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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

I'm concerned about the combination of size and resolution:

    Display: an LCD display that is 5.7″ at 720×1440 pixels

The size should be smaller, while the resolution should be probably higher.

They mention, that such resolution is caused by heat dissipation issues[1] (since they by design don't use integrated SoC). May be size is also caused by separate chips?

Regarding the browser, it would be nice to have something based on Servo, rather than Epiphany. Are there good mobile browsers that use Servo embedding and can work on normal Linux?

1. https://developer.puri.sm/FAQ.html#what-resolution

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About a Servo based browser: I plan to get my in progress-but-really-unusable-so-far Servo based phone UI (https://github.com/fabricedesre/servonk) working on the Librem 5. But honestly it's frustrating to see how little general web compat work is happening in Servo right now, where most of the team effort is directed to VR/AR use cases. I'm not blaming the team, but it's hard to believe in Servo outside of niche use cases right now.

Thanks for the link, that's very interesting and I hope it will be usable!

Why is Servo team not focused on general Web compatibility? That sounds like a major must do before anything else. Don't Mozilla plan to replace Gecko in Firefox with WebRender from Servo anyway, so how can they achieve it without good Web compatibility?

> Don't Mozilla plan to replace Gecko in Firefox with WebRender from Servo anyway...?

No they don't, they're replacing pieces of firefox with pieces developed from servo but there are no plans to ever replace it wholesale.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum

That's probably why they're focusing on the VR/AR stuff, to put that into firefox once it's ready since it'll be a new set of features entirely and not have any legacy version they need to maintain bug compatibility with too.

>> Don't Mozilla plan to replace Gecko in Firefox with WebRender from Servo anyway...?

> No they don't

It's in progress and due for Firefox 64 later this year (if projections below are current):

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Roadmap

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-f...

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/firefox-58-the-quantum-era...

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/Quantum_Render

WebRender is not a replacement for Gecko, it is replacement for the rendering subsystem of Gecko. As GP said they are replacing individual subsystems of FF/Gecko one at a time from Servo components. So the fact that Servo as a whole has major compatibility problems has no relevance to using Servo's rendering code in Firefox, as long as the rendering code itself works properly (which has obviously been a major focus of Mozilla for the past year or so).

All this being said, I won't be shocked if the end result of all of this work leads to Gecko being entirely replaced in a Ship of Theseus manner eventually. It'd let them get almost all the benefit of actually wholesale replacing it (they'll still end up with technical debt from the legacy interfaces) but they'll be able to get the benefits from it sooner than having to wait and essentially halt all other development to be able to bring it into place.

They do slash technical debt; for example, they did it with the add-on subsystem.

I'd really like to see an electron competitor built on Servo. Electron has made desktop experiences very accessible, but it runs like a dog.

Is 282.45 PPI really too low? I am pretty sure that at this size I can't see single pixels anymore.

May be. Nexus 5 which is almost 5 years old now, is 4.95" / 1080 x 1920. It runs various mobile Linuxes, and I was thinking to replace it with Librem 5, but going to bigger size and lower resolution is a question.

It's not the end of the world, but I was subconsciously expecting 1080p or thereabouts. I agree, that resolution in 2018, especially for a 5.7" panel feels low. I had both the Nexus 5 and 5x that were 1080p.

It started out as 5" and that was large. This was in a world in which phones had bezels, but I am not quite confident they can get their bezels small enough to make the 5.7" not ridiculous.

That's plenty of room with a decent window manager. I had a small laptop with that resolution for most of last year and was comfortable even without external monitors.

I hope so. I'll wait until some reviews of the final release.

Could it be that heating issues are also because of the choice of their UI toolkit?

It looked like they're writing their apps in gtk, using the CPU for any animation and rendering - as opposed to some OpenGL solution that would do this much more efficiently on the GPU..

For reference, Rendering a simple, animated bar chart using QtQuick canvas, at 720p@60fps maxed out our iMX6 cpus - while doing the same on the GPU took like 30% cpu and the result was much more smooth.

UI toolkit choice puzzles me. They should have used Qt or even partnered with Plasma Mobile to begin with. Regarding the GPU, they are supposedly working with Mesa/etnaviv, but it's in the very raw state so far. I don't think it even supports OpenGL 3.1 yet. And big question is about power management side of things.

I pretty much agree with your recommendations, but they didn't pick GTK+ per se — they wanted GNOME on a phone, so they picked GNOME and use its toolkit.

Choice of Gnome (vs KDE Plasma) is also questionable in my view. But I suppose they had some reasons.

Consistency across products - their PureOS runs Gnome.

c.f. Canonical running Unity on desktop and phone.

The (ever increasing) inflexibility, or perhaps more politely, extremely focused opinionatedness, of Gnome shell makes this seem an unfortunate choice for a project requiring so much adaptation and innovation.

GTK4 will use OpenGL for rendering

Ahh interesting.

Would love to see a comparison between gtk4 widgets vs. qtquickcontrols 2.0.

From the looks of it, gtk 4 seems to have come a long way since I last tried:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=slIhZwmMv1g

And more importantly, there seem to be fewer breaking changes for applications to leverage these improvements:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QzJHEpKdefA

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