Seeing how Purism has already successfully manufactured a line of laptops before I perceive the Librem 5 project to be one of the more realistic initiatives to get a fully working Linux environment on a phone in a while.

Hardware wise I don't care that the phone will be slower than the newest flagships. I'm used to slow with both my N900 and Jolla 1. I suspect it will be faster than the Neo900 for example. As long as the interface runs smoothly and there's plenty of storage I'll be satisfied

Software wise I'm enthusiastic about both Gnome and KDE announcing they will try to adapt their software to work nicely on the Librem 5. How much of this can truly be realised in one year is the major question, especially seeing that development for KDE Plasma Mobile has been very slow for the last year or so. I guess I'm hoping that the Librem 5 will provide for a target device to build towards for both DE's and be a stimulus as such.

I've messed around with KDE Plasma Mobile on my Nexus 5 before, and I think it can be developed into something very nice. To name another positive example I currently have Arch linux with KDE Plsama 5 running on a Chinese tablet (the Cube i7 Book, might anyone be interested), where the touch interface works very nicely. I only needed to install a couple of extra packages to improve touch interpretation and handling and that's it. Supposedly Gnome 3 works even better out of the box. Seeing these two examples working already in practice, together with the fact that Purism will have about 1.5 to 2 million dollars at their disposal for the coming year makes me positive, overall.

I have to say find the discussion going on here (both pro's and con's mentioned) very interesting to read, especially the posts with actual new information about possible hardware and drivers for example