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Runs on the Librem 5 Smartphone – Week 2

dmix 7y ago
GTK for a smartphone is an interesting choice. I'm curious if the Gnome team would ever commit to this. The use of a stylus in the video is a bit concerning though. Off topic but I hope Librem releases a high-end laptop in addition to their mid-tier one, ideally with a high performance AMD CPU. Something that could be the open-source friendly version of a Macbook Pro. The way they disable Intel ME and add hardware toggles for webcams/microphones, and their general good taste is a big draw for me. Edit: looks like Gnome is backing Purism's project. Neat. https://www.gnome.org/news/2017/09/gnome-foundation-partners-with-purism-to-support-its-efforts-to-build-the-librem-5-smartphone/ https://www.gnome.org/news/2017/09/gnome-foundation-partners...
- alexkavon 7y ago
  I believe they're working with the Gnome team on this, as well as support for Plasma Mobile.[0] [0] https://puri.sm/posts/gnome-and-kde-in-pureos-diversity-across-devices/ https://puri.sm/posts/gnome-and-kde-in-pureos-diversity-acro...
  - dmix 7y ago
    > In addition, Purism is needing to lead some of the development within the GNOME community, since there is not a large community around an upstream-first GNOME/GTK+ for mobile yet. This makes me happy. This is good news for all Gnome users.
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  > The use of a stylus in the video is a bit concerning though. I imagine that's just so there isn't a big finger/hand getting in the way of the camera. And because the phone is flat on the table for the video, you can't type on it like when you're holding it with your hand. A non-issue in my opinion. I wouldn't have given it a second thought.
  - seba_dos1 7y ago
    What's more - it's a capacitive screen, so unlike with the resistive ones, the stylus doesn't add much additional accuracy over the finger.
- bo1024 7y ago
  I think the specs are already pretty competitive with Macbook Pro -- the only thing it doesn't have is a discrete GPU. Unfortunately I'd guess they won't use an AMD CPU anytime soon because I don't think we know how to 'purify' it, at least with Intel we can try to disable ME.
  - dmix 7y ago
    I disagree. The only option is an Intel HD Graphics 620 with an HDMI port (!) which can’t even host an external 4k monitor @ 60hz… I also mentioned AMD CPU for a good reason as Nvidia is poorly supported by modern Wayland compositors. The wireless card is also Atheros 802.11n with no a/c support. Librem 15 is very much a mid-tier laptop.
jijji 7y ago
Any demos of the phone making an actual phone call, sending an sms text message?
- alexkavon 7y ago
  https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-progress-report-12/ https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-progress-report-12/
dman 7y ago
Any idea on when this ships?
- meruru 7y ago
  Q3 according to the videos.
learnfromstory 7y ago
Just shockingly ugly. If you're going to do a pixels-under-glass UI, you really have to start with a toolkit that isn't awful, or you end up with the openmoko which looked exactly like these demos but 12 years ago. You end up with, in short, a phone where the user adjusts the volume using alsamixer in an xterm because the UI wasn't really thought through.
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  > Just shockingly ugly. Are you sure about that? It looks amazing: https://puri.sm/posts/runs-on-the-librem-5-smartphone-week-3/ https://puri.sm/posts/runs-on-the-librem-5-smartphone-week-3...
  - the_pwner224 7y ago
    I'd say its better than most modern phones with their stupid flat UIs. I use KDE on the desktop for its featured richness, but gnome is still much more 3d and I envy its appearance. Buttons very clearly look like buttons and text boxes look like text boxes and the whole thing just looks 'nice.'
  - learnfromstory 7y ago
    That is literally xterms on phones. That is not amazing to me.
logicprog 7y ago
I want to like Librem's smartphone, I really do. I like having control over my software, and I like being able to really understand how it works and tinker with it and stuff. But I have this sinking feeling that the Librem 5 is just vaporware, or worse, that it'll get released with a half baked UI and a barebones list of apps. On that latter one, I really don't see how they'll fix the problem. On the former, the thing is that the affordences for bad UI design are a LOT tighter on mobile devices and it's taken a long time for desktop Linux to get their game together. Plus, all of Librem's other stuff is over priced and a bit cheap looking, and I'm not sure I want a phone like that.
- TylerE 7y ago
  I'm getting a lot of Ouya vibes from this project. Good UI/UX is hard, and "open platform" might get some kickstarter monies, but it isn't really something 99.9% of people care about.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    At the very least, they won't be trying to chase the fickle gamer market. It seems like Librem 5 is trying to cater to hackers, who would be the most tolerant of deficiencies in the UX.
    - TylerE 7y ago
      That's a pretty small market, and they're on the wrong end of the economy-of-scale curve to begin with.
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  It doesn't look like vaporware to me. The videos and updates seem legit. > it'll get released with a half baked UI and a barebones list of apps. Have you even looked into the project? It's running Gnome, on Linux, all the regular apps are there. Check out the videos in this link, it's not half-baked: https://puri.sm/posts/runs-on-the-librem-5-smartphone-week-3/ https://puri.sm/posts/runs-on-the-librem-5-smartphone-week-3...
joey_bob 7y ago
If someone were to develop an iphone-quality design with the same objectives as the librem 5, I'd pay $3000 for it. How much would the market shrink if that was the price of what would become the librem 5? It's rather niche to begin with, but there isn't any real competition the meets the same objectives, and I assert that the customer base has the money to afford it.
- mac01021 7y ago
  I'm considering ordering a librem 5, but I would go without any phone at all rather than spend thousands on one.
meruru 7y ago
