22 ms·

PureOS is convergent

399 points by iBelieve 8y ago

mdgrech23 8y ago
I've got to switch to your laptop and your phone to get the benefit of being in sync? No thanks. Not worth it to me.
- 0815test 8y ago
  What? They're working on the GNOME mainline, so any computer running that desktop environment will benefit from their work. As for the mobile environment, there is no obstacle to it running on e.g. pmOS when it's ready, so any pmOS-supported device would benefit to some extent.
- meruru 8y ago
  No, you switch to their products because you agree with their goals and want to support the cause. The benefits are a bonus.
  - sebastos 8y ago
    To each their own and all that, but this method of driving adoption never works. Virtually nobody makes decisions that way when they're shopping for a product that is important to their everyday life. This was Tesla's big insight in the car market. Pre-Tesla electric cars were all ugly, terrible vehicles that apologized for their own existence. They wanted to sell themselves based on the fact that they were good for the environment, while never compromising those ideals to make them, you know, actually nice to drive. But that was never going to catch on, because very few people are so idealistic that they will suffer an annoyingly bad product in exchange for virtue. People will do that all the time with little stuff, but not with big ticket items that they use a lot. So the designers of early electric cars ironically cemented their negligible impact on the environment by refusing to compromise their ideals, because the cars never became popular. Tesla came along and realized that what they had to do was make electric cars something you _wanted_ to drive. Because they were luxurious, and fast, and sexy looking. The fact that they were virtuous was just gravy. So if your statement is a good summary of their strategy, then they've got it backwards. You never win adopters by making crappy things that support a good cause. You win adopters by making things that do their job well, and support a good cause as a bonus. And presumably even idealists want adopters, so they should revisit that :)
- Insanity 8y ago
  How is this different from buying into the 'apple ecosystem'? It's just a different ecosystem. Not saying that you agree with doing so for apple, but other people clearly do so there might be a market for it.
reddotX 8y ago
remember Ubuntu Touch?
- amiga-workbench 8y ago
  What about it? UBports is still under development, Canonical just bailed out because they wanted to cut their losses and jump for an IPO.
api 8y ago
Lots of haters here. This company is trying to build a real alternative to the Apple/Google/MS oligopoly based on open source and respect for privacy. I'm really really tempted.
- krageon 8y ago
  At this exact moment there's three comments including yours. What are you referring to, exactly?
  - hereiskkb 8y ago
    I guess this person's definition of "lot" is a bit different from ours.
  - scld 8y ago
    probably "here" as in HN at large
  - meruru 8y ago
    There's a dead comment too. Before his post there were only negative comments. The important part of his comment is not the first four words though. We should probably not focus on that.
  - asdkhadsj 8y ago
    Priming the tribalism lines, I'd guess. We seem to yearn for our turf wars to the degree that we help them along. Not sure why.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  I'm not seeing many haters here. I am seeing a lot of people raising the issues they see with the idea, but that's not hating. For a project like this to be successful, people need to point out the problems it brings so that solutions can be found.
dcdevito 8y ago
This is nice, but what problem does it solve? Mobile and Desktop operating systems solve different issues on their own. Ubuntu tried this - how'd that go? Second issue is: how do I use it? How can I install it on MY devices? I'm all for privacy and I want to is it, just seems like a dream and it will never come to fruition
- meruru 8y ago
  It solves bug #1 This bug is widely evident in the PC industry. Steps to repeat: 1. Visit a local PC store. 2. Attempt to buy a machine without any proprietary software. What happens: Almost always, a majority of PCs for sale have Microsoft Windows pre-installed. In the rare cases that they come with a GNU/Linux operating system or no operating system at all, the drivers and BIOS may be proprietary. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
  - masklinn 8y ago
    > It solves bug #1 It doesn't do so anymore than ubuntu already does.
    - meruru 8y ago
      It does so more directly by being a PC without Microsoft Windows pre-installed or proprietary BIOS. Almost always, a majority of PCs for sale have Microsoft Windows pre-installed. In the rare cases that they come with a GNU/Linux operating system or no operating system at all, the drivers and BIOS may be proprietary. Ubuntu helped enable Purism to exist and they are great for that too.
      - masklinn 8y ago
        > It does so more directly by being a PC without Microsoft Windows pre-installed or proprietary BIOS. Ah, so it does so by redefining the inconvenient bits completely out of bug #1.
SeripisChad 8y ago
I keep looking at their products (laptop & phone) and can't pull the trigger based on what seems like a lack of apps/UX. I really want have better privacy and support companies with that in their DNA. I almost purchased a black-phone before. I really think sandboxing built-in emulator for android apps has to occur for the phone to get traction. I think i'm their ideal consumer and still can't see the value yet. I'm a technical person who is willing to deal with some issues/trade-offs for privacy, but still can't reach the tipping point to purchase. I also think this a place where duckduckgo could partner with with their services. I think most consumers wants things to be polished and just work.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  > I really think sandboxing built-in emulator for android apps has to occur for the phone to get traction > I think i'm their ideal consumer and still can't see the value yet I don't think you are their ideal consumer. They're appealing to the Stallmans, the people who aren't looking to replace their smartphone, but for which this would be one of their first. I have heard someone say about the Pinephone (similar project): "I don't want a smartphone. But I want this. " I do think they could vastly expand their appeal by adding Android emulation, but I have a feeling using the (which seems like the) market leader (Alien Dalvik) would be some licensing hassle, as you'd want to allow people to install their own distro and still use it. Add to that the whole (admittedly important) thing about everything being open software.
  - freeone3000 8y ago
    Acknowledging that missing Google Play Services is a big deal and will in fact miss most apps that people want when they think "android", you could do it with AOSP which is mostly Apache-licensed. As for having to install Google Play Services yourself, lineageos users don't seem to mind.
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    > I don't think you are their ideal consumer. They're appealing to the Stallmans, the people who aren't looking to replace their smartphone, but for which this would be one of their first. That's certainly part of it, however I do have an iPhone currently, (seems like a better, if less than ideal option than Android), however am not happy about the locked down nature of iOS. Free software smartphones are necessary simply because they're the frontier the PC was in the 80s.
AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
My primary concern with this is that different applications are inherently optimized for the platform on which they were originally designed. There are some applications that have a very dense UI because there's simply alot of functionality that the program handles (think of a video editor, an IDE, etc). Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just seems silly, and I fear that in the name of making "everything work everywhere", we're going to compromise a bunch of apps that worked beautifully on one platform in favor of making them work adequately on several platforms. I mean, if someone said, "I've successfully ported Vim to Android!", my first thought would be, "Why in god's name would I want to run vim on my phone?"* * Ruling out, of course, someone plugging their phone into external KVM.
- masklinn 8y ago
  > There are some applications that have a very dense UI because there's simply alot of functionality that the program handles (think of a video editor, an IDE, etc). Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just seems silly And beyond that, platforms have affordances which you should want to leverage. A smartphone has a very direct and tactile interaction model, but my computer pairs an extremely precise pointing mechanism with a good way to input oodles of text and chord shortcuts.
- fwip 8y ago
  >"Why in god's name would I want to run vim on my phone?" To be fair, I've used vim on my phone over SSH and it was actually a pretty good experience. Editing is a bit more deliberate of an affair than with a hardware keyboard, but still easier than trying to visually select text on the touchscreen, and no complex chorded keybindings to try to enter.
  - effinjdent 8y ago
    Your phone has an escape key? Or did you rebind it?
  - jimktrains2 8y ago
ktpsns 8y ago
Don't the screenshot just show the GNOME desktop environment?
- detaro 8y ago
  The blog post is about improvements to GNOME and GNOME apps, not that surprising that the screenshots are of GNOME then?
sciurus 8y ago
Here's a report of the effort involved with making the Subsurface dive log desktop application run on mobile as well. The tl;dr seems to be that 1) it was a lot of work 2) users don't like the result very much https://lwn.net/Articles/780031/ https://lwn.net/Articles/780031/ There's a huge mismatch between how users want to interact with desktop and mobile applications that makes convergence really hard to do effectively in a single codebase.
- magissima 8y ago
  A lot of the issues mentioned there stem from platform differences though. The packaging hurdles and out-of-place UI style wouldn't be an issue on a convergent platform, though the difficulty and slight ugliness of QML/Kirigami wouldn't change.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  I saw the presentation, lack of experience with mobile development naturally doesn't produce high-quality results. I remember there were some statements how things work, related to issues they faced, which were plain wrong.
