Librem 5 July Update | Hacker News Reader

Librem 5 July Update

puri.sm

57 pointspksadiq21 comments

Interesting, they are building their own mobile compositor based on wlroots: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/phoc

This is the right way to do an open source phone by adopting existing modern desktop Linux tech. Instead of going your own Androidy path like Sailfish/Jolla is doing.

Yeah worst case scenario Gnome will be better off with some adaptive UI work.

Yeah. Though I also wish someone would tackle this from a hardware perspective too. I'm looking forward to being able to run various linux programs on a real linux phone, but many are never going to be touch-screen friendly let alone mobile-layout friendly. A phone with a little pointer nub and left-click/right-click buttons would be sweet to me...

I mean, I think if you can run real Linux programs, and a lot of your "daily use" stuff works with touch, you can connect a Bluetooth mouse/keyboard combo when you need it. (I already keep one in my car.) And being Linux, you can probably script a bunch of stuff (when using your keyboard) to "just work" when you're not using your keyboard.

The important part is you won't need to special case what you can run on a phone versus what you can run on a desktop. A lot of stupid/simple Windows apps I wish I could run on my phone. But even if you are on Windows Phone you could only run apps meant for it.

Maemo was originally based on desktop XOrg/Gtk/GNOME tech but with no real phones providing drivers for that stack I guess Sailfish felt like they had no choice but to adopt Android drivers.

Always enjoy reading these updates. It's refreshing for a company to explain their progress in this kind of technical detail, another bonus of a free/open source product. Congrats to the Purism team for the progress, looking forward to seeing the new Linux phone.

Does anyone who follows this more closely know what mapping support there will be? I worry that it will be hard to match the quality of Google/Apple Maps with free software. I've tried using OsmAnd, but it's just a terrible experience compared to commercial map apps. This is a big deal for me and I imagine many others, because losing the traffic data and turn-by-turn navigation of commercial map apps is a dealbreaker, but allowing me to get rid of these most invasive apps would be a huge selling point, and would probably get me to buy the device all on its own.

Good real-time traffic data is an emergent property of being an invasive platform. Maybe there’s a possibility of opting into position information uploading that goes to some open mothership(?) or decentralized mesh, but this is not going to ever be as good as google passively leveraging and aggregating its millions of phones in cars on the road.

OsmAnd definitely has some rough edges but it has rudimentary turn by turn navigation.

the latest shipping update is still Q3 2019 (so 2-5 months away) and yet the marketing page still has a lot of hardware that is TBD: memory, cameras, and battery.

who wants to bet it will be pushed back to 2020?

Which is my I'm not pre-ordering, I'm waiting till the final specs are released. Also I need to be able to view PDF documents, so probably gonna be a while.

Most web browsers can handle PDFs out of the box. Is this really a roadblock that isn't likely to already be workable on the Librem kit?

Also I'd be surprised if https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince wasn't easy to install if it's not included out of the box.

For PDF viewing, Evince seems to be working already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8YMc06RMrc

I remember Evince working on GNU/Linux phones already 10 years ago, so yeah, I wouldn't worry about PDFs :)

I've preordered and have no doubts in my mind that it'll be pushed back to Q4 or Q1/Q2 2020. I'm not really concerned about it releasing I think if they don't release it will be detrimental to the Purism image. Also I'm fine with the money I put down if it helps develop adaptive UI for Gnome and some better Linux driver support and nothing else. Hopefully we get a small Linux computer with a touch screen at the very least!

Not sure how you calculated 2-5 months. We're already in Q3 (Jul/Aug/Sep). Q3 ends in 79 days. So it's "0-2.5" months away.

They've continued to push that it will be released in Q3, even more so recently. And they've started producing daily videos of different software running on the dev kit. One of those videos also showed the actual phone, not the dev kit.

So although it says hardware is "TBD", I don't believe that is the case, and it seems very clear to me that they are confident, and intend to, release before the end of September atm.

whoops, you're right! i mixed up my Qs.

i hope you're also right that they'll make their Q3 promise. but i won't be surprised (or upset) if they push it back.

Have they said anything about PWA support? If PWA is supported and on par with Chrome on Android this would allow a lot of PWA-compliant web apps (like Twitter, Gmail, and many more) to be ready to go right away. While not "native" the app ecosystem would at least have a chance to be there at the time of release.

They're working on a browser, so yes... I believe PWA will be possible since they're just rebranded HTML+JS apps.

It looks like the UI is coming together nicely. My only question is what battery life will look like on these phones. I'm guessing terrible for the first gen.

This is so exciting! I can't wait to buy one.

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