This is incredibly exciting. For those that haven't seen it, here's a bullet list of the Librem 5 differentiators: + Does not use Android or iOS. The Librem 5 comes with the mobile version of our FSF-endorsed operating system PureOS by default, and is expected to be able to run most GNU+Linux distributions. + CPU separate from baseband, isolating the blackbox that the modem may represent and allowing us to seek hardware certification of the main board by the Free Software Foundation. + Hardware Kill Switches for camera, microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and baseband. + End-to-end encrypted decentralized communications via Matrix over the Internet. + We also intend the Librem 5 to integrate with the Librem Key security token in the future.
liamcardenas 7y ago
I’m sure people will disagree with this but I think they should focus on getting an easy way for people to target their devices with React Native, NativeScript, PWAs and every other cross-platform framework. That way they can much more easily acquire software. Seriously making an app from scratch is no small task, and often time isn’t worth it for such a small market.
- TACIXAT 7y ago
  Yea, I think PWAs are a great substitute for apps. I wrote a websocket chat that my girlfriend and I use. It works great on desktop and mobile, makes for a seamless transition from commute to work. I'm less hyped about the electron ecosystem, but something performant that allowed those front end tools would be great.
- flukus 7y ago
  Have you seen what development for this is like? You can slap together simple apps (the UI anyway) with a few dozen lines of C. It's extremely simple, lightweight and fast, everything react/PWA's/etc aren't. This is what excites me about librem the most, it's so easy to just write code with no bloated IDE, 15 xml files, AbstractFactoryBuilders and the rest of the android crapfest. PWA's and the like can stay away, I want software from developers that actually respect their users, software that doesn't waste resources, software that actually looks native.
  - liamcardenas 7y ago
    I’m sure it’s just as easy as any other UI. My point is it’s so small, nobody will focus on it. However, if they can easily port their existing codebase, it will have more apps.
- Apaec 7y ago
  Web centric didn't work for FirefoxOS. Contrary to popular trends, programmers can know more than a couple of languages and not everything has to be javascript. I'm sure many hackers would be more excited to make an app with go, rust, haskell, etc than to do js, that just feels like work.
justforpurism 7y ago
Registered just to post this. Love Purism, want it to succeed. But... IMHO, the effort is going to fail miserably, unless folks stop wasting time trying to build a phone UI, i.e. another attempt to build Android/iOS ecosystem. There were Sailfish, MER, Openmoko, and whatnot attempts to make a pure Linux-running cell phone. Just stop it. You will burn through your money doing half-baked UI, there will be no adoption, then no developers, then no apps, and thus no users. As per OP link, Purism just have shown that they wasted precious time on badly looking GNOME Clocks, Emacs, Password manager, a game, a half-baked music player, Torrent client (on a phone!), and Drawing app made with their native UI. What a waste of time to re-write (or port) all of this, all over again. The only surviving plan for any Linux-phone: make it web-centric. You have to port ONE app: Firefox. Make it fast, make it perfect. Then, automatically you will get: - Adoption. http://m.uber.com http://m.uber.com http://m.lyft.com/ http://m.lyft.com/ work out of the box. I am not leaving home without the phone because it enables to access essential day-to-day services. Partner with companies that develop those web-based apps. - Adoption. Web-based music: Spotify, SoundCloud. Out of the box. Purism doesn't need to waste time on this. Just have pre-installed bookmarks to those apps. Partner with companies that develop those web-based apps. - Adoption. Endless web apps such as "Clocks", "Notepad", Games and drawing apps already exists. Purism don't need to waste time on this stuff. Just have pre-installed bookmarks for those apps. Partner with companies that develop those web-based apps. Once basic needs satisfied, those of us who need Emacs, will be able to port Emacs and Torrent clients themselves. Why waste your time, Purism? Focus on releasing the hardware, be different from other phones, be lean, get immediate adoption, community will fill the blanks.
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  > another attempt to build Android/iOS ecosystem Do you understand what they are doing? They don't have to build the ecosystem, it already exists! > Purism just have shown that they wasted precious time on badly looking I think it looks good. > What a waste of time to re-write (or port) So you still have no idea what they are doing. Why are you taking the time to create new accounts and post long comments if you aren't taking the time to understand what they're doing? > make it web-centric. You have to port ONE app: Firefox. They aren't making a web-centric device. We don't want a web-centric device. They are making a privacy-focused, portable Linux device that makes calls. --- It's weird. It seems like every Librem 5 post has new accounts that criticize it. Is there someone who doesn't want it to suceed?
mikece 7y ago
Is there any reason why applications cannot be written for the Librem 5 with Flutter? The Flutter framework compiles to ARM binary and the UI is rendered with Skia, a C++ UI layer. It's not like a bunch of widgets would need to be written and supported on Librem, just the Skia layer. What am I missing?
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  They aren't writing applications, they are improving Gnome to work with small touch displays.
- maheart 7y ago
  That would be a massive amount of work. In my opinion, Purism correctly limited the scope of the original proposal -- a FOSS phone that can make calls, and send messages (and maybe use a web browser?). libhandy (the library that allows GTK applications to "shrink" their UI for a phone) is intended to minimise work by allowing Purism to take advantage to existing software (e.g. Settings, Web browser). Even this is a huge amount of work (I've written about it here/Reddit in the past).
shmerl 7y ago
I'd welcome more push behind Plasma Mobile for it. There is practically no progress now. It could benefit from moving towards more touch oriented design, Sailfish like, dropping lingering elements inherited from the desktop UI.
panpanna 7y ago
Has anyone here attempted to develop software for librem? Mind share your experience with us?
jplayer01 7y ago
What was the reasoning for going with Gnome/GTK instead of Qt?

