It's also hard to make the case that it isn't, ultimately, what the people want, by "the standard you walk past is the standard you accept" principle.
It's been nearly twenty years. If Americans were deeply, deeply bothered by the government spying on them, they'd have burned down this government by now. At most charitable, this speaks to a deep ignorance or apathy in the American electorate and American citizenship. Or a general anxiety about what "the other people" are doing that exceeds their anxiety about what the government can do with panopticon surveillance.
I think, in general, hackers vastly overestimate the average human concern or sensitivity to this kind of thing.
The one that hasn't formed yet because the electorate has failed to recognize that parties only exist because they can consolidate mass political power. This is part of the "apathy" category. People don't care enough to meet up on this issue. They don't even care enough to be members of the existing parties or do more than show up to elections (and then, only between half and three-quarters for President, less for Congress, and hovering around 10-20% for primaries).
People care, but not enough to overcome institutional inertia.
> The one that hasn't formed yet because the electorate has failed to recognize that parties only exist because they can consolidate mass political power.
This is not the reason. The reason is the how the system was designed:
The Tea Party Republicans are a counter-example (or more accurately, a counterinsurgency). While there are still only two parties, one of them has become something that would be nearly unrecognizable to its members from the '70s.
It is possible to organize within the party to bend it. But in general, one side of the aisle tends to seem to have difficulty with finding enough common ground to actually work as a bloc, while the other side has managed, impressively, to unify Christian fundamentalists and ultra-rich billionaires.
> If Americans were deeply, deeply bothered by the government spying on them, they'd have burned down this government by now.
Right now stuff is happening that does deeply bothers Americans, and what do they do? They walk around with signs, they file legal papers, and maybe some other forms of peaceful, albeit useless, protest... a lot of other countries truly would be burning down the government right now if something like Elon happened there, but so far America has just been saying they don't want it, in as many ways as possible, but while still continuing to fully let it happen.
In the US it's looking like the main aggressors are Trump supporters and most of everyone else is not actually out for blood, just Peacefully Unhappy.
Elon is 100% out for blood, he's practically a modern-day Nazi.
On many social media platforms you can see a lot of people from the UK, EU, etc. being totally bewildered that all the US is doing right now is useless peaceful protests.
Maybe eventually something will happen that changes things, or maybe eventually things will reach a tipping point, but right now at least they are still stuck in some peaceful protest limbo.
I'm a fan of uBlock, but the argument's just not compelling enough for me. I may be dull, but Ads on the internet are like taxes to me; they'll just have to be paid.
Sites host ads, nobody else does it. They do it for pretty straight-forward economic reasons. If a site's too annoying, why visit it? Eventually, I hope it all settles down to a decent equilibrium.
You would be right if you were talking about ordinary ads, like those DuckDuckGo is using. I'm not blocking that. Most ads today track users and illegally collect huge amounts of information in order to psychologically manipulate you into buying what you don't need.
True. I'm still being presented ads for shoes I bought three months ago. How many pairs can I possibly need? But, seriously, I see that as part of the tax too. Annoying, useless, and tedious. Have I grown callouses?
I already made that mistake with Linux phones. They were unusable crap.
Immediately I can tell you that $1000 for a tablet with an Intel N5100 (Celeron) is not a good buy at all. The processor you get in the iPad Pro is 7x faster at multi-core operations and 4x faster in single thread (PassMark).
You can play recent AAA games like Resident Evil 2 (Remake) on an iPad Pro. It looks very similar to a home console in terms of level of detail in graphics.
The 3DMark Wild Life Unlimited benchmark is a difference in performance score of 12x
You're also getting a tandem OLED display that's essentially the best display on the market.
These are not even in the same class of device. I have to seriously question what the Librem 11 is actually good at? What is the target audience going to do with it? Being able to become root and fuck around in the terminal on a potato device isn't a use case. I can just go do that on a laptop or desktop which will be a much better device for doing those kinds of tasks.
If things that tablets are good at and intended for like drawing, viewing content, and any tablet workflows (e.g. digital audio produciton or film editing) or games involving high performance are all literally 10x better/more performant on an iPad, what is the Librem tablet supposed to be good at that isn't going to be a better experience in something like a Framework or even just a Dell/Lenovo laptop with Linux installed?
I'm sure it's a great daily driver for someone who wants to do almost nothing on their phone.
