Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one

I took a nice break over the summer and did some light reading, but it's time to dive in to Volume II.

Sparsebeard the pirate!

Check out the Halloween surprise I found underneath my sawhorse!

Update: I just trimmed this to shape it and remove the neck beard and it's not too bad. I may just let it fill in a bit and see what that looks like...

I was inspired to expand this into a full article to give myself a bit more space to talk about the issues:

https://puri.sm/posts/the-general-purpose-computer-in-your-pocket/

I was planning to grow out some stubble as part of my Halloween pirate costume. My son informed me (a bit too late) that he would prefer it be a full beard, so I'm going as Sparsebeard.

@davidrevoy Depends on your form factor I suppose, and whether Librem Mini works or whether you need to slot full-size PCI cards, etc.

@davidrevoy I have some (biased) ideas!

Microsoft got in antitrust trouble for bundling IE for free w/ Windows to compete with Netscape.

Now imagine Microsoft controlled whether Netscape could be installed or updated on Windows, and blocked them, and you are closer to the current situation with phones.

One of the neatest tricks Big Tech ever pulled was convincing people that phones weren't general-purpose computers and should have different rules than laptops or desktops. These rules conveniently give the vendor more control.

Now these rules are moving to laptops and desktops.

@ted The laptops certainly started with that first group originally but has matured into all three over the years. The phone is still early days so it's still primarily getting interest from the FOSS core for now. I expect it will follow the path of the laptops as it matures.

In either case, our desire is to market these products to *everyone* not just FOSS geeks, because it's not only FOSS geeks who deserve privacy, security and freedom.

@ted There are three main categories of customer that map to the legs of the stool.

The traditional FOSS core values our commitment to free software and the fact our hardware fully supports Linux out of the box.

The privacy-focused customer tends to care most about the hardware kill switches and our public commitments to privacy.

Security folks tend to care about code auditability, freed up firmware, Qubes support, and the kill switches.

Some customers are a blend of the three.

@ted Purism currently is trying. Even though the existing FOSS community continues to pigeon-hole Purism into the traditional categories, they would be surprised to discover the parts of our customer base that are outside of the FOSS community and are using Linux for the first time.

We sit on a three-legged stool of privacy, security and freedom and customers come to us based of some combination of those three values.

@ajmartinez @angdraug I think a lot of folks on other platforms still assume Linux on the desktop is the same as it was a decade ago when they switched to OSX and aren't aware of all of the advances.

@twrightsman Their primary goal is to take away disillusioned devs from Macs, but as some of those disillusioned devs might have tried out Linux again after a decade and discovered just how far it's come, I suppose it will have some effect.

It's also a marketing opportunity: "The best Linux development environment isn't Mac or Windows, it's Linux of course."