dmix 7y ago

GTK for a smartphone is an interesting choice. I'm curious if the Gnome team would ever commit to this. The use of a stylus in the video is a bit concerning though. Off topic but I hope Librem releases a high-end laptop in addition to their mid-tier one, ideally with a high performance AMD CPU. Something that could be the open-source friendly version of a Macbook Pro. The way they disable Intel ME and add hardware toggles for webcams/microphones, and their general good taste is a big draw for me. Edit: looks like Gnome is backing Purism's project. Neat. https://www.gnome.org/news/2017/09/gnome-foundation-partners-with-purism-to-support-its-efforts-to-build-the-librem-5-smartphone/ https://www.gnome.org/news/2017/09/gnome-foundation-partners...

alexkavon 7y ago
I believe they're working with the Gnome team on this, as well as support for Plasma Mobile.[0] [0] https://puri.sm/posts/gnome-and-kde-in-pureos-diversity-across-devices/ https://puri.sm/posts/gnome-and-kde-in-pureos-diversity-acro...
- dmix 7y ago
  > In addition, Purism is needing to lead some of the development within the GNOME community, since there is not a large community around an upstream-first GNOME/GTK+ for mobile yet. This makes me happy. This is good news for all Gnome users.
RandomBacon 7y ago
> The use of a stylus in the video is a bit concerning though. I imagine that's just so there isn't a big finger/hand getting in the way of the camera. And because the phone is flat on the table for the video, you can't type on it like when you're holding it with your hand. A non-issue in my opinion. I wouldn't have given it a second thought.
- seba_dos1 7y ago
  What's more - it's a capacitive screen, so unlike with the resistive ones, the stylus doesn't add much additional accuracy over the finger.
bo1024 7y ago
I think the specs are already pretty competitive with Macbook Pro -- the only thing it doesn't have is a discrete GPU. Unfortunately I'd guess they won't use an AMD CPU anytime soon because I don't think we know how to 'purify' it, at least with Intel we can try to disable ME.
- dmix 7y ago
  I disagree. The only option is an Intel HD Graphics 620 with an HDMI port (!) which can’t even host an external 4k monitor @ 60hz… I also mentioned AMD CPU for a good reason as Nvidia is poorly supported by modern Wayland compositors. The wireless card is also Atheros 802.11n with no a/c support. Librem 15 is very much a mid-tier laptop.

jijji 7y ago

Any demos of the phone making an actual phone call, sending an sms text message?

alexkavon 7y ago
https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-progress-report-12/ https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-progress-report-12/

dman 7y ago

Any idea on when this ships?

meruru 7y ago
Q3 according to the videos.

learnfromstory 7y ago

Just shockingly ugly. If you're going to do a pixels-under-glass UI, you really have to start with a toolkit that isn't awful, or you end up with the openmoko which looked exactly like these demos but 12 years ago. You end up with, in short, a phone where the user adjusts the volume using alsamixer in an xterm because the UI wasn't really thought through.

RandomBacon 7y ago
> Just shockingly ugly. Are you sure about that? It looks amazing: https://puri.sm/posts/runs-on-the-librem-5-smartphone-week-3/ https://puri.sm/posts/runs-on-the-librem-5-smartphone-week-3...
- the_pwner224 7y ago
  I'd say its better than most modern phones with their stupid flat UIs. I use KDE on the desktop for its featured richness, but gnome is still much more 3d and I envy its appearance. Buttons very clearly look like buttons and text boxes look like text boxes and the whole thing just looks 'nice.'
- learnfromstory 7y ago
  That is literally xterms on phones. That is not amazing to me.

logicprog 7y ago

I want to like Librem's smartphone, I really do. I like having control over my software, and I like being able to really understand how it works and tinker with it and stuff. But I have this sinking feeling that the Librem 5 is just vaporware, or worse, that it'll get released with a half baked UI and a barