limited the 2nd SO-DIMM slot to 16GB RAM. We needed to re-do
the PCB to address both of these issues.

We know a lot of people have been interested to see pictures of the
actual Librem 14 instead of just renders. We have made the second round
of EVT samples a few weeks ago and have finally gotten a chance to take
some high-quality pictures to share. We are almost there! There are just
a few more tweaks we want to make that will only add a few weeks to our
shipping plan, but we think it’s important to get everything perfect.
With the holidays this will likely mean shipping won’t start until the
beginning of January.

Here are some pictures of an EVT2 sample so you can see the minor
improvements we’d still like to make. In the front view you can see the
keyboard layout is almost there. We want to tweak the print of the
letters to be a bit thinner and improve the overall quality of the
keyboard printing (you can see an example of room for improvement in the
F3 key).

Librem 14 Librem 14 EVT2 front view

We also want to tweak the print next to the hardware kill switch LEDs so
they are larger and on top of the LEDs. The hardware kill switches
themselves are a bit too short–we want them to sit a bit higher so they
are easier to trigger with your finger.

Kill Switches Librem 14 EVT2 HKS

Kill Switches Mockups Hardware Kill Switch Print Mock Up

We are adding a hole near the DC barrel jack for a power indicator LED
that will match the power LED on the top of the keyboard so you can tell
whether the laptop is suspended even when the lid is closed. We are also
removing the redundant microphone hole as we now have a digital
microphone next to the camera in the LCD lid.

Librem 14 EVT2 right Librem 14 EVT2 right

There’s no changes to point out in this side, but you can see the HDMI,
USB-A, microSD, and USB-C slots.

Librem 14 EVT2 left Librem 14 EVT2 left

No changes here but check out how nice the Librem 14 looks when closed!

Librem 14 EVT2 closed angle Librem 14 EVT2 closed angle

We know many of you are as excited about the Librem 14 as we are. With
these tweaks we know you’ll be pleased with the final result. And if you
haven’t yet placed your pre-order for the Librem 14 now’s your chance
<https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-14/>.

  Avoid "Advertiser ID" with the Librem 5

Apple and Google profess to care about the privacy rights of their
customers, but their operating systems tell a different story. iOS and
Android both allow for pervasive tracking of users through Advertiser
IDs. Google uses a version is known as GAID (Google Advertiser
Identification) and Apple uses its version called IDFA (Identifier For
Advertisers).

While most advertisers claim it’s a benefit because you got a coupon for
your pizza, it instead keeps a permanent record of everything your phone
has done. That treasure trove of your personal information is shared
with any party participating in the user tracking business model, which
ends up meaning most apps on your phone.

As Martin Gundersen shares his horrors
<https://nrkbeta.no/2020/12/03/my-phone-was-spying-on-me-so-i-tracked-down-the-surveillants/>
with the pervasive tracking he experienced that violates his civil
liberties:

    Almost a month later, I received an interesting email attachment
    from Venntel. It contained information on where I’d been 75,406
    times since 15 February. Suddenly I could retrace my every step on a
    hike, out for a drink, and visiting my grandmother in Southern Norway.

    There were no phone numbers or names in the data. Still, it would
    have been easy for nearly anyone to find out that this was me.
    Simple searches in Google and the white pages would show there was a
    Martin Gundersen living in Sorgenfrigata in Oslo and working at NRK
    Marienlyst.

Map View

The Librem 5, which runs PureOS, does not include any tracking methods.
PureOS—which is endorsed by the Free Software Foundation—has been
developed in compliance with our company’s strict policies to advance
user freedom, release all the source code, never track users, and fully
respect the rights of its customers. The Advertiser ID along with the
entire surveillance as a business model industry runs counter to user
freedom.

Retain your digital rights and support the growing trend, buy a Librem 5
<https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/> for you and your friends.

  Preventing Fragmentation with the Librem 5

Fragmentation is a massive problem in computer software development that
has only gotten worse with mobile computers. By fragmentation I’m
referring to incompatible platforms that require a developer to maintain
separate forks of their code. Twenty years ago if you wanted to write
software for an end user, you had to decide whether to support Windows,
Macs or Linux. Each of those platforms required you to build, test, and
maintain different forks of your software.

