They're working with UBPorts and KDE to get Ubuntu Touch and Plasma Mobile running on the phone. PureOS is where they do their work, but they're made a point of trying to upstream everything. They're doing it right.
Re:End of Year Librem 5 Update
by calvinmorrison on Wednesday January 09, 2019 @03:19PM
(#18868421)
They're not building their own OS, they're building a few apps and dealing with hardware specific driver issues - but otherwise a lot of stuff is projects that already existed and needed improvements (which they have done upstream) or working directly with those upstream projects.
And updating libraries so they can re-use existing apps in a phone context, like GNOME Contacts and Web.
I LOVE this approach. Responsive gnome. It seems essential to me anyway, allows for tablets and any form factor you like.
That, and they take advantage of decades of work put into GNOME.
Collaboration!
To emphasise, I think this is far less work than it would be to actually get UBPorts to a point where you could reasonably ship it on your device to match customer expectations.
I think skipping UBports was the right call. UBports is too design constrained and they shell they've been working on in its place uses much better design and should support a much wider variety of applications OOTB.
Full disclosure: I am the maintainer of a critical open-source component that influenced this design decision.
Well, and I would MUCH prefer debian over some ubuntu-based (or influenced) thing.
(thank you for wlroots!)
PureOS (which is the OS that will ship on the phone) is built on top of Debian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem#Operating_system -- so they're already "standing on the shoulders of giants"
This market is too small and fragmented to have the wasted effort. Its difficult enough to build the open hardware device, no need to split energy / IQ by also worrying about the OS.