I mean we are talking about a $800 phone with no 5G modem. That's already a dealbreaker just from a carrier spectrum allocation aspect alone. This is a phone that will not get as good of a connection to do basic things like make calls and exchange texts/images/vidoes compared to any other device on the market.
I have found that keeping up with the modem capabilities of the average person's phone has been historically important for getting good signal strength and service in general.
I don't know if this is a resolved problem with 5G LTE and/or how backwards compatible 5G is with 4G (can they share spectrum? I honestly don't know, and perhaps it all depends on the particular carrier and how they allocate their deployments), but in the past you could notice that your 3G service would be a lot worse in its latter years of deployment than the 4G service simply because most customers had 4G and the carrier was allocating way more spectrum and bandwidth to 4G LTE service.
So you think about the median person replacing their phone every 3 years and you can figure that basically everyone in the US now has a phone with 5G capability, that's the service that cellular carriers are going to prioritize. That's also the level of service I am paying the carrier every month for.
And yes, 5G does get me a lot of great stuff like that. I actually tether my phone to my laptop or gaming handheld and play streamed games on it. I also work with large files so I can upload/download those large files to a server while I'm on a commuter train or in the passenger seat of a car. I can join video conference calls and things like that without issue.
I also personally switched from Android to iPhone specifically because so many carriers test iPhones so extensively (and there aren't an overwhelming amount of SKUs to test). The iPhone seems to have fewer carrier-related glitches in my experience. For example, I have a family member who switched from iPhone to Android and subsequently experienced call drops to their international calls consistently on their Android device (even after replacing the SIM card and other troubleshooting), but they resolved it entirely by switching back to an iPhone. Their carrier just didn't test out that particular Android phone that well, I guess. But the underlying reasons were irrelevant, they just need a phone that works for the purpose it's supposed to perform.
Considering that cellular service is the most expensive part of phone ownership, it seems to me that having a shitty device that can barely utilize the network's functionality is a way bigger problem than the device not being open source or not being Linux based or whatever line in the sane that Librem markets their very expensive phone under.
And of course I haven't even gotten into convenience features that depend on the proprietary app stores or carrier-integrated features like banking, transit cards/boarding passes/wallet functionality, CarPlay/Android Auto, visual voicemail, having a camera on hand that competes well with standalone point and shoot cameras, but I guess a Linux/Open Source die hard doesn't mind going back to the previous decade for those things. Still, those features are pretty damn enticing.
I can understand if you don't want those things but we have to remember that Librem is charging iPhone money for a device that does less things and has worse specs than a basic $100-300 Android phone.
So for you convenience is more important than supporting alternatives to the duopoly. I can understand that for sure, however keep in mind that duopoly is dangerous to the free market and its users in the long term. (See this: https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/). I do suffer from the lack of some features.
This is kind of like saying it would be better for me to take the train or bus to work and that car-based infrastructure harms everyone, but I live in San Bernadino or Indianapolis. You're not wrong but if you are in that environment it's clear which choice is more logical if I'm comparing a two hour bus ride or no transit at all to a 30-minute car ride.
Let's not forget also that Android is mostly open-source and that there are actual Google-free Android alternatives out there: GrapheneOS, /e/OS, LineageOS, CalyxOS...so Librem is competing with other open source alternatives that are far more capable and run on far better hardware.
That’s not really the discussion. We know that iPadOS is shit. On windows and Linux there are form factors that fit the users use case perfectly but they don’t want these products. Instead of adapting to those system they decide to rant about apple not doing what they want… yet we only see these posts from apple users that talk like there is no alternative.
ChromeOS balances the different paradigms reasonably well with Crostini and the ability to run Linux-based applications with native hardware virtualization. Solves for every power-user case you can't get from Android or the browser.
I recommend the starlite if you don’t depend primarily on battery power. Personally won’t be going back to Apple’s golden handcuffs, and would never consider the user-hostile MS.
I have one, and switched to a Framework in a Cooler Master case, I carry around a portable screen to connect it to. Reason is power. Even if you get enough RAM, the CPU will peg at the slightest provocation.
This was one of the reasons I bought into the recent Raspberry Pi 5 tablet the Pilet on Kickstarter --- I'm hoping it, or a Raspberry Pi connected to a Wacom One or Wacom Movink 13 will work as a general-purpose device.
A very large portion of the money goes directly into the pockets of senior managers who, based on Mozilla's dismal and falling market share, add absolutely no value to the business.
More than 1% of revenue (not profit; revenue) goes straight into the pocket of the CEO.
reply