Fast forward to today, and at a minimum a developer has to decide
whether to develop a “mobile app” or a “desktop app” and depending on
that choice, has to decide whether to support Android or iOS (and if
they want to be fancy, all of the Android forks and different
mobile-only Linux OSes), or Windows, MacOS and Linux, or potentially all
of the above!

Each platform means a separate fork, a separate set of libraries and in
some cases means you have to develop your application in a completely
different language with a completely different framework! Fragmentation
means developers must divide their limited time and attention between
different codebases and understand the nuances of each platform.
Fragmentation wastes valuable developer time. Since so many of these
applications are proprietary (especially true for mobile apps),
developers also typically can’t rely on the community to step in and
port and support their application on a different platform.

    Android Fragmentation

There is even further fragmentation of the Android ecosystem not only
from vendors creating their own custom forks of Android, but also
because vendors stop providing OS updates for a particular piece of
hardware after a year or two–that is if hardware gets Android updates at
all. If you combine that with new backwards-incompatible OS features,
Android app developers have to support wide ranges of OS releases and
monitor reports of how many old Android devices are still in the wild,
so they know how many existing users they might leave behind with a
future update.

    “Mobile Linux” Fragmentation

Over the years there have been numerous efforts to create “mobile” Linux
OSes that attempt to resemble more traditional Linux distributions, but
that only run on mobile hardware. These OSes combine a Linux kernel
(often from Android) with a custom userspace environment and run the
continuum from Android itself (which is a mobile-only OS that runs a
Linux kernel with a custom userspace), to Android forks that add
security features, to Android forks that remove all proprietary
software, to finally what most people think of as “mobile Linux” OSes
that feature a wide range of different and incompatible userspace
environments.

Unfortunately, most “mobile-only Linux” efforts to date have made the
fragmentation problem worse, not better. This is because in the end, if
a software developer wants their software to run on any of these OSes
that don’t feature the Android userspace, they must port their software
to yet another platform. This is true even if the developer already
supports Linux on the desktop.

More than anything else, it’s this fragmentation that has led to limited
adoption of mobile Linux OSes (or really any alternative to Android and
iOS). It’s why almost every conversation about these platforms ends up
being around “how many apps do you have?” If you have to port every
application to your platform to be a success, you face a steep uphill climb.

Number of apps mattered on Android and iOS originally because apps had
to be ported (and essentially rewritten) from an existing platform. If
all MacOS apps “just worked” on iOS, “number of apps” would have never
been part of the conversation. Just like web developers responded to the
surge of mobile browsing with responsive web design in only a matter of
years, Mac developers would have done the same so their MacOS apps
worked on iOS. This is why the Librem 5 runs PureOS.

    The Librem 5 and PureOS

In addition to “how many apps do you have?” another frequently asked
question we get about the Librem 5 is “why didn’t you use
Android/Android fork/other mobile-only Linux OS?” We think of the Librem
5 as a portable, general-purpose computer, not a “smartphone” and it
should use a general-purpose OS. We wanted to avoid all of the
fragmentation, app porting woes, and mistakes of other platforms by
using the same OS we use on our laptops.

Instead of asking developers to support yet another mobile OS, we
realized the best path to success in providing an alternative to Android
and iOS is using a platform they already know and already support:
PureOS. So instead of spending effort porting apps, we invested in
making the existing Linux desktop ecosystem portable.

By making the Linux desktop portable, we already had thousands of apps
at our disposal. Like web designers making responsive web sites, we just
had to make them adaptive to look good on a small screen. So we
developed libhandy to make it easy to add adaptive features to existing
GTK applications. We also developed phosh, phoc and squeekboard, among
other tools, so we had a desktop environment that worked well in a phone
form-factor.

Because of our approach, the Librem 5 runs regular desktop Firefox and
we didn’t have to ask Mozilla to port Firefox to our platform. We’ve
also worked upstream to help make more and more desktop applications
like Epiphany (web browser), Geary (email), Lollypop (music player) and
a number of foundational Gnome applications adapt to smaller screens.

Sorry, your client doesn't seem to support embedded videos. View the
video directly here
<https://videos.puri.sm/promo/l5-convergence-extra.mp4?_=1>

    What PureOS on the Librem 5 Means For Developers

What does this mean if you are a developer who wants to write an app for
the Librem 5? It means you can write your app just like you would for a
Librem laptop using the same exact development tools. You can develop
applications either on a Librem laptop running PureOS or the Librem 5
itself. There’s no need to maintain a separate Librem 5 fork of your
code–just make sure your standard Linux desktop app still works when
resized down to the Librem 5 screen size
<https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Apps/Guides/Design/Constraints.html>,
and widgets are touch-friendly, and you’re done.

Sorry, your client doesn't seem to support embedded videos. View the
video directly here <https://videos.puri.sm/promo/L5_dev_v4.mp4?_=2>

By avoiding fragmentation and bringing the existing desktop ecosystem to
the phone, we save valuable developer time. Apps developed for the
Librem 5 not only work on the Librem 5, they work when the Librem 5 is
docked with a larger screen, as well as on Librem laptops and the Librem
Mini.

At the moment I would describe the Linux desktop ecosystem like the web
development ecosystem before “responsive web design” made web browsing
usable on mobile screens. All the applications work, they just don’t all
fit. The work to make an existing website responsive is similar to
making an existing desktop application adaptive, and both are easier–and
better design–than maintaining a mobile-only port.

Avoid fragmentation and bring your apps to PureOS and the Librem 5–the
general-purpose computer in your pocket.

  Convergent App Development

The Librem 5 while docked is just as versatile to write code on as our
laptop. Build apps once
<https://puri.sm/posts/preventing-fragmentation-with-the-librem-5/>, and
run them on any screen size on a variety of hardware
<https://puri.sm/products/>.

Sorry, your client doesn't seem to support embedded videos. View the
video directly here <https://videos.puri.sm/promo/L5_dev_v4.mp4?_=1>

With tools like Glade <https://glade.gnome.org/> and Gnome-builder
<https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder>, you can whip up a UI and attach
it to just about any popular programming language. Pick how you want to
write apps and write them anywhere.

  A Phone That Respects Your Children

Even if a child doesn’t have a phone of their own, they often borrow
their parent’s phone to play games or watch videos. Most phones don’t
distinguish between children or adults when it comes to the data they
collect.

The Librem 5 respects the privacy of you and your children by running
free software that does not track you. The Librem 5’s hardware kill
switches allow you to disable the network completely with a flip of the
switch so your child doesn’t accidentally end up online, making it the
best phone for a child’s privacy.

Sorry, your client doesn't seem to support embedded videos. View the
video directly here <https://videos.puri.sm/promo/l5-gcompris.mp4?_=1>

  I Love You For Your Personality

If you are as excited about the Librem 5 as I am, you will want to show
it to all your non-techie friends and family. “Look, it’s a Linux
phone!”, you’ll say. They may be briefly impressed with the terminal,
which evokes The Matrix to the uninitiated, but after brief fiddling,
they will fail to share your joy. “Why,” you may ask, “why don’t they
get it?”

That’s because there’s a chasm of understanding between you. I was on
its other side once.

A long, long time ago, I met an owner of a Jolla phone at a conference.
I had never seen it before, and I was excited to try it. But after I
swiped around, tried out a few apps, and when the novelty of the user
interface wore off, I ended up unimpressed. Yes, it was a phone. Yes, it
had apps, just like mine. But I didn’t come across anything exceptional.
What went wrong?

On the way back home, I realized that nothing went wrong: on the
surface, the Jolla phone was just a phone. That’s what I saw then, and
that’s what your family will initially see in the Librem 5. But the
amazing thing about it takes longer to discover: its personality as a
Linux phone.

