> My biggest question is if they use Halium/libhybrys at all,

That would be a showstopper for now, IMHO. Doing it with maintainable open source Linux drivers is the hard part of having a viable device, from everything I've seen.

Another concern are that I can't find who the developers are, nor even definitively what country they're based in. (I don't see it on their About Us page, and the GitHub repo contributors are hidden. I saw a reference to Sydney, but unclear.)

Also, it would be nice to have the option of a better hardware provenance than a generic whitebox(?) phone from some unidentified manufacturer in China. Even for individual hobbyist users, and certainly for corporate ones. (This is why I'd like hardware options combinations like Purism for the premium device, and a cheaper device that runs the same software but is still from a brand that at least has a reputation to preserve, like Pine64 or (ha) Google.)

I agree with you, and especially identify with the last sentence. However, I’m fed up with Apple and Google, and any alternative that doesn’t tie me to Google and has all functioning hardware and usable 5G or at least LTE with reasonable specs is a major win in my book. I’ve preordered the FLX1s. The FLX1, which is no longer in production, had a replaceable battery, but lack of a replaceable battery or non-pure Linux in an alternative phone certainly isn’t going to keep me chained to Apple or Google.

> My biggest question is if they use Halium/libhybrys at all

From what I have been able to tell, the folks behind Furilabs are also behind Droidian, which is Halium/libhybrys based. Furilabs/FuriOS is the commercial version of it.

It uses halium and libhybris. Flatpak apps work perfectly fine on my FLX1. I have no usability issues with the phone at all.

> postmarketOS has no hybris and everything works great, but no device has all the drivers

this is why halium exists. OEMs don't produce drivers beyond whatever kernel they ship with, so this is an attempt to build a system that leverages the crap they do ship.

> why stop at the OS?

Because the OS is the only thing you control. The reason the Librem 5 costs so much for a decade-old platform is because they didn't grab a predesigned device from another OEM. Doing everything yourself is going to be the only way to produce a first-class linux phone.

> Both GNOME Shell in the phone context and Plasma Mobile are evolutionary dead ends.

That's a hell of a hot take. Could you elaborate on why you think so?

That was always the challenge for computer phones, to get the phone part of the phone work. There's been many Wi-Fi only PDAs, non-calling data cards for those, non-calling but cellular-enabled ones, etc. before iOS/Android happened.

> but they get extra energy from this objecting-to-the-objections quality.

Should they not? It would be unfair "extra energy" if the comments were fair criticisms, but they're not in the spirit of hacker or entrepreneurial culture. The parent seems to be arguing that most of these comments are entirely ignoring who the product is for to leap to hardware comparisons pre-hoc. And I agree with that conclusion; there is nothing intellectually stimulating or helpful in a discussion about how a dev kit appeals to the broader consumer market.

Doesn't that just reinforce that they might as well have made a better device?

I'm not a case user but even I agree

More than rugged, add some knurling so it doesn't slip out of your hands so easily.

But is it really thin if there are parts that are thicker? The "depth" or whatever should be measured where it's thicker, not thinnest.

I guess I'm too much of an office worker to get that most people have their phones in their pocket, as soon as I sit down at my desk the phone gets placed on the desk.

And don't forget _overdimensioning_. Vendors love this because volume scales cubically with increase in any one of width, height and depth -- they're not the ones carrying the phone, but they can pack more features into one, quite literally. FOSS vendors more so since they need more ground to compete on (hardware being older and price being high enough because of economy of scale).

No economies of scale. Niche things will always be more expensive.

If you are small, there is no way around it if you want to grow.

"overpricing" is often higher cost of parts at lower quantity, future R&D and other costs that are much higher than for big corporation.

What is even more unfair is you making me say something I did not say. Extremely sad that nuance is no longer a part of this world.

yes. I use this one https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-star

Yes, but no "flagship" devices from mainstream brands, only specialty/novelty stuff. The last <6" flagship I'm aware of was the Asus Zenphone 10 in 2023.

The problem isn't that this hypothetical vocal minority is completely imaginary, but that consumers will repeatably gravitate toward the biggest and most glitterliest product. Only few realizes it's not what they want.

Hmm, or they fabricate the demand so they can fulfill it. SUVs anyone?

As the article points out, the iPhone 13 mini sold half as much as the other iPhone 13 models, while competing with the iPhone SE which was the same size at half the price. That isn’t exactly terrible.

It depends! You can make a website with a static text file or you can make a video run as the background. There are more ways to mess it up than to get it right, actually.

> how does that happen btw?

People write their sites in slow languages "because it's I/O bound anyway" and put content which could easily be static in a DB.

Serve even statical pages with direct DB access on every hit, using some slow and bloated JS/Python backend, and voila.

It's a WordPress site.

Static sites are not that popular, generally speaking.

Anyone competent can put a static site up on CF pages or even a lame VPS and serve huge amounts of traffic just fine. That’s not what they do.

Actually useful archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250920071806/https://furilabs....

> The FLX1s from Furi Labs runs a fully optimized Linux system called FuriOS, packing a lightning fast user interface, 3 hardware switches for microphone, camera and modem/gps, and a privacy centric approach like no other.

https://furilabs.com/shop/flx1s

"Error establishing a database connection"

So it only works fine if you don't care what a FLX1s is.