wjoe 8y ago
That's cool, and it's good to see work going on in more fundamental building blocks of Linux like Gnome to support mobile and reactive UIs. I always felt like this was the biggest blocker to using a Linux system on handheld devices - having a good ecosystem of open source projects that work for that, and having the ability to pick your own desktop environment and components rather than having to have an "all in one" solution equivalent to Android. Admittedly I know that isn't a killer feature for average users - they do want the all in one solution. But having these things available makes it easier for a company like Purism to build a product using existing software. It feels like this announcement is missing a step though. What can we do with this? Does this allow plugging your phone into a monitor and then running your phone apps in larger windows (eg, the opposite of what's shown in the videos). The idea of having the same programs running on your phone and laptop is nice in theory, but I'm quite happy with my own custom Linux setup on my laptop, I don't want to install PureOS on there. Of course, much more work will need to be done in other programs to support this. The Gnome Web example looks really slick, and it's great to see this sort of 'responsive design' applied to native application interfaces - Android took a step backwards in this regard. But on desktop I'd rather use Firefox, and they have entirely separate builds for desktop and mobile. I wonder if Mozilla have any plans to support this?
- 0815test 8y ago
  > ...I'm quite happy with my own custom Linux setup on my laptop, I don't want to install PureOS on there. PureOS is just Debian with a few tweaks. This work is being done as part of the GNOME mainline branch, so any GNOME user is going to benefit from it down the road. And as "alternative" Linux desktops (MATE, Xfce, LXDE) transition to GTK3+, users of these environments will likely be able to make use of it, as well.
  - anoncake 8y ago
    LXDE transitioned to Qt, under the name LXQt.
  - wjoe 8y ago
    Exactly, and this is why it's an important development. But the article starts out by saying it's allowing "applications to run on both the Librem 5 phone and Librem laptops, from the same PureOS release." which is sort of missing the point - this isn't about about buying a phone and laptop from them so that you can use their software on both, but an important step on Linux for handheld devices. Good to see that Gnome are involved in this themselves too, and it's not some Purism fork of Gnome.
_bxg1 8y ago
I've become unenthused about this software "dream". Having spent years designing and building UIs on the web, what I've learned is that: 1) Convergence works great for "casual" apps - messaging, stores, content feeds, etc.; anything where the amount of stuff you need to see on screen at once doesn't need to be especially large. But the web already does a great job of making this type of application both responsive and cross-platform. 2) Advanced, dense professional tools will never adapt automatically to mobile screens in any meaningful way. And frankly, these are all I find myself installing natively on my desktop anymore. The vast majority of software these days falls squarely into one of these two camps, and neither seems to benefit much from the prospect of convergence.
- _bxg1 8y ago
  The key factor, I believe, is how much needs to be shown onscreen at the same time. Your newsfeed can be compressed to a smaller screen because you can simply show less of it, without sacrificing the core goal of the view. Whereas, consider a desktop app with multiple panes that show different information about the same subject. The default way to condense this would be to arrange the panes into a single vertical column that you could scroll up and down. But if you need to see them all at once, this adaptation is useless. At some point there are only so many physical inches of screen space.
- maxsilver 8y ago
  > Convergence works great for "casual" apps - messaging, stores, content feeds, etc.; But the web already does a great job of making this type of application both responsive and cross-platform. I'd argue this is where Convergence actually works best. (Especially the way Windows does it, anyway). For most people, "casual" apps are 95% of what they need a computer for. And the web does a good job, but not a great job, at making these apps responsive and cross-platform. Usually, these applications sacrifice lots of performance and/or usability and/or reliability, just for the benefit of being able to run in a browser. Which is fine if that's a trade-off you want to make, but this is usually not being done out of benefit for the user. Convergence can help fix part of this, by reducing the cost of native app development even further while preserving the majority of the quality/performance/usability benefits native apps provide.
presscast 8y ago
What's the state of running linux natively on Mac these days?
- aeroevan 8y ago
  It used to be much better (I run linux on my 2013 MBP, and used to run it on my 12" powerbook back in the day), but I think there's been some progress on the newer MBPs: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
- iBelieve 8y ago
  I used to run Linux quite well on a 2013 MacBook Pro, then I got a new 2016 MacBook Pro through work, and ran into tons of issues and finally gave up running Linux on it and just use Linux on my home-built desktop. Issues included the keyboard not working out of the box, suspend not working quite right, issues with the dedicated+integrated GPUs, etc. I don't know the current state of Linux on recent MacBooks, but here are the two GitHub repos I had used: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux and https://gist.github.com/roadrunner2/1289542a748d9a104e7baec6a92f9cd7 https://gist.github.com/roadrunner2/1289542a748d9a104e7baec6...
- rinchik 8y ago
  linux natively on Mac? Why? whats the point?? the experience will be just horrible and 60% of the hardware will be idle, unused or just incompatible. You'll get an overpriced Thinkpad wrapped in gorgeous Mac's case. The amount of details, little "sprinkles" that average Mac and MacOS users take for granted is greatly underrated. When you look at the stats from all native available hardware, sensors etc, it really feels that Macs are comparable to space shuttles, not a single OS can come even close to support all this (or will be allowed to)
  - bildung 8y ago
    > The amount of details, little "sprinkles" that average Mac and MacOS users take for granted is greatly underrated. Especially those sprinkles that get stuck under the keys ;)
solidrake 8y ago
I wish this don't turn out like the Ubuntu Phone Convergence dream.
exabrial 8y ago
This is incredible. I've been waiting for a commercially supported Unix/Hardware vendor since Apple products have tanked in Quality under the new CEO.
rossdavidh 8y ago
This reminds me of the idea of "wouldn't it be great if we could use the same programming language for frontend, backend, and database queries". Well, maybe, but in practice not really. They are doing different kinds of things, you will have to use them differently, it doesn't really help all that much to have the same language. It SOUNDS like this would be really helpful, until you get it, and then discover that it doesn't really help all that much, because what matters most is not the language syntax, but the problem space. Laptops and smartphones are made for doing different kinds of things. The real-estate requirements are different, as are the typical use cases, and even in the case where you solve them both with, for example, dynamic web pages, you still end up coding for both use cases separately, you just now have it all stuffed into the same codebase, which is harder in many cases instead of easier. I believe Microsoft has been trying to make all OS usecases the same for decades. I believe they have not succeeded, not because Microsoft is deficient somehow, but rather because it's not, fundamentally, a good idea.
- robto 8y ago
  You can live that dream in clojure land! Clojurescript on the front end, Clojure on the backend, and datalog/honeysql for the database if you'd like. And it is awesome! After using a stack like this I'm spoiled for the slog that is developing in separate languages for each of those things. I think that dream is possible with OS usecases as well, it's just that nobody has made it work yet. And I can't think of a better way to eventually get there than to build it slowly out of free and open source software. It might take a while, but since people have the ability to adapt the software to their needs when it is free, I'm confident with time that it will serve those needs.
  - rossdavidh 8y ago
    I'm glad it's working for you. My usual work involves python, javascript, and occasional SQL, and really the syntax is not that much of an issue. The problem space difference matters a lot more (for me) than the syntax (which an IDE can help me with anyway). I think part of the motivation was also managers thinking they could easily shuttle developers between frontend, backend, and database work, and that has mostly not worked out, because what takes time to learn about each is not the language, it's the problem space and the tradeoffs. But, if it's working out for you, I'm glad it is. I was not impressed.
tobiaswk 8y ago
Was very interested in their stuff. I was very disappointed when I saw a demo of the current state of Librem 5 running on development hardware. It did not look good. Laggy and slow. Very bad UI/UX.
- neilsimp1 8y ago
  I was a little disheartened as well, but that video was made early on in development. There was and still is time for optimization. I don't think the hardware is incapable of a smooth user experience. It's a software problem.
moron4hire 8y ago
Windows has had this with .NET apps for... Oh, pretty much since there has been a .NET. I had written several apps for Windows CE that ran both on desktop and mobile (same EXE file, even). Today, you can do it with UWP. It's a shame Windows Phones didn't take off. They had a great UI paradigm and I think Microsoft has done a lot of very hard work that goes mostly unappreciated in the development world, just because Google's reputation is still based on a decade-old memory of their (never official) motto "don't be evil". Microsoft hasn't been the "Halloween Papers" company for longer than Google has been a company, period. EDIT: I'm not saying MS isn't an evil corporation. I think all corporations get to some degree of evil proportional to their size. But for some reason, Google and Apple don't get that same evaluation, getting some sort of pass, that I think is worse in the specific case of Google (being an ad-tech company). We are collectively missing out on a lot of inovation and market diversity because of this cognitive dissonance.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > They had a great UI paradigm Many people liked that paradigm. I am not one of them.