Think of it as of dating: what you can see on a first date is how
attractive someone is. But it takes longer than that to learn what
really matters about them, before you commit to a relationship. And oh
dear, look at the relationships people have with mainstream phones and
apps! If apps were people, it wouldn’t fly at all. Here’s how I would
translate some common behaviors:

  * When you are bombarded with ads: “My mum says you need to shave/cook
    the way she does/stop wearing sweaters/…”
  * When an application stores your stuff in the cloud unencrypted: “I
    sent a copy of our kinky texts to my mum. You know, to keep them safe.”
  * When you get spammed by random notifications: “Are you there???
    Okay, just checking.”
  * “This app needs access to your contacts” = “I need the phone numbers
    of your parents and cousins.”
  * “Enter your payment information” = “I need your payment card.”
  * When you call the doctor unencrypted: “Mum, what does a proctologist
    do?”
  * When you talk about weed unencrypted
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore>: “I already told your
    parents!”
  * When you cannot install other app stores: “You can hang out with
    others, but only when I’m there too”.
  * When you aren’t given a choice to block access: “It’s my way or the
    highway!”
  * When the phone stops getting security updates: “I don’t like our car
    any more so I left it unlocked.”
  * When an application you like gets banned from the store
    <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/apple-approves-then-bans-hong-kong-app-after-chinese-criticism/>:
    “I didn’t like your fishing gear so I threw it away.”
  * “This app needs access to your location” = “You must always tell me
    where you go.”
  * When your Google
    <https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/dtr6gi/youtube_suspends_google_accounts_of_markipliers/>
    (or other <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627093>)account
    <https://support.google.com/mail/thread/84573761?hl=en> gets blocked
    <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25179652> for no reason
    <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAEdFRoOYs0>: “I am leaving and I’m
    taking the dog with me.”

Oof, that’s a damning picture. But people using mainstream phones are so
used to most of this that they can’t imagine there is another way. They
won’t see the personality of the Librem 5, unless you patiently show it
to them. But how?

You have to realize that what makes Librem 5 special is the community
around it. Community isn’t something you can simply show. But you can
describe it: Linux users value openness, and have little patience for
those who abuse their trust. For example, when Ubuntu partnered up and
sent desktop searches to Amazon, people rioted
<https://hotforsecurity.bitdefender.com/blog/ubuntu-12-10-amazon-search-triggers-wave-of-protest-for-privacy-concerns-3621.html>.
Firefox, as the last big bastion of the open browser, is under constant
scrutiny <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24652537>. As a result,
you will scarcely see ads or snitches on Linux.

With some skills, you can show practical effects of the community’s
openness. Most apps are completely open. When I used the Nokia N900, I
noticed that my notes app was broken. Instead of begging the author to
fix it, I could take the code and fix it myself, without asking anyone
for permission. Same goes for the Librem 5 (even if you aren’t a
seasoned coder, I encourage you to create your own layout
<https://developer.puri.sm/projects/squeekboard/tutorial.html> for
Squeekboard).

What you can’t show so easily is how the openness affects longevity. The
Raspberry Pi is a minimal Linux computer from 2012, and it’s still
supported <https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/operating-systems/> in
2020, after 8 years. I see a similar fate for the Librem 5.

Of course, someone may interrupt you and ask about Facebook. Well,
community is not a perfect protection. While the chances of ending up in
an ugly relationship are lowered, the ultimate choice is still yours. If
you insist on using Google or Facebook, I don’t think you could ever
escape the ads economy, even on the Librem 5. But you won’t be forced
into anything before you even begin (choose whichever app store you
like! No forced cloud!).

As you can see, that was a lot to unpack. So don’t be disappointed when
your friends don’t instantly fall in love with the Librem 5. It’s not
their fault. Instead, be patient, and direct their attention to the
personality. Let them get used to the thought that the smartphone world
can be different.

  Gaming That Respects You

The Librem 5 features high quality, free games that respect you. Play 2D
and 3D games without ads, without in-app purchases, and without tracking.

Sorry, your client doesn't seem to support embedded videos. View the
video directly here <https://videos.puri.sm/promo/l5-stk.mp4?_=1>
Purism

Thanking you for your support,
— the Purism team (feedback at puri.sm)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

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