this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
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I can't believe it mentions the Librem 5 and absolutely nothing about its sordid history of scamming customers. Friends don't let friends purchase a Librem 5.
Some more context would be helpful (to let people make up their own minds). I've looked into PinePhone and Jolla, but I've only heard about the other brands listed.
Sorry, I should've given something. I linked to a small taste of it below after you wrote this, but it runs deeper than that. Delay after delay for years (even pre-COVID), people e.g. having to contact their AG to get a refund on a phone they've been waiting literal years for (this one didn't contact their AG; they just waited two years for a product they never received and an additional four for a refund), hardware that's functionally equivalent to a phone from c. 2013 (plus abysmal battery life), etc. The refund stories are absolutely rampant; this is not a one-off. Honest businesses do not do anything even close to this.
Overall not a business you want to let hold nearly $1000 hostage.
They had an ambitious project of designing a phone from scratch and ran into complications when covid hit just like other manufacturers, causing further delays. They eventually shipped the phone, and it does as advertised.
You can order today and it will arrive in a few weeks. It's still the best GNU/Linux phone available today (which says a lot), can easily flash multiple distributions on it.
They intentionally, systemically withheld refunds from customers who'd been waiting years over schedule for a phone, and I'm sorry, I didn't realize COVID-19 was responsible for them scamming their backers in 2019. Mind that the ship date announced August 2017 was January 2019.
Fuck the fuck off with this disgraceful apologia. Either you know better and are preying on people who are less familiar, or you should know better for how trivial it is to find this information.
People who go into a crowdfunding campaign expecting either a product or a refund with no risk for just one or neither, aren't the right audience for and shouldn't be participating in crowdfunding.
The delays and refund denials were not ideal, and perhaps they could have handled that better, but picking between complete insolvency delivering no product to anyone vs delivering the product to people who crowdfunded and pre-ordered, is the lesser of the two "evils" if people want to call it that, especially given the reality of the situation headed into COVID-19.
Okay, even if you assume this caveat emptor bullshit excuse to be the case: these refunds were not nearly limited to crowdfunding campaign backers. These were people who saw Purism advertising a finished product that they could preorder/order. This is the same position as if I'd go to Fairphone's website, order a Fairphone 6, never receive it, request a refund, and either get denied repeatedly or ghosted indefinitely.
You can't "buyer beware" a legally established American company advertising a product. That's just called a scam. And that's already generously ignoring the crowdfunding backers they scammed by giving zero transparency to.
Its amazing the complaints you get around crowdfunding. Its a gamble to begin with and anything that actually manages to refund in the end if it goes south is a success not a failure. Anything that actually delivers even if late is a massive success. Like if you judged every company by how well it met its internal timelines they would all be shit. crowdfunding is just more transparent.