  - moron4hire 8y ago
    We can probably agree that it was at least a little better than just cramming Gnome into a small screen, right?
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Yeah, as someone who still carries an HP Elite x3 and uses some of the same apps on my phone and my desk, I found the claim of being "first" Purism made here to be... hilarious.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  I loved my Lumias, still use one of them as my secondary phone. And also like UWP a lot, although its implementation was rather clusmy with the whole DevDiv vs WinDev issues.
sinuhe69 8y ago
To be frank, I don’t see the benefit of convergence. Admittedly, one code base is cool and convenient, sure but if one considers the additional cost of design, maintenance and the loss of the optimal user experience, I think convergence is rather a minus. A small touch screen requires a totally different convention of user interactions as a big screen with only mouse and keyboard support. It’s simply the reality. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel (admittedly a new and shiny one), why don’t we just stick to the well proven approaches and design different UIs and front ends for different platforms? The bulk of the codes would go into the common business/security layers anyway. With CI/CD, each user would have his/her app with the same functionality but different UI for the optimal user experience without much headaches or additional burden.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Skunkleton 8y ago
  > I don’t see the benefit of convergence. To me the benefit is not to have a single application that works both with a touch screen and a mouse/keyboard. Rather, the benefit is to have a single filesystem that I can access with both touch screen apps and mouse/keyboard apps. This way I could for example create a grocery with a mouse/keyboard, then take my phone and check items off with a touchscreen. There are lots of things we rely on the cloud for that would be better served by a "convergent" environment imo.
  - thekyle 8y ago
    I use Syncthing right now to achieve the effect of having a shared file-system across all my devices. It works really well and since it doesn't rely on any sort of cloud or client-server architecture it even works offline if you're on the same network. https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
  - gcbw2 8y ago
    Lol. And this pipe dream of magically converting apps to phone doesn't even address this use case of sharing the data. They assume the linux applications will be cloud locked-in like traditional ios/android apps.
meh206 8y ago
I just hope that better touchscreen / tablet support is realized from the efforts put forth in this project!
wanderfowl 8y ago
The exciting part of this to me is not the ability to run the same software on two devices, but the potential to run two 'kinds' of software on one single device. This unlocks what is for me the most appealing computing fantasy: I have exactly one device to compute with. At home or work, I plug it into my dock, where it pairs to an eGPU/monitor, external storage, keyboard, and mouse, and is my desktop computer. There, I can access the 'pro' level apps we're discussing below. On the couch or on the go, maybe I slide it into a bigger touchscreen with some extra dumb batteries, and it's now a tablet. Throw in a keyboard case, and now it's a laptop. And if I'm sitting on the bus or walking to work, it's my phone, and I can edit today's lecture right there, or access all my files. Maybe I'm not firing up emacs or MATLAB, but it's still there if I needed to. This, to me, is the fantasy of convergence. And considering we're now currently paying $4000+ for the trio of a laptop, tablet, and smartphone, I suspect one could create something pretty compelling and high-end and still feel like a bargain to many.
- mstibbard 8y ago
  I completely agree with your goal definition of convergence. The ability to have one device for all your computing needs. I don't expect to be able to do everything on a 5-6" phone screen, but I should be able to connect my phone to a monitor (or dock) and be able to do everything. The closest thing to this on the market is Samsung DeX but it's still incredibly limited.
  - mycall 8y ago
    or a GPDWIN2 with 4G card.
- HeWhoLurksLate 8y ago
  Outside of Intel Phi, is there anything like an eCPU? That would be really cool, and could be exactly what we need. Back before Thunderbolt, I used a mini-PCI-express to PCIE adapter for more GPU power. This was great for games, but I immediately became CPU-bound, which wasn't so great. To fix this, you could have something like Big.Little but where the Big cores are external and only used when connected. Heck, then you could do something like a Big.Medium.Little architecture, where the phone's integrated Big.Little bows to the higher IPC cores in the eCPU device. In this way, you would be able to have something that was a "soul" device that had all your settings and stuff on it, with expandable CPU & GPU computing resources. Expanded storage would also be pretty neat, but then you'd have to figure out what did and didn't need access when you were away from your "exosuit".
samirm 8y ago
>If you’ve ever had an app on your phone that you wanted on your laptop, you’ve wanted convergence. Isn't that just called portability?
Ericson2314 8y ago
I wish they just focused solely on the hardware, then used the die-hard fan's money to develop the software. I'm going to run NixOS on this phone (maybe with an entirely CloudABI userland), and it's going to be better than their distro. Yeah their apps will be useful in that context, but I would be OK with rewriting them too.
dharma1 8y ago
I worked on this stuff for Ubuntu. I think this can work pretty well for some classes of apps - browsers, chat/messaging apps, voice/video calling, terminal, contacts, gallery, music player etc - relatively light weight (at least in terms of interactions) apps. Android/ChromeOS and iOS/MacOS are already moving to this direction for these classes of apps. It doesn't work so well (or is more difficult to execute well, or at all) on apps with very dense UI - video editing, 3D design, IDEs, interface design apps, CAD etc An aside - I'm not sure I'd use GTK+ for this. Why not Qt, or something like Flutter?
- saturn_vk 8y ago
  Why not gtk+ though?
- gcbw2 8y ago
  > An aside - I'm not sure I'd use GTK+ for this. Why not Qt, or something like Flutter? This is why ubuntu phone tanked. Trying to be too smart and centralizing. Librem5 phone will probably succeed on this but not for the reasons their marketing people think (convergent apps with magic! ha!). PureOS will be as irrelevant tomorrow as it is now. But their phone, being a proper linux phone like android never was, will have some small chance of success after the community buys into it and start porting a decent effort to the applications.
  - dharma1 8y ago
    here's to hoping we have a usable (non-android) linux phone in the future!
- fulafel 8y ago
  Interestingly web- or electron-based 3D, CAD and IDE apps are gaining mindshare at quite a clip.
  - dharma1 8y ago
    definitely, I think a lot of dense UI pro software works well on the web. Just not necessarily on mobile
cridenour 8y ago
I'm really excited about the software side of Purism but I can't justify buying a 2 year old processor on the laptop at a price still more expensive than alternatives, especially since that refresh happened in the last few months.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  The CPU choice is restricted by their ability to disable Intel ME. If you don't care about that, you probably don't care about what Purism is trying to achieve, so it's not for you.
  - gcbw2 8y ago
    If that was true, they would be using AMD or ARM. Seems to be a matter or price/stock only.
    - amiga-workbench 8y ago
      What about Platform Security Processor and Trust Zone? Few CPU's lack a hardware rootkit now.
    - AsyncAwait 8y ago
      AMD also has this feature, (AMD Platform Security Processor), but unlike Intel ME, there's no way to disable it at all, currently. As for ARM, they have it too, (TrustZone), the performance is nowhere near what x86 gives you and arguably even less free/open than x86 and developers aren't really focused on it.
amdelamar 8y ago
Its neat, but doesn't make sense for a majority of apps/programs. Why would I run GIMP/Photoshop or any Graphics-heavy program on my phone? Why run any GPS-enabled app on my Desktop?
- ghostwreck 8y ago
  Maybe not phone yet, but tablets (running the same OS) are getting extremely powerful and the apps are coming. [1] [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/15/17969754/adobe-photoshop-apple-ipad-creative-cloud https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/15/17969754/adobe-photoshop...
- gcbw2 8y ago
  https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/22/the-ms-surface-pro https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/22/the-ms-sur...
JohnFen 8y ago
Convergence is not something of great value to me, but I don't object -- as long as mobile and desktop versions don't have to have the same user interface.
ryanmarsh 8y ago
Slightly off-topic, is anyone using Librem laptops? What has your experience been? They look nice. I've always wanted a nice secure Linux laptop to work on but I'm not eager to waste hours upon hours getting the drivers to behave (my experience with Linux on the desktop is a bit dated).
- gcbw2 8y ago
  your experience is more than 20yrs out of date. And i am not even exaggerating. Drivers in linux normally gives you less problems than OSX or Windows (latest graphic cards model excluded)
  - voltagex_ 8y ago
    Dunno about that. I have a Dell XPS 9350 - to get a stable wifi connection under Linux I had to pull the Broadcom wifi card out and replace it with a much nicer Intel one (good luck doing that on the 2018/9 model - it's soldered in). For a couple of years, the internal NVMe drive wasn't supported unless you changed from "RAID" to AHCI mode - unknown performance and power effects. It looks like that's changed recently.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    My less than 5 years experience is still waiting for the beautiful AMD open source drivers to give me back the video acceleration and OpenGL Features from fxglr. One of these days, the laptop will just get back W10 with its DirectX 11 drivers.
