I think your assessment is correct about the energy losses. I'm just not sure about the fix.

Directly buying from FP is a huge deal for me.

If they do, then migrate to a provider that offers what you need at that time. It's not like adding a new remote is hard.

This definitely gave me "road not taken" vibes and made me reconsider where I'd be, and more importantly how happy I'd be, if I'd done as Alan did.

Also, confusingly, I feel like I'm Alan all over again. I've been thinking of a massive career change (AKA, goose farming from the meme) a lot of recently due to AI sucking the fun out of my career.

Of course I knew that the Librem5 existed, but at the time I was thrown off by the price and the smell of "impending shitstorm" the device reeked of. Afterwards, I was too deep into the Pine side of things to pay attention to what was going on over at the Librem side.

It's sad that these two devices have derailed open phones so much. Obviously there's a ton of things to figure out, radio chief among them. But I fear that the corporations have learned from what happened during the "PC compatible" era of computing and openness will be a thing of the past.

I hope I'm wrong about that.

I haven't heard much bad about Purism. I was always more on the Pine side.

A quick search online didn't find anything. Can you give me a quick breakdown or link?

I respectfully disagree. Pine's MO was basically "create hardware and hope people create software for it". A bit tongue in cheek, but that's it. Which is fine as long as they're up front about it, which they are.

But in order for this to work, a community needs to form around the device. Pine doesn't have to be the ones to manage it, and some would say it's better if they don't, but they're surely a big part of it if for no other reason than they're the makers of the hardware. The infant PP community was doing quite fine until they announced the PPP and confused the hell out of everything. Couple that with some seriously brain dead choices (IMHO) around booting and charging, led to them not only torpedoing the pro but sinking the original PP as well. Probably in no small part because they split what little community had formed.

The pro was obviously rushed. I personally think they saw an easy way to grab some quick cash and took it.

Instead, call them. Insist to talk to a human. Corporate really doesn't like call center calls, and they usually have monitoring set up to track why people are calling.

Well, I fear that loophole is quickly closing with little fanfare.

Which isn't entirely a bad thing. The issues facing the world and the country are so much bigger than they used to be 200 years ago and aren't getting smaller. They require an entire team of educated people to fix. If only they weren't so corrupt. But since power corrupts, I'm not sure that's something that's even fixable at longer timescales.

I do love what the gram developer is doing though.

So hey, why not try something new.