Originally Posted by mikecomputing (Post 1535882)

yeah marketing sucks as usual :/

But at least Lunduke show, Linux gamer, planetkde and planetgnome give it some attention. But they should do more.

Let's hope something happens in the weekend...

Originally Posted by gerbick (Post 1535887)

I have not one clue what Lunduke Show, Linux Gamer, PlanetKDE or PlanetGnome were until you listed them out.

Not saying I'm the majority (I'm not) but it's pretty safe to say that the problem then resides in the targeted groups - they're not putting their money into this whereas you'd think they would.

Marketing has become a necessary evil, unfortunately.

Regardless, it would be nice to see this not fail. Better yet, I'd like to see Ubuntu's Shuttleworth cover the rest because of the failure that was Ubuntu Touch (not mentioning the Ubuntu Edge).

Originally Posted by gerbick (Post 1535887)

...because of the failure that was Ubuntu Touch (not mentioning the Ubuntu Edge).

Originally Posted by mscion (Post 1535740)

Currently they are at about 63% with 20 days to go. That means Purism has to raise about $27500 per day which is like about 46/day of new orders for the $599 device. Lets see where they're at in 5 and 10 days from now to determine the trend. Hopefully it is going in a positive way...

Originally Posted by chenliangchen (Post 1531077)

Qualcomm (Chosen): Solution extremely expensive. Components are hard to get. But support is great (in terms of drivers). Performance at top tier, power management is great.
Intel: They exit mobile chipset business and atom range is not as power efficiency as Qualcomm.
MTK: Cheaper than Qualcomm, performance is OK. But drivers often being the issue. Components often out of stock...
Allwinner: Lower end cheap SoC with unknown support other than Android
Rockchip: Strength on Media but not a mainstream chipset.

Originally Posted by wicket (Post 1531100)

You say you've already chosen Qualcomm (which isn't necessarily a bad thing depending on your target audience) but I've a few comments on your summary of SoCs which you may want to take into consideration.

Intel have indeed exited the mobile chipset business however China-based mobile chip vendor Spreadtrum have partnered with Intel and have been making new x86-based SoCs for smartphones.

Allwinner is quite the opposite of what you describe. They are actually one of the best vendors for non-Android support and use Mali GPUs which are compatible with the Lima free/open drivers.

You didn't mention OMAP, perhaps because TI are no longer developing new chips, but OMAP has great mainline Linux support. The main disadvantage with OMAP is the PowerVR GPU for which there are no free/open drivers.

Qualcomm has traditionally been a bad choice for privacy reasons. Their SoCs are known to have bad hardware design where the modem controls GPS, audio (including mic), RAM, NAND. If you choose a Qualcomm SoC without a built-in modem, it might be okay. Mainline Linux support for certain Qualcomm SoCs has improved in recent years and Freedreno (along with Lima) is one of the more advanced projects for free/open GPU drivers.

Have a look at my thread on mainline Linux devices which provides some info on which SoCs are currently best supported by mainline Linux. There are currently two 64-bit Qualcomm phones with some support: the LG Nexus 5X (MSM8992) and the Huawei Nexus 6P (MSM8994). Other 64-bit Qualcomm chips with mainline support can be found here.

Originally Posted by Feathers McGraw (Post 1535960)

I'd appreciate some input from anyone who knows something about different chipsets... what can we expect from the i.MX8 purism have chosen here?

In Chen's new qwerty slider concept discussion thread there was some good discussion about the relative merits of different chips:





I don't know enough to tell if the i.MX8 falls under one of the categories above, or if it's part of a completely different line of chips?

I would be interested in some informed opinions about how it compares to the competition! Obviously the point of this phone is that it's fully open, so I wouldn't expect the performance and battery life to be comparable, but it's still worth discussing.