from Hacker News

Runs on the Librem 5 Smartphone – Week 2

by yepthatsreality on 7/12/19, 1:40 AM with 74 comments

  • by dmix on 7/12/19, 2:26 AM

    GTK for a smartphone is an interesting choice. I'm curious if the Gnome team would ever commit to this.

    The use of a stylus in the video is a bit concerning though.

    Off topic but I hope Librem releases a high-end laptop in addition to their mid-tier one, ideally with a high performance AMD CPU. Something that could be the open-source friendly version of a Macbook Pro.

    The way they disable Intel ME and add hardware toggles for webcams/microphones, and their general good taste is a big draw for me.

    Edit: looks like Gnome is backing Purism's project. Neat. https://www.gnome.org/news/2017/09/gnome-foundation-partners...

  • by logicprog on 7/12/19, 2:59 AM

    I want to like Librem's smartphone, I really do. I like having control over my software, and I like being able to really understand how it works and tinker with it and stuff. But I have this sinking feeling that the Librem 5 is just vaporware, or worse, that it'll get released with a half baked UI and a barebones list of apps. On that latter one, I really don't see how they'll fix the problem. On the former, the thing is that the affordences for bad UI design are a LOT tighter on mobile devices and it's taken a long time for desktop Linux to get their game together. Plus, all of Librem's other stuff is over priced and a bit cheap looking, and I'm not sure I want a phone like that.

  • by meruru on 7/12/19, 3:19 AM

    This is incredibly exciting.

    For those that haven't seen it, here's a bullet list of the Librem 5 differentiators:

      + Does not use Android or iOS. The Librem 5 comes with the mobile version of our FSF-endorsed operating system PureOS by default, and is expected to be able to run most GNU+Linux distributions.  
  + CPU separate from baseband, isolating the blackbox that the modem may represent and allowing us to seek hardware certification of the main board by the Free Software Foundation.  
  + Hardware Kill Switches for camera, microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and baseband.  
  + End-to-end encrypted decentralized communications via Matrix over the Internet.  
  + We also intend the Librem 5 to integrate with the Librem Key security token in the future.

  • by learnfromstory on 7/12/19, 2:51 AM

    Just shockingly ugly. If you're going to do a pixels-under-glass UI, you really have to start with a toolkit that isn't awful, or you end up with the openmoko which looked exactly like these demos but 12 years ago. You end up with, in short, a phone where the user adjusts the volume using alsamixer in an xterm because the UI wasn't really thought through.

  • by liamcardenas on 7/12/19, 3:37 AM

    I’m sure people will disagree with this but I think they should focus on getting an easy way for people to target their devices with React Native, NativeScript, PWAs and every other cross-platform framework.

    That way they can much more easily acquire software. Seriously making an app from scratch is no small task, and often time isn’t worth it for such a small market.

  • by justforpurism on 7/12/19, 3:55 AM

    Registered just to post this. Love Purism, want it to succeed. But...

    IMHO, the effort is going to fail miserably, unless folks stop wasting time trying to build a phone UI, i.e. another attempt to build Android/iOS ecosystem. There were Sailfish, MER, Openmoko, and whatnot attempts to make a pure Linux-running cell phone. Just stop it. You will burn through your money doing half-baked UI, there will be no adoption, then no developers, then no apps, and thus no users.

    As per OP link, Purism just have shown that they wasted precious time on badly looking GNOME Clocks, Emacs, Password manager, a game, a half-baked music player, Torrent client (on a phone!), and Drawing app made with their native UI. What a waste of time to re-write (or port) all of this, all over again.

    The only surviving plan for any Linux-phone: make it web-centric. You have to port ONE app: Firefox. Make it fast, make it perfect. Then, automatically you will get:

    - Adoption. http://m.uber.com http://m.lyft.com/ work out of the box. I am not leaving home without the phone because it enables to access essential day-to-day services. Partner with companies that develop those web-based apps.

    - Adoption. Web-based music: Spotify, SoundCloud. Out of the box. Purism doesn't need to waste time on this. Just have pre-installed bookmarks to those apps. Partner with companies that develop those web-based apps.

    - Adoption. Endless web apps such as "Clocks", "Notepad", Games and drawing apps already exists. Purism don't need to waste time on this stuff. Just have pre-installed bookmarks for those apps. Partner with companies that develop those web-based apps.

    Once basic needs satisfied, those of us who need Emacs, will be able to port Emacs and Torrent clients themselves. Why waste your time, Purism?

    Focus on releasing the hardware, be different from other phones, be lean, get immediate adoption, community will fill the blanks.

  • by joey_bob on 7/12/19, 3:13 AM

    If someone were to develop an iphone-quality design with the same objectives as the librem 5, I'd pay $3000 for it. How much would the market shrink if that was the price of what would become the librem 5? It's rather niche to begin with, but there isn't any real competition the meets the same objectives, and I assert that the customer base has the money to afford it.

  • by mikece on 7/12/19, 4:07 AM

    Is there any reason why applications cannot be written for the Librem 5 with Flutter? The Flutter framework compiles to ARM binary and the UI is rendered with Skia, a C++ UI layer. It's not like a bunch of widgets would need to be written and supported on Librem, just the Skia layer. What am I missing?

  • by shmerl on 7/12/19, 4:09 AM

    I'd welcome more push behind Plasma Mobile for it. There is practically no progress now. It could benefit from moving towards more touch oriented design, Sailfish like, dropping lingering elements inherited from the desktop UI.

  • by jijji on 7/12/19, 2:34 AM

    Any demos of the phone making an actual phone call, sending an sms text message?

  • by panpanna on 7/12/19, 7:47 AM

    Has anyone here attempted to develop software for librem?

    Mind share your experience with us?

  • by dman on 7/12/19, 2:38 AM

    Any idea on when this ships?

  • by jplayer01 on 7/12/19, 8:17 AM

    What was the reasoning for going with Gnome/GTK instead of Qt?