Posted by speckx 2 days ago
Flop-Elon was the worst guy at the worst time in the worst position. It was 110% obvious windows mobile would flop. Everyone knew it, it was just a panic decision.
The reason some of them are grainy is that there's no denoising applied to them at all. The current GPU-based pipeline only does debayering, lens shading correction, highlight clipping, color matrix application, tone mapping and barrel distortion correction so far. You get the raws though, so you can apply whatever you want post-factum. Patches are welcome too.
If you didn't know, you could have asked.
The tram photo is arguably the best output of the lot and it's got a ton of problems by contemporary standards. Fun photo, if you didn't buy the phone for the camera and you want to hot rod it to get the best you can out of it, great.
Send that to any of the typical phone reviewers and the camera's going to get panned, probably universally unless someone wants to stake out a contrarian position for publicity.
"It's not bad for a Linux phone" isn't the expectation, we need a genuinely reasonably good device with good components.
No shit Sherlock. A processing pipeline written in a few weeks by someone who was just learning what color actually is while writing it, with lots of TODOs left around, can't compete with the state of the art? Who would have thought?
The post that started this subthread simply asked "Is this a good enough camera for you?", which is a valid question. For some (like me), the answer will be yes; for others, no. That's fine. I appreciate this link being posted because there's lots of really bad photos circulating out there coming from misconfigured software stacks that don't even do the most basic things you're supposed to do with pixels to get a viable picture, giving a much worse impression of hardware than deserved simply because of poor software. It was you who then suddenly showed up with your false "massive amounts of post-processing" claims and iPhone comparisons, as if anyone was claiming that it was comparable to iPhones. Take a short break and re-read what you wrote and what you've been replying to.
You're supporting my point. A device which first shipped seven years ago still requiring someone to properly configure a post-processing software stack to get viable pictures out of it (with no path to viable video) kind of makes my point for me. That the hardware can perform significantly better with post-processing is more of an indictment of the overall device than it is an endorsement of the camera hardware itself.
For me, from a camera standpoint (among others) the device isn't good enough to be a viable alternative to switch from Android (the post's topic), or from iOS (likely the most commonly used device family by HN readers). Even with your stack. As I said, your photos are the most convincing I've seen, at least the ones in the most forgiving circumstances. It's not personal.
As switcher targets go, the Librem 5 is a poor one. Ask any normal person to do what you call basic to get them looking like a midrange camera from a decade prior. And yet, when switching comes up, the same few suggest it as if it's a genuinely good option for anything but very niche cases.
No break needed. That's it.
Except it doesn't. The photos I showed are as they come by default out-of-the-box on the default OS the device ships with. You're just making things up again.
If it was actually strong at everything else, it may well have a shot as a second device, but the Librem 5 doesn't come close there.
That said, what's there already is enough for me to have plenty of fun with the camera anyway.
I had an iPhone 11 Pro Max in 2019 and its camera quality was miles ahead of the linked photos, even if you assume raw output and post-processing. (The video, as you note, is even worse.) The link provided are shill posts of photos shot mostly under highly favorable conditions, with massive amounts of post-processing happening with much newer tech. I'm looking at casual photos straight out out of my 2019 device and they're vastly better than these.
Linux phones aren't going to get better by pretending the experience is something it isn't, and telling people not to believe their lying eyes. If everyone's cameras were suddenly replaced with the Librem 5's, the number of camera quality complaints would explode.
It's not good enough for anything beyond novelty use.
They're fun photos and some of them are of pretty decent technical quality considering the device used, but switching from iOS/Android to Linux phone of the Librem 5 or PinePhone (/Pro) variety is a bag of hurt for anyone who isn't so committed they're willing to craft their personality around it with an almost religious-like zeal.
That's what's up with me here. Still, I appreciate your photos.
Edit: Check the comments. You've got a guy saying the PinePhone Pro is "there." Except, it's bad as a phone. Minor detail.
I stated the camera isn't up to snuff for me, your photos are the best counterexample anyone's posted, and they still aren't up to snuff for me. Also, decent video isn't optional in 2026. I remember upgrading a BlackBerry to finally get decent video. The whole thing is so fundamentally constrained that it will never be more than a niche novelty, barring new hardware and massively better supported.
But that doesn't stop the shilling. It's bizarre.
Of course we need better phones. Librem 5, the one I personally still consider the best out there right now, is now 6-7 years old! It wasn't a low-end device back then, but it wasn't high-end either, and time flies. Yet at the same time I keep seeing people going "I wish we had XYZ" when XYZ was something I was enjoying all these years already. And you know, these better phones won't come out of the Santa Claus' bag. If all the people complaining about the need of better Linux phone had actually bought one, we would already have their successors in our hands.
There's still a lot of work to do, but the usual reaction when people are playing with my phone is being surprised at how usable it appears ("this is a Linux phone? it looks like a normal one!"), so I do think we need to put more effort into informing people of what's already there, even if it won't satisfy everyone's needs.
Purism was a case study in how not to handle delays, and faulting consumers for being overly picky or not supporting the product financially ignores the broader context.
Some people may also object to buying a phone that struggled for years to...make phone calls. (And by some contemporary accounts still does.) It takes potato quality videos. It was an absolute mess as of 2025: https://forums.puri.sm/t/it-is-normal-for-the-librem-5-to-ha...
Its existence does not obligate anyone wanting a genuinely good device to exist to contribute to that project, and it's naive to think a lack of sales is what's prevented Purism from shipping a better device.
Original backers got it in 2020-2021. It took until 2023 to catch up with preorders made already after the original campaign ended.
> Purism was a case study in how not to handle delays
Agreed.
> faulting consumers
I haven't faulted anyone. I just made a "if I had a dollar for each time..."-style remark.
> It was an absolute mess as of 2025
You linked to a post about a faulty unit and about how another unit with exact same software didn't have the listed problems...
> it's naive to think a lack of sales is what's prevented Purism from shipping a better device
It's exactly what prevented Purism from shipping the successor so far. It's also what prevented it from keeping a whole team of developers hired that worked not just on the specific device, but on the entire software platform and whose work is now being used across various devices. The Librem 5 project was a massive cost sink that left its fingerprints all over the place across the GNU/Linux stack, and more sales was exactly what would be needed to let it continue at that pace. The reasons why it didn't sell well enough can be argued, but the inarguable fact is that more sales would bring more progress.
Edited to add: The people saying, actually, my device also reboots fairly often, do not inspire confidence.
Given fair phone exists, it should now be able to get all kind of apps anyone wants.
I'm surprised WhatsApp works on his non-Android OS?!