- rkangel 8y ago
  I bought Thinkpads for work, installed Fedora on them and everything worked out of the box, right down to the keyboard backlight dimming. The things you have to watch out for are: * Use an up to date distro with an up to date kernel (e.g. Fedora) * Graphics are the only real driver issue. Easiest solution is to buy something with integrated Intel, but some cards are well supported, you just need to check * Battery life will be worse compared to Windows on a machine normally sold for Windows. This situation may be better on things designed for Linux, like Dell Sputnik stuff and Purism, but I have less experience with them
codinger 8y ago
I want my desktop OS to act like a proper desktop workstation and my phone to act like a typical smartphone. Don't force Windows 8 like experience onto me.
mastrsushi 8y ago
Canonical has been trying to make a mobile OS since 2012, KDE since 2011. Do you guys honestly think a company of 27 employees is going to make this work?
- MentallyRetired 8y ago
  Canonical was unfocused, and the new CEO shelved it. And yes, I do believe it's possible.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  I'm not sure that what Canonical can or can't do has much bearing on what others can or can't do. I also don't think that the number of employees means all that much. Very often, smaller teams can be more focused and able to accomplish more than larger teams.
  - mastrsushi 8y ago
    Yeah, let me know when less than 25 developers crank out a working mobile Linux distro that will continue to be supported in 5 years. Looking at all the failed projects in the past and all the managements complexities like software support, modern touch integration this is virtually impossible. They'll likely have a brief stint releasing some Debian ARM based mobile OS with a limited selection of software. You'll get some GTK Calendar, Calculator, etc. The basic crap that imitates Android phones from 2011. And it will be supported by up to 5 or so devices, hopefully without some impractical rooting method. Linux barely exists as a desktop operating system as is. The only difference nowadays is smartphones don't have that freedom of customization desktops provide. Smartphones are consumer centric devices, you can't even swap batteries anymore. Leading OEMs have no interest in supporting an obscure operating system, they know the majority of users want Android. When Purism releases this as an OOTB product, it will without a doubt run on some no named Chinese Phone that holds the mediocre power of any low end Android Device. Only it will be $600, rather than $180
    - emilsedgh 8y ago
      The mobile phone market is already slowing down. Just like PC market did years ago. When it gets stagnant, companies will stop innovating that hard and slowly but steadily open solutions will gain quality and feature parity. If in 10 years I get an open phone with the features close to what I have today, I'd be pretty happy. Because I just don't think phones today are going to be that different in 10 years. You are right that Linux Desktop barely has any market share. But it's a very viable solution and I'd personally argue that it's ahead of it's competition.
bibyte 8y ago
It seems really familiar to the decision of going with many repos vs a mono repo. Slightly OT but I hope PureOS doesn't lock down root access like Android does. Or at least release an official way to root their devices.
billfruit 8y ago
I remember windows phones around Windows Mobile 5.x/ 6.x era: the executable programs that run on the phone, if the exes were to be copied onto a windows PC, the exes ran the same like native PC exes. I do not know if that is still the case with windows mobile.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  The only thing in common is Windows in the name. Kernel is unrelated, .NET version are unrelated, there is a sandbox in place, COM has been redone, only a Win32 subset is supported.
  - fxfan 8y ago
    I thought win10 shared kernel between mobile and computer?
At1C 8y ago
My hats off to purism for putting in the effort to free people from stinking thinking. Proprietary walled garden surveillance capitalism is not smart choice for people, your kids will be owned and controlled by the goolag. Stop deferring choices to terms and agreements for momentary fomo. If you live without GYTFA Gee-Your-Twit-Face-Azhole you can start to make the world a better place. Unless your paycheque depends on them keep prostituting your life and feeling useless.
benatkin 8y ago
The article started off with a wild assertion, that "Purism is beating the duopoly to that dream". A duopoly on computing? Windows is still by far the biggest desktop computing platform. They may have messed up mobile, but that doesn't make them irrelevant.
- jethro_tell 8y ago
  it does if you're talking about two platforms converging. Be hard to win that race with one platform.
  - benatkin 8y ago
    That probably means that Android is not converging with a desktop platform anytime soon, except for a negligable fraction of users. Chrome OS certainly isn't a part of any duopoly. Not even close.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      ChromeOS is not part of anything, other than US school system and Googleplex. Contrary to what gets discussed on HN, its worldwide desktop coverage is even lower than GNU/Linux.
anderspitman 8y ago
I used to be really excited about the idea of convergence. I still think it's cool, and I hope it gains more traction, but after working on more webapps designed for desktop and mobile, there are definitely challenges. The "write once run anywhere" pipe dream is quite elusive. I think something like React Native's "learn once write anywhere" philosophy might be more realistic.
Animats 8y ago
This is just a Linux distro, right? Not a new operating system.
- thekyle 8y ago
  Yes, it is based on Debian.
- gcbw2 8y ago
  yes. But they are so insane about talking like it is a innovative OS that this is probably the biggest reason most people consider their laptops for linux and give up, afraid they won't work well with ubuntu or fedora.
- rkangel 8y ago
  Yes, but you can get a long way tailoring a Linux distro in a particular way. In an extreme example, Android is a Linux distro. This is closer to conventional in that it's still Debian and Gnome, but if they are putting development work into making that a cross-platform system then everyone benefits.
jillesvangurp 8y ago
The opportunity here is not just convergence but multi modal. We have bits and pieces in the current world but frankly it's a big stinky mess that is poorly integrated. Most of this stuff is just horribly limited and single vendor walled gardens. A good positive example or how things should work is spotify. I regularly switch between my desktop, laptop and phone and the spotify instances seem to be aware of each other. I accidentally started playing music at home while at work today because my laptop spotify was still targeting my home desktop. Just works. What matters here is that spotify is available on multiple platforms; it moves files around for you as you need them. All you do is sign in and it will serve you your music, playlists, etc. In the same way I can continue reading a e-book on my phone that I was reading earlier on my Kindle. Browser state is replicating across platforms as well. The logical next steps would be devices where after authentication, your apps and data are just available and adapt to the device in a way that makes sense. Right now setting up a new laptop is a chore. You have to worry about installing stuff, configuring stuff. signing into stuff, backing up stuff, etc. Ideally all that goes away and you basically just pick up a device and start using it with zero effort. Or better even, the devices are integrated into the environment and simply adapt to you being there. Some apps won't make sense in all form-factors but many do. Ever walked into a hotel room and after briefly fiddling with some alien hotel entertainment system simply watched netflix on your laptop? I watched netflix on a recent transatlantic flight and ignored the entertainment system 20 centimeters from my nose it's just better and I charged it using usb-c from my laptop. So, I walked out of the plane with a fully charged phone. What if those devices in hotels, planes, etc. would basically provide you all your stuff after a simple signin? Walk into a hotel and all your digital stuff is already there by the time you walk into the room? And yes there are all sorts of concerns with privacy, security, etc. All solvable problems. For device manufacturers this would liberate them from selling only one or a handful of devices per person. You could turn phones into fashion accessories. They pretty much are already but why just have one phone when you could have one to match each pair of shoes? Why fiddle with your phone when you step in your car that these days might have a huge touch screen and plenty of computing power. Convergence is much broader than just your phone + laptop.
gcbw2 8y ago
I bought a libre13 DESPITE pureOS. PureOS is just a distraction. instead of adding a usbC port to their already outdated computer line, or lowering the absurd price (there is a reason their clientele is exclusively in california and germany) they are fiddling with linux distros like it is 1995. This is the same old a phone-just-need-a-browser idea of 10 years ago. This will fail, for the same reason firefoxOS failed: There is no whatsapp (or lock-in chat app du jour) website.
gcbw2 8y ago
Everyone in this thread complaining about phones without keyboard and Blackberry had a keyboard android phone flagship for a decade but nobody cared. You all deserve crappy media-consumer-only phones. :(
- amiga-workbench 8y ago
  That thing had a locked bootloader, no matter how nice the hardware I am not buying a device with a 2-3 year lifespan.
dschuetz 8y ago
Those are pretty expensive, but the idea to have fully supported Linux phone and 15" laptop is great! I'd very much like to own those.
dgregd 8y ago
As far I know Gnome 4 constraint-based layout [1] is still in planning phase. So how devs are going to build responsive UIs for different screen sizes? PS. I work on a Ubuntu laptop. [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GTK/Roadmap/GTK4 https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GTK/Roadmap/GTK4
tempodox 8y ago
Looks like somebody found a new buzzword.

