If you’re getting concerned about how much of your privacy is sucked up and used by the likes of Google, Apple, Facebook, etc., you probably should be.  There are a lot of people out there who are getting sick of being taken advantage of by tech companies. The free (as in Freedom) open-source software community has been aware of the advantages of giving full control of technology software and hardware over to the users themselves and that’s what the Purism Librem 5 phone is all about.

It doesn’t run Android or iOS at all.  It runs “Pure OS” which is a modified Linux distribution based on Gnome 3 and Debian.  Purism has put a lot of work into making Pure OS capable of working both on their laptop computers and now on the Librem 5 smartphone.

The Librem 5 has been in development for years, and now the first batch is finally shipping for those who had pre-ordered it a long time ago. Now, this is the “Aspen” batch which means it’s still kind of a work in progress. These devices have: individually milled case, loose fit, varying alignment, unfinished switch caps (hand crafted).  Later batches as described here will include case refinements and software refinements as the months progress.

Here’s a video of the first Librem 5 to come off the assembly line:

You can also check out some pictures of the Aspen version of the Librem 5: