Librem 5 Phone Progress Report

Re:Librem 5 Phone Progress Report by shmerl on Thursday January 18, 2018 @09:05AM (#16177062)

That's the point. No Android. They aren't going to make a whole new OS, they are using Linux but with conventional glibc and graphics stack (Mesa / Wayland). They are relying on Etnaviv: https://github.com/etnaviv

That's a good thing. There is more than enough Android around already, we need proper Wayland based mobile Linux with open drivers, that also works on a decent usable device (and that it's privacy respectful is a huge bonus too).

Jolla for example never opened up their SailfishOS despite multiple promises (it's just too hard and not a priority for them). So Librem 5 can be that option at last.

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Re:Librem 5 Phone Progress Report by Fnoord on Thursday January 18, 2018 @10:34AM (#16177846)

Would love to see OSes based on KDE Mobile or whatever it is called these days. Qt is a solid framework.

Fairphone Open [1] for FP2 is based on Android but completely open source. You can run it with GCM (which isn't open source) or without. You can run LineageOS (with or without microG), and there are unofficial ports of Ubuntu Touch and SailfishOS. The phone is also modular though the hardware is slightly out of date for 2018 standards.

[1] https://code.fairphone.com/projects/fairphone-2-official-rel...

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Re:Librem 5 Phone Progress Report by shmerl on Thursday January 18, 2018 @10:57AM (#16178048)

> Would love to see OSes based on KDE Mobile or whatever it is called these days.

Purism said, they are working with KDE developers to support Plasma Mobile on Librem 5.

I wish though Plasma Mobile would get rid of those archaic on screen buttons, and would adopt SailfishOS style swipes navigation. Or at least they should make that an option. KDE is after all well known for customization.

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Re:Librem 5 Phone Progress Report by distances on Thursday January 18, 2018 @12:32PM (#16179095)

> I wish though Plasma Mobile would get rid of those archaic on screen buttons, and would adopt SailfishOS style swipes navigation. Or at least they should make that an option. KDE is after all well known for customization.

I wish they won't, as it's hard to get right. In my personal opinion the Sailfish swipe UI was one of the probable reasons it failed in the market -- it was hard to explore, and error-prone to use.

Meanwhile the N9 swipes felt just right to me, so I think it's about having enough UX expertise at the design team. Which open source projects famously are short of.

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Re:Librem 5 Phone Progress Report by Apocryphon on Thursday January 18, 2018 @02:08PM (#16180267)

Things are different now, though. The release of iPhone X has finally made such UI gestures mainstream.

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Re:Librem 5 Phone Progress Report by shmerl on Thursday January 18, 2018 @03:23PM (#16181002)

Make it configurable, so users would be able to assign actions to any swipe and gesture. That should allow customizing it to your needs any way you want.

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Re:Librem 5 Phone Progress Report by distances on Thursday January 18, 2018 @04:53PM (#16181864)

That works for technically oriented people, so maybe in this case it'd be fine. But in general configurations are avoided in end-user applications for a good reason, as they increase complexity both for developers and users.

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Re:Librem 5 Phone Progress Report by shmerl on Thursday January 18, 2018 @07:54PM (#16183151)

KDE is famous for configurability while providing useful defaults at the same time. So it's only fitting.

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