399 points by iBelieve 8y ago

mdgrech23 8y ago

I've got to switch to your laptop and your phone to get the benefit of being in sync? No thanks. Not worth it to me.

0815test 8y ago
What? They're working on the GNOME mainline, so any computer running that desktop environment will benefit from their work. As for the mobile environment, there is no obstacle to it running on e.g. pmOS when it's ready, so any pmOS-supported device would benefit to some extent.
meruru 8y ago
No, you switch to their products because you agree with their goals and want to support the cause. The benefits are a bonus.
- sebastos 8y ago
  To each their own and all that, but this method of driving adoption never works. Virtually nobody makes decisions that way when they're shopping for a product that is important to their everyday life. This was Tesla's big insight in the car market. Pre-Tesla electric cars were all ugly, terrible vehicles that apologized for their own existence. They wanted to sell themselves based on the fact that they were good for the environment, while never compromising those ideals to make them, you know, actually nice to drive. But that was never going to catch on, because very few people are so idealistic that they will suffer an annoyingly bad product in exchange for virtue. People will do that all the time with little stuff, but not with big ticket items that they use a lot. So the designers of early electric cars ironically cemented their negligible impact on the environment by refusing to compromise their ideals, because the cars never became popular. Tesla came along and realized that what they had to do was make electric cars something you _wanted_ to drive. Because they were luxurious, and fast, and sexy looking. The fact that they were virtuous was just gravy. So if your statement is a good summary of their strategy, then they've got it backwards. You never win adopters by making crappy things that support a good cause. You win adopters by making things that do their job well, and support a good cause as a bonus. And presumably even idealists want adopters, so they should revisit that :)
Insanity 8y ago
How is this different from buying into the 'apple ecosystem'? It's just a different ecosystem. Not saying that you agree with doing so for apple, but other people clearly do so there might be a market for it.

reddotX 8y ago

remember Ubuntu Touch?

amiga-workbench 8y ago
What about it? UBports is still under development, Canonical just bailed out because they wanted to cut their losses and jump for an IPO.

api 8y ago

Lots of haters here. This company is trying to build a real alternative to the Apple/Google/MS oligopoly based on open source and respect for privacy. I'm really really tempted.

krageon 8y ago
At this exact moment there's three comments including yours. What are you referring to, exactly?
- hereiskkb 8y ago
  I guess this person's definition of "lot" is a bit different from ours.
- scld 8y ago
  probably "here" as in HN at large
- meruru 8y ago
  There's a dead comment too. Before his post there were only negative comments. The important part of his comment is not the first four words though. We should probably not focus on that.
- asdkhadsj 8y ago
  Priming the tribalism lines, I'd guess. We seem to yearn for our turf wars to the degree that we help them along. Not sure why.
JohnFen 8y ago
I'm not seeing many haters here. I am seeing a lot of people raising the issues they see with the idea, but that's not hating. For a project like this to be successful, people need to point out the problems it brings so that solutions can be found.

dcdevito 8y ago

This is nice, but what problem does it solve? Mobile and Desktop operating systems solve different issues on their own. Ubuntu tried this - how'd that go? Second issue is: how do I use it? How can I install it on MY devices? I'm all for privacy and I want to is it, just seems like a dream and it will never come to fruition

meruru 8y ago
It solves bug #1 This bug is widely evident in the PC industry. Steps to repeat: 1. Visit a local PC store. 2. Attempt to buy a machine without any proprietary software. What happens: Almost always, a majority of PCs for sale have Microsoft Windows pre-installed. In the rare cases that they come with a GNU/Linux operating system or no operating system at all, the drivers and BIOS may be proprietary. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
- masklinn 8y ago
  > It solves bug #1 It doesn't do so anymore than ubuntu already does.
  - meruru 8y ago
    It does so more directly by being a PC without Microsoft Windows pre-installed or proprietary BIOS. Almost always, a majority of PCs for sale have Microsoft Windows pre-installed. In the rare cases that they come with a GNU/Linux operating system or no operating system at all, the drivers and BIOS may be proprietary. Ubuntu helped enable Purism to exist and they are great for that too.
    - masklinn 8y ago
      > It does so more directly by being a PC without Microsoft Windows pre-installed or proprietary BIOS. Ah, so it does so by redefining the inconvenient bits completely out of bug #1.

SeripisChad 8y ago

I keep looking at their products (laptop & phone) and can't pull the trigger based on what seems like a lack of apps/UX. I really want have better privacy and support companies with that in their DNA. I almost purchased a black-phone before. I really think sandboxing built-in emulator for android apps has to occur for the phone to get traction. I think i'm their ideal consumer and still can't see the value yet. I'm a technical person who is willing to deal with some issues/trade-offs for privacy, but still can't reach the tipping point to purchase. I also think this a place where duckduckgo could partner with with their services. I think most consumers wants things to be polished and just work.

solarkraft 8y ago
> I really think sandboxing built-in emulator for android apps has to occur for the phone to get traction > I think i'm their ideal consumer and still can't see the value yet I don't think you are their ideal consumer. They're appealing to the Stallmans, the people who aren't looking to replace their smartphone, but for which this would be one of their first. I have heard someone say about the Pinephone (similar project): "I don't want a smartphone. But I want this. " I do think they could vastly expand their appeal by adding Android emulation, but I have a feeling using the (which seems like the) market leader (Alien Dalvik) would be some licensing hassle, as you'd want to allow people to install their own distro and still use it. Add to that the whole (admittedly important) thing about everything being open software.
- freeone3000 8y ago
  Acknowledging that missing Google Play Services is a big deal and will in fact miss most apps that people want when they think "android", you could do it with AOSP which is mostly Apache-licensed. As for having to install Google Play Services yourself, lineageos users don't seem to mind.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  > I don't think you are their ideal consumer. They're appealing to the Stallmans, the people who aren't looking to replace their smartphone, but for which this would be one of their first. That's certainly part of it, however I do have an iPhone currently, (seems like a better, if less than ideal option than Android), however am not happy about the locked down nature of iOS. Free software smartphones are necessary simply because they're the frontier the PC was in the 80s.

AdmiralAsshat 8y ago

My primary concern with this is that different applications are inherently optimized for the platform on which they were originally designed. There are some applications that have a very dense UI because there's simply alot of functionality that the program handles (think of a video editor, an IDE, etc). Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just seems silly, and I fear that in the name of making "everything work everywhere", we're going to compromise a bunch of apps that worked beautifully on one platform in favor of making them work adequately on several platforms. I mean, if someone said, "I've successfully ported Vim to Android!", my first thought would be, "Why in god's name would I want to run vim on my phone?"* * Ruling out, of course, someone plugging their phone into external KVM.

masklinn 8y ago
> There are some applications that have a very dense UI because there's simply alot of functionality that the program handles (think of a video editor, an IDE, etc). Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just seems silly And beyond that, platforms have affordances which you should want to leverage. A smartphone has a very direct and tactile interaction model, but my computer pairs an extremely precise pointing mechanism with a good way to input oodles of text and chord shortcuts.
fwip 8y ago
>"Why in god's name would I want to run vim on my phone?" To be fair, I've used vim on my phone over SSH and it was actually a pretty good experience. Editing is a bit more deliberate of an affair than with a hardware keyboard, but still easier than trying to visually select text on the touchscreen, and no complex chorded keybindings to try to enter.
- effinjdent 8y ago
  Your phone has an escape key? Or did you rebind it?
- jimktrains2 8y ago

ktpsns 8y ago

Don't the screenshot just show the GNOME desktop environment?

detaro 8y ago
The blog post is about improvements to GNOME and GNOME apps, not that surprising that the screenshots are of GNOME then?

sciurus 8y ago

Here's a report of the effort involved with making the Subsurface dive log desktop application run on mobile as well. The tl;dr seems to be that 1) it was a lot of work 2) users don't like the result very much https://lwn.net/Articles/780031/ https://lwn.net/Articles/780031/ There's a huge mismatch between how users want to interact with desktop and mobile applications that makes convergence really hard to do effectively in a single codebase.

magissima 8y ago
A lot of the issues mentioned there stem from platform differences though. The packaging hurdles and out-of-place UI style wouldn't be an issue on a convergent platform, though the difficulty and slight ugliness of QML/Kirigami wouldn't change.
pjmlp 8y ago
I saw the presentation, lack of experience with mobile development naturally doesn't produce high-quality results. I remember there were some statements how things work, related to issues they faced, which were plain wrong.

wjoe 8y ago

That's cool, and it's good to see work going on in more fundamental building blocks of Linux like Gnome to support mobile and reactive UIs. I always felt like this was the biggest blocker to using a Linux system on handheld devices - having a good ecosystem of open source projects that work for that, and having the ability to pick your own desktop environment and components rather than having to have an "all in one" solution equivalent to Android. Admittedly I know that isn't a killer feature for average users - they do want the all in one solution. But having these things available makes it easier for a company like Purism to build a product using existing software. It feels like this announcement is missing a step though. What can we do with this? Does this allow plugging your phone into a monitor and then running your phone apps in larger windows (eg, the opposite of what's shown in the videos). The idea of having the same programs running on your phone and laptop is nice in theory, but I'm quite happy with my own custom Linux setup on my laptop, I don't want to install PureOS on there. Of course, much more work will need to be done in other programs to support this. The Gnome Web example looks really slick, and it's great to see this sort of 'responsive design' applied to native application interfaces - Android took a step backwards in this regard. But on desktop I'd rather use Firefox, and they have entirely separate builds for desktop and mobile. I wonder if Mozilla have any plans to support this?

