Hacker News Reader

Comment by letstrynvm | Hacker News Reader

Wish them all the best, but I tried the latest firmwate image on my dev kit last week and although there's plenty of progress, many things are not there, at least on that image + platform combination.

No lte, no wifi, browser scrolls at ~10fps, browser crashes, display has some hw jittering if you look closely.

I guess some of these are solved on the production hw (they use a different lte module) but still, only consider it if you have a pain threshold or have booked to go into hypersleep for 18 mo.

View on HN

Developing good smartphone userland and OS is very software engineering resource intensive. You cannot do it on a shoestring budget. Even Nokia with its Maemo was only 80% there - and they were able to throw hundreds of software engineers on it. I was also part of one early smartphone development team where you had 150 people at its peak and they still could deliver the product. Not to mention OpenMoko.

Even when Librem delivers, it will be subpar UX to what people are used to. It is a trade off, but I feel only very hardcore enthusiastic are willing to take it.

That sounds about right for where they are in the development process right now. Anyone expecting a remotely 'consumer' device experience should be waiting for the Evergreen release at least. Only early adopters willing to deal with some pain should be jumping in right now.

I paid for a "dev kit"... it's not like I have unreasonable expectations. I went back to check it to figure out if I should buy an actual phone... I kept my money in my pocket.

I can handle quite a bit of dust and pieces coming month by month but I can't handle no wireless comms and a crashy and slow browser. At least the internet and the browser operation have to be reliable and fluid or nobody can use it for normal operations. I'll try it again in a few months.

But LTE and WiFi work just fine on my devkit?

What did you do to get them working? I flashed the latest image and no sign of them, even with a valid SIM.

The UI is being reworked right now to better fit the screen, but it's generally there in GNOME Settings (latest changes broke the password field and I think it's not restored yet, but you can fill it in by editing NetworkManager's config anyway). For LTE you just have to set the correct APN. I've just connected to the internet with LTE to test it and it worked; and I'm using WiFi connection daily.

Make sure your kill switches actually turn WiFi and LTE on. Also, the modem is generally way more stable when used with battery inserted, as USB might not be able to supply enough current.

Turning on power switches to the chips is pretty important!

It gives a hint about how manufacturing is, that the switch tops come out so late.

>LTE and WiFi work just fine on my devkit?

I don't know, do they?

Not sure what module they're using for the devkits, but you can check to see if your bands are supported here:

https://puri.sm/faq/supported-networks/

To see which bands your provider uses, check here:

https://cellmapper.net/

Which browser are they using?

It's the Gnome webKit browser Epiphany (aka Gnome web).

I'd prefer firefox but I don't have any real beef with it. Except on the dev kit the scrolling is more or less unusable. It might be a 'feature' of the dev kit since the imx8 runs hot enough to burn your hand on that due to hardware problems that shouldn't exist on the real device.

Is there a reason they wouldn't get Mozilla to help out with a FF mobile port? Seems like the obvious and symbiotic way to get this done.

I'm sure Mozilla would accept Purism's work if they did it, but even a lot of work for desktop Firefox (tabs in the titlebar, wayland) is done by Red Hat people.

That's true, there's a lot more to a partnership though then just the coding and it would still be beneficial for both.

Epiphany, GNOME's WebKit-based browser. Firefox doesn't resize small enough to fit on the screen.

Does that mean no extensions and thus no ad blocker? If so, do they have another ad block solution at the device level?

Epiphany has support for Easylist-based adblocking -- at least on the desktop version, I don't know about the mobile interface.

There's no distinction between the "desktop" and "mobile" versions of GNOME Web. It's literally the same code (compiled for the appropriate processor architecture), just at a different window size.

Since I am personally unfamiliar with GNOME’s toolchain for compiling apps for both mobile and desktop, I didn’t want to speak too confidently about the matter above.

So, all options shown in the preferences of the desktop version will automatically be shown in the preferences of the mobile version?

You can test it by shrinking the Epiphany's window while running its latest version on desktop.

Epiphany has a built-in adblocker (using normal adblock style rules).

> Firefox doesn't resize small enough to fit on the screen.

What exactly does this mean?

* I can make the FF desktop window super tiny

* I can do browser zooming down to 30%

* even if the chrome would obscure the webpage viewport I can go into fullscreen mode

* FF itself has a responsive design mode and ships with Iphone and other small form factors in the dropdown

I understand that it may be easier to tweak Gnome's browser for adding navigation gestures/url bar appearance, etc. But I can't imagine how FF wouldn't be able to display a web page in a way that fits the Librem 5 screen.

It can display a web page, but there's a long way from that to making the UI pleasurable to use on small touchscreen.

Can I ask what you mean by that? Firefox's core has been used on the mobile phone in multiple applications that function just fine and Firefox's desktop version is perfectly capable of resizing down to mobile phone sizes, even emulating a phone if you want.

There's no mobile version of Firefox that would work on GNU/Linux. There was one, but got ditched when Fennec got rewritten into being a native Android app.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com