On Thu, Dec 04, 2025 at 07:47:40AM -0500, Jason Shaw via Talk wrote:
I owned both the pinephone (original model, first wave of production) and the librem 5. Both of their specs match bottom tier cheap Android devices nowadays, and both cameras were very much behind the times.
The performance of the Pine Phone leaves *a lot* to be desired. I set mine up on wifi to experiment with before moving my SIM over, and had such a poor user experience that I never bothered. That's purely a poor *user* experience. From a tinkering point of view, I enjoyed it. So I guess figure out what your desire is before buying the phone. It might be more worthwhile to get a mainstream phone that still has decent postmarketos support (Pixel 6a from memory, but don't quote me on that).
I've long been a follower and supporter of foss phones, having had an OpenMoko Freerunner that I actually used as my main phone, a Nokia n9 (best phone of all time, despite not being totally open), various iterations of SailfishOS on supported devices, and even a Firefox phone (it was terrible).
Despite not being truely FOSS, I really liked Palm's WebOS phones. Linux under the hood, running pulseaudio for sound routing. Basically user accessible out of the box. -- Chris Irwin email: chris@chrisirwin.ca xmpp: chris@chrisirwin.ca web: https://chrisirwin.ca