0815test 8y ago
> ...I'm quite happy with my own custom Linux setup on my laptop, I don't want to install PureOS on there. PureOS is just Debian with a few tweaks. This work is being done as part of the GNOME mainline branch, so any GNOME user is going to benefit from it down the road. And as "alternative" Linux desktops (MATE, Xfce, LXDE) transition to GTK3+, users of these environments will likely be able to make use of it, as well.
- anoncake 8y ago
  LXDE transitioned to Qt, under the name LXQt.
- wjoe 8y ago
  Exactly, and this is why it's an important development. But the article starts out by saying it's allowing "applications to run on both the Librem 5 phone and Librem laptops, from the same PureOS release." which is sort of missing the point - this isn't about about buying a phone and laptop from them so that you can use their software on both, but an important step on Linux for handheld devices. Good to see that Gnome are involved in this themselves too, and it's not some Purism fork of Gnome.

_bxg1 8y ago

I've become unenthused about this software "dream". Having spent years designing and building UIs on the web, what I've learned is that: 1) Convergence works great for "casual" apps - messaging, stores, content feeds, etc.; anything where the amount of stuff you need to see on screen at once doesn't need to be especially large. But the web already does a great job of making this type of application both responsive and cross-platform. 2) Advanced, dense professional tools will never adapt automatically to mobile screens in any meaningful way. And frankly, these are all I find myself installing natively on my desktop anymore. The vast majority of software these days falls squarely into one of these two camps, and neither seems to benefit much from the prospect of convergence.

_bxg1 8y ago
The key factor, I believe, is how much needs to be shown onscreen at the same time. Your newsfeed can be compressed to a smaller screen because you can simply show less of it, without sacrificing the core goal of the view. Whereas, consider a desktop app with multiple panes that show different information about the same subject. The default way to condense this would be to arrange the panes into a single vertical column that you could scroll up and down. But if you need to see them all at once, this adaptation is useless. At some point there are only so many physical inches of screen space.
maxsilver 8y ago
> Convergence works great for "casual" apps - messaging, stores, content feeds, etc.; But the web already does a great job of making this type of application both responsive and cross-platform. I'd argue this is where Convergence actually works best. (Especially the way Windows does it, anyway). For most people, "casual" apps are 95% of what they need a computer for. And the web does a good job, but not a great job, at making these apps responsive and cross-platform. Usually, these applications sacrifice lots of performance and/or usability and/or reliability, just for the benefit of being able to run in a browser. Which is fine if that's a trade-off you want to make, but this is usually not being done out of benefit for the user. Convergence can help fix part of this, by reducing the cost of native app development even further while preserving the majority of the quality/performance/usability benefits native apps provide.

presscast 8y ago

What's the state of running linux natively on Mac these days?

aeroevan 8y ago
It used to be much better (I run linux on my 2013 MBP, and used to run it on my 12" powerbook back in the day), but I think there's been some progress on the newer MBPs: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
iBelieve 8y ago
I used to run Linux quite well on a 2013 MacBook Pro, then I got a new 2016 MacBook Pro through work, and ran into tons of issues and finally gave up running Linux on it and just use Linux on my home-built desktop. Issues included the keyboard not working out of the box, suspend not working quite right, issues with the dedicated+integrated GPUs, etc. I don't know the current state of Linux on recent MacBooks, but here are the two GitHub repos I had used: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux and https://gist.github.com/roadrunner2/1289542a748d9a104e7baec6a92f9cd7 https://gist.github.com/roadrunner2/1289542a748d9a104e7baec6...
rinchik 8y ago
linux natively on Mac? Why? whats the point?? the experience will be just horrible and 60% of the hardware will be idle, unused or just incompatible. You'll get an overpriced Thinkpad wrapped in gorgeous Mac's case. The amount of details, little "sprinkles" that average Mac and MacOS users take for granted is greatly underrated. When you look at the stats from all native available hardware, sensors etc, it really feels that Macs are comparable to space shuttles, not a single OS can come even close to support all this (or will be allowed to)
- bildung 8y ago
  > The amount of details, little "sprinkles" that average Mac and MacOS users take for granted is greatly underrated. Especially those sprinkles that get stuck under the keys ;)

solidrake 8y ago

I wish this don't turn out like the Ubuntu Phone Convergence dream.

exabrial 8y ago

This is incredible. I've been waiting for a commercially supported Unix/Hardware vendor since Apple products have tanked in Quality under the new CEO.

rossdavidh 8y ago

This reminds me of the idea of "wouldn't it be great if we could use the same programming language for frontend, backend, and database queries". Well, maybe, but in practice not really. They are doing different kinds of things, you will have to use them differently, it doesn't really help all that much to have the same language. It SOUNDS like this would be really helpful, until you get it, and then discover that it doesn't really help all that much, because what matters most is not the language syntax, but the problem space. Laptops and smartphones are made for doing different kinds of things. The real-estate requirements are different, as are the typical use cases, and even in the case where you solve them both with, for example, dynamic web pages, you still end up coding for both use cases separately, you just now have it all stuffed into the same codebase, which is harder in many cases instead of easier. I believe Microsoft has been trying to make all OS usecases the same for decades. I believe they have not succeeded, not because Microsoft is deficient somehow, but rather because it's not, fundamentally, a good idea.

robto 8y ago
You can live that dream in clojure land! Clojurescript on the front end, Clojure on the backend, and datalog/honeysql for the database if you'd like. And it is awesome! After using a stack like this I'm spoiled for the slog that is developing in separate languages for each of those things. I think that dream is possible with OS usecases as well, it's just that nobody has made it work yet. And I can't think of a better way to eventually get there than to build it slowly out of free and open source software. It might take a while, but since people have the ability to adapt the software to their needs when it is free, I'm confident with time that it will serve those needs.
- rossdavidh 8y ago
  I'm glad it's working for you. My usual work involves python, javascript, and occasional SQL, and really the syntax is not that much of an issue. The problem space difference matters a lot more (for me) than the syntax (which an IDE can help me with anyway). I think part of the motivation was also managers thinking they could easily shuttle developers between frontend, backend, and database work, and that has mostly not worked out, because what takes time to learn about each is not the language, it's the problem space and the tradeoffs. But, if it's working out for you, I'm glad it is. I was not impressed.

tobiaswk 8y ago

Was very interested in their stuff. I was very disappointed when I saw a demo of the current state of Librem 5 running on development hardware. It did not look good. Laggy and slow. Very bad UI/UX.

neilsimp1 8y ago
I was a little disheartened as well, but that video was made early on in development. There was and still is time for optimization. I don't think the hardware is incapable of a smooth user experience. It's a software problem.

moron4hire 8y ago

Windows has had this with .NET apps for... Oh, pretty much since there has been a .NET. I had written several apps for Windows CE that ran both on desktop and mobile (same EXE file, even). Today, you can do it with UWP. It's a shame Windows Phones didn't take off. They had a great UI paradigm and I think Microsoft has done a lot of very hard work that goes mostly unappreciated in the development world, just because Google's reputation is still based on a decade-old memory of their (never official) motto "don't be evil". Microsoft hasn't been the "Halloween Papers" company for longer than Google has been a company, period. EDIT: I'm not saying MS isn't an evil corporation. I think all corporations get to some degree of evil proportional to their size. But for some reason, Google and Apple don't get that same evaluation, getting some sort of pass, that I think is worse in the specific case of Google (being an ad-tech company). We are collectively missing out on a lot of inovation and market diversity because of this cognitive dissonance.

JohnFen 8y ago
> They had a great UI paradigm Many people liked that paradigm. I am not one of them.
- moron4hire 8y ago
  We can probably agree that it was at least a little better than just cramming Gnome into a small screen, right?
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
Yeah, as someone who still carries an HP Elite x3 and uses some of the same apps on my phone and my desk, I found the claim of being "first" Purism made here to be... hilarious.
pjmlp 8y ago
I loved my Lumias, still use one of them as my secondary phone. And also like UWP a lot, although its implementation was rather clusmy with the whole DevDiv vs WinDev issues.

sinuhe69 8y ago

To be frank, I don’t see the benefit of convergence. Admittedly, one code base is cool and convenient, sure but if one considers the additional cost of design, maintenance and the loss of the optimal user experience, I think convergence is rather a minus. A small touch screen requires a totally different convention of user interactions as a big screen with only mouse and keyboard support. It’s simply the reality. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel (admittedly a new and shiny one), why don’t we just stick to the well proven approaches and design different UIs and front ends for different platforms? The bulk of the codes would go into the common business/security layers anyway. With CI/CD, each user would have his/her app with the same functionality but different UI for the optimal user experience without much headaches or additional burden.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Skunkleton 8y ago
> I don’t see the benefit of convergence. To me the benefit is not to have a single application that works both with a touch screen and a mouse/keyboard. Rather, the benefit is to have a single filesystem that I can access with both touch screen apps and mouse/keyboard apps. This way I could for example create a grocery with a mouse/keyboard, then take my phone and check items off with a touchscreen. There are lots of things we rely on the cloud for that would be better served by a "convergent" environment imo.
- thekyle 8y ago
  I use Syncthing right now to achieve the effect of having a shared file-system across all my devices. It works really well and since it doesn't rely on any sort of cloud or client-server architecture it even works offline if you're on the same network. https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
- gcbw2 8y ago
  Lol. And this pipe dream of magically converting apps to phone doesn't even address this use case of sharing the data. They assume the linux applications will be cloud locked-in like traditional ios/android apps.

meh206 8y ago

I just hope that better touchscreen / tablet support is realized from the efforts put forth in this project!

wanderfowl 8y ago

The exciting part of this to me is not the ability to run the same software on two devices, but the potential to run two 'kinds' of software on one single device. This unlocks what is for me the most appealing computing fantasy: I have exactly one device to compute with. At home or work, I plug it into my dock, where it pairs to an eGPU/monitor, external storage, keyboard, and mouse, and is my desktop computer. There, I can access the 'pro' level apps we're discussing below. On the couch or on the go, maybe I slide it into a bigger touchscreen with some extra dumb batteries, and it's now a tablet. Throw in a keyboard case, and now it's a laptop. And if I'm sitting on the bus or walking to work, it's my phone, and I can edit today's lecture right there, or access all my files. Maybe I'm not firing up emacs or MATLAB, but it's still there if I needed to. This, to me, is the fantasy of convergence. And considering we're now currently paying $4000+ for the trio of a laptop, tablet, and smartphone, I suspect one could create something pretty compelling and high-end and still feel like a bargain to many.

mstibbard 8y ago
I completely agree with your goal definition of convergence. The ability to have one device for all your computing needs. I don't expect to be able to do everything on a 5-6" phone screen, but I should be able to connect my phone to a monitor (or dock) and be able to do everything. The closest thing to this on the market is Samsung DeX but it's still incredibly limited.
- mycall 8y ago
  or a GPDWIN2 with 4G card.
HeWhoLurksLate 8y ago
Outside of Intel Phi, is there anything like an eCPU? That would be really cool, and could be exactly what we need. Back before Thunderbolt, I used a mini-PCI-express to PCIE adapter for more GPU power. This was great for games, but I immediately became CPU-bound, which wasn't so great. To fix this, you could have something like Big.Little but where the Big cores are external and only used when connected. Heck, then you could do something like a Big.Medium.Little architecture, where the phone's integrated Big.Little bows to the higher IPC cores in the eCPU device. In this way, you would be able to have something that was a "soul" device that had all your settings and stuff on it, with expandable CPU & GPU computing resources. Expanded storage would also be pretty neat, but then you'd have to figure out what did and didn't need access when you were away from your "exosuit".

samirm 8y ago

>If you’ve ever had an app on your phone that you wanted on your laptop, you’ve wanted convergence. Isn't that just called portability?

Ericson2314 8y ago

I wish they just focused solely on the hardware, then used the die-hard fan's money to develop the software. I'm going to run NixOS on this phone (maybe with an entirely CloudABI userland), and it's going to be better than their distro. Yeah their apps will be useful in that context, but I would be OK with rewriting them too.

dharma1 8y ago

I worked on this stuff for Ubuntu. I think this can work pretty well for some classes of apps - browsers, chat/messaging apps, voice/video calling, terminal, contacts, gallery, music player etc - relatively light weight (at least in terms of interactions) apps. Android/ChromeOS and iOS/MacOS are already moving to this direction for these classes of apps. It doesn't work so well (or is more difficult to execute well, or at all) on apps with very dense UI - video editing, 3D design, IDEs, interface design apps, CAD etc An aside - I'm not sure I'd use GTK+ for this. Why not Qt, or something like Flutter?

saturn_vk 8y ago
Why not gtk+ though?
gcbw2 8y ago
> An aside - I'm not sure I'd use GTK+ for this. Why not Qt, or something like Flutter? This is why ubuntu phone tanked. Trying to be too smart and centralizing. Librem5 phone will probably succeed on this but not for the reasons their marketing people think (convergent apps with magic! ha!). PureOS will be as irrelevant tomorrow as it is now. But their phone, being a proper linux phone like android never was, will have some small chance of success after the community buys into it and start porting a decent effort to the applications.
- dharma1 8y ago
  here's to hoping we have a usable (non-android) linux phone in the future!
fulafel 8y ago
Interestingly web- or electron-based 3D, CAD and IDE apps are gaining mindshare at quite a clip.
- dharma1 8y ago
  definitely, I think a lot of dense UI pro software works well on the web. Just not necessarily on mobile

cridenour 8y ago

I'm really excited about the software side of Purism but I can't justify buying a 2 year old processor on the laptop at a price still more expensive than alternatives, especially since that refresh happened in the last few months.

AsyncAwait 8y ago
The CPU choice is restricted by their ability to disable Intel ME. If you don't care about that, you probably don't care about what Purism is trying to achieve, so it's not for you.
- gcbw2 8y ago
  If that was true, they would be using AMD or ARM. Seems to be a matter or price/stock only.
  - amiga-workbench 8y ago
    What about Platform Security Processor and Trust Zone? Few CPU's lack a hardware rootkit now.
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    AMD also has this feature, (AMD Platform Security Processor), but unlike Intel ME, there's no way to disable it at all, currently. As for ARM, they have it too, (TrustZone), the performance is nowhere near what x86 gives you and arguably even less free/open than x86 and developers aren't really focused on it.

amdelamar 8y ago

Its neat, but doesn't make sense for a majority of apps/programs. Why would I run GIMP/Photoshop or any Graphics-heavy program on my phone? Why run any GPS-enabled app on my Desktop?

ghostwreck 8y ago
Maybe not phone yet, but tablets (running the same OS) are getting extremely powerful and the apps are coming. [1] [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/15/17969754/adobe-photoshop-apple-ipad-creative-cloud https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/15/17969754/adobe-photoshop...
gcbw2 8y ago
https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/22/the-ms-surface-pro https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/22/the-ms-sur...

JohnFen 8y ago

Convergence is not something of great value to me, but I don't object -- as long as mobile and desktop versions don't have to have the same user interface.

ryanmarsh 8y ago

Slightly off-topic, is anyone using Librem laptops? What has your experience been? They look nice. I've always wanted a nice secure Linux laptop to work on but I'm not eager to waste hours upon hours getting the drivers to behave (my experience with Linux on the desktop is a bit dated).

gcbw2 8y ago
your experience is more than 20yrs out of date. And i am not even exaggerating. Drivers in linux normally gives you less problems than OSX or Windows (latest graphic cards model excluded)
- voltagex_ 8y ago
  Dunno about that. I have a Dell XPS 9350 - to get a stable wifi connection under Linux I had to pull the Broadcom wifi card out and replace it with a much nicer Intel one (good luck doing that on the 2018/9 model - it's soldered in). For a couple of years, the internal NVMe drive wasn't supported unless you changed from "RAID" to AHCI mode - unknown performance and power effects. It looks like that's changed recently.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  My less than 5 years experience is still waiting for the beautiful AMD open source drivers to give me back the video acceleration and OpenGL Features from fxglr. One of these days, the laptop will just get back W10 with its DirectX 11 drivers.
rkangel 8y ago
I bought Thinkpads for work, installed Fedora on them and everything worked out of the box, right down to the keyboard backlight dimming. The things you have to watch out for are: * Use an up to date distro with an up to date kernel (e.g. Fedora) * Graphics are the only real driver issue. Easiest solution is to buy something with integrated Intel, but some cards are well supported, you just need to check * Battery life will be worse compared to Windows on a machine normally sold for Windows. This situation may be better on things designed for Linux, like Dell Sputnik stuff and Purism, but I have less experience with them

codinger 8y ago

I want my desktop OS to act like a proper desktop workstation and my phone to act like a typical smartphone. Don't force Windows 8 like experience onto me.

mastrsushi 8y ago

Canonical has been trying to make a mobile OS since 2012, KDE since 2011. Do you guys honestly think a company of 27 employees is going to make this work?

MentallyRetired 8y ago
Canonical was unfocused, and the new CEO shelved it. And yes, I do believe it's possible.
JohnFen 8y ago
I'm not sure that what Canonical can or can't do has much bearing on what others can or can't do. I also don't think that the number of employees means all that much. Very often, smaller teams can be more focused and able to accomplish more than larger teams.
- mastrsushi 8y ago
  Yeah, let me know when less than 25 developers crank out a working mobile Linux distro that will continue to be supported in 5 years. Looking at all the failed projects in the past and all the managements complexities like software support, modern touch integration this is virtually impossible. They'll likely have a brief stint releasing some Debian ARM based mobile OS with a limited selection of software. You'll get some GTK Calendar, Calculator, etc. The basic crap that imitates Android phones from 2011. And it will be supported by up to 5 or so devices, hopefully without some impractical rooting method. Linux barely exists as a desktop operating system as is. The only difference nowadays is smartphones don't have that freedom of customization desktops provide. Smartphones are consumer centric devices, you can't even swap batteries anymore. Leading OEMs have no interest in supporting an obscure operating system, they know the majority of users want Android. When Purism releases this as an OOTB product, it will without a doubt run on some no named Chinese Phone that holds the mediocre power of any low end Android Device. Only it will be $600, rather than $180
  - emilsedgh 8y ago
    The mobile phone market is already slowing down. Just like PC market did years ago. When it gets stagnant, companies will stop innovating that hard and slowly but steadily open solutions will gain quality and feature parity. If in 10 years I get an open phone with the features close to what I have today, I'd be pretty happy. Because I just don't think phones today are going to be that different in 10 years. You are right that Linux Desktop barely has any market share. But it's a very viable solution and I'd personally argue that it's ahead of it's competition.

bibyte 8y ago

It seems really familiar to the decision of going with many repos vs a mono repo. Slightly OT but I hope PureOS doesn't lock down root access like Android does. Or at least release an official way to root their devices.

billfruit 8y ago

I remember windows phones around Windows Mobile 5.x/ 6.x era: the executable programs that run on the phone, if the exes were to be copied onto a windows PC, the exes ran the same like native PC exes. I do not know if that is still the case with windows mobile.

pjmlp 8y ago
The only thing in common is Windows in the name. Kernel is unrelated, .NET version are unrelated, there is a sandbox in place, COM has been redone, only a Win32 subset is supported.
- fxfan 8y ago
  I thought win10 shared kernel between mobile and computer?

At1C 8y ago

My hats off to purism for putting in the effort to free people from stinking thinking. Proprietary walled garden surveillance capitalism is not smart choice for people, your kids will be owned and controlled by the goolag. Stop deferring choices to terms and agreements for momentary fomo. If you live without GYTFA Gee-Your-Twit-Face-Azhole you can start to make the world a better place. Unless your paycheque depends on them keep prostituting your life and feeling useless.

benatkin 8y ago

The article started off with a wild assertion, that "Purism is beating the duopoly to that dream". A duopoly on computing? Windows is still by far the biggest desktop computing platform. They may have messed up mobile, but that doesn't make them irrelevant.

jethro_tell 8y ago
it does if you're talking about two platforms converging. Be hard to win that race with one platform.
- benatkin 8y ago
  That probably means that Android is not converging with a desktop platform anytime soon, except for a negligable fraction of users. Chrome OS certainly isn't a part of any duopoly. Not even close.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    ChromeOS is not part of anything, other than US school system and Googleplex. Contrary to what gets discussed on HN, its worldwide desktop coverage is even lower than GNU/Linux.

anderspitman 8y ago

I used to be really excited about the idea of convergence. I still think it's cool, and I hope it gains more traction, but after working on more webapps designed for desktop and mobile, there are definitely challenges. The "write once run anywhere" pipe dream is quite elusive. I think something like React Native's "learn once write anywhere" philosophy might be more realistic.

Animats 8y ago

This is just a Linux distro, right? Not a new operating system.

thekyle 8y ago
Yes, it is based on Debian.
gcbw2 8y ago
yes. But they are so insane about talking like it is a innovative OS that this is probably the biggest reason most people consider their laptops for linux and give up, afraid they won't work well with ubuntu or fedora.
rkangel 8y ago
Yes, but you can get a long way tailoring a Linux distro in a particular way. In an extreme example, Android is a Linux distro. This is closer to conventional in that it's still Debian and Gnome, but if they are putting development work into making that a cross-platform system then everyone benefits.

jillesvangurp 8y ago

The opportunity here is not just convergence but multi modal. We have bits and pieces in the current world but frankly it's a big stinky mess that is poorly integrated. Most of this stuff is just horribly limited and single vendor walled gardens. A good positive example or how things should work is spotify. I regularly switch between my desktop, laptop and phone and the spotify instances seem to be aware of each other. I accidentally started playing music at home while at work today because my laptop spotify was still targeting my home desktop. Just works. What matters here is that spotify is available on multiple platforms; it moves files around for you as you need them. All you do is sign in and it will serve you your music, playlists, etc. In the same way I can continue reading a e-book on my phone that I was reading earlier on my Kindle. Browser state is replicating across platforms as well. The logical next steps would be devices where after authentication, your apps and data are just available and adapt to the device in a way that makes sense. Right now setting up a new laptop is a chore. You have to worry about installing stuff, configuring stuff. signing into stuff, backing up stuff, etc. Ideally all that goes away and you basically just pick up a device and start using it with zero effort. Or better even, the devices are integrated into the environment and simply adapt to you being there. Some apps won't make sense in all form-factors but many do. Ever walked into a hotel room and after briefly fiddling with some alien hotel entertainment system simply watched netflix on your laptop? I watched netflix on a recent transatlantic flight and ignored the entertainment system 20 centimeters from my nose it's just better and I charged it using usb-c from my laptop. So, I walked out of the plane with a fully charged phone. What if those devices in hotels, planes, etc. would basically provide you all your stuff after a simple signin? Walk into a hotel and all your digital stuff is already there by the time you walk into the room? And yes there are all sorts of concerns with privacy, security, etc. All solvable problems. For device manufacturers this would liberate them from selling only one or a handful of devices per person. You could turn phones into fashion accessories. They pretty much are already but why just have one phone when you could have one to match each pair of shoes? Why fiddle with your phone when you step in your car that these days might have a huge touch screen and plenty of computing power. Convergence is much broader than just your phone + laptop.

gcbw2 8y ago

I bought a libre13 DESPITE pureOS. PureOS is just a distraction. instead of adding a usbC port to their already outdated computer line, or lowering the absurd price (there is a reason their clientele is exclusively in california and germany) they are fiddling with linux distros like it is 1995. This is the same old a phone-just-need-a-browser idea of 10 years ago. This will fail, for the same reason firefoxOS failed: There is no whatsapp (or lock-in chat app du jour) website.

gcbw2 8y ago

Everyone in this thread complaining about phones without keyboard and Blackberry had a keyboard android phone flagship for a decade but nobody cared. You all deserve crappy media-consumer-only phones. :(

amiga-workbench 8y ago
That thing had a locked bootloader, no matter how nice the hardware I am not buying a device with a 2-3 year lifespan.

dschuetz 8y ago

Those are pretty expensive, but the idea to have fully supported Linux phone and 15" laptop is great! I'd very much like to own those.

dgregd 8y ago

As far I know Gnome 4 constraint-based layout [1] is still in planning phase. So how devs are going to build responsive UIs for different screen sizes? PS. I work on a Ubuntu laptop. [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GTK/Roadmap/GTK4 https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GTK/Roadmap/GTK4

tempodox 8y ago

Looks like somebody found a new buzzword.