Adventures of porting PostmarketOS to the Librem 5 | Hacker News Reader

Adventures of porting PostmarketOS to the Librem 5

puri.sm

56 pointsollieparanoid12 comments

I hate to say this, because I really hope the succeed, but how have they done at things other than marketing & demos? Are functional phones in people's hands? Do they make calls yet?

I can't speak for the Librem 5, but I have the latest PinePhone Community Edition with PostmarketOS. It works out of the box for most things, including calls. The cameras and HDMI output aren't working right now, but fixes are coming soon for these issues (like next week).

Firefox works well with several tabs open. There are UI issues, but this is to be expected since practically no Linux desktop apps are designed for small screens. However, it's perfectly capable of running a responsive web app or two.

The phones exist and kind of work, but they’re not really functional as a phone. They seem to be riddled with issues affecting all but the most basic of functionality. For example web apps are supposed to be a big thing for the Librem 5 but it can barely render web pages from what I’ve seen in recent videos.

Firefox works just as well as it does on desktop Linux for rendering web pages - controls/ui are obviously still an issue but the rendering works perfectly well: https://puri.sm/posts/desktop-firefox-in-your-pocket-with-th...

Calls work: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Cellul...

This whole post was written because of a functional phone in a non-Purism person's hand. And yes, they have been making calls just fine for almost a year now.

Frequently asked questions about this phone: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...

Epic. I love this project. It’s such good work and the right things are being done.

ha that fan mounted by wires nice

also this is really cool to see, can't wait till the Linux Desktop OS phones have higher hardware specs

What exactly do you miss in terms of specs? It seems fine to me.

See also my earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24411681

3GB is not a lot, I would like to be able to attach the phone to keyboard/mouse and a big monitor and use it as a "portable desktop". I realize that's a big ask. But you have the flagship samsung phones(I realize they're $2K or whatever) that have 12GB of RAM in them... that's the kind of RAM I'm looking for even 8GB is almost not enough.

Granted I imagine you can't spin up VMs on these mobile processors, maybe... I'm on web-side dev so I guess I don't need too much to work with but RAM is usually the problem for me, even with a tiling manager.

I will also add, it's probably one of those "fantasies" that may not make sense. How often do you have a setup somewhere that's just a monitor/keyboard/mouse and you bring your phone to dock with it. Maybe it's very specific instance it happens. But I do like that idea of a "full compute" from mobile. Which again "use a cloud IDE etc"... but idk, would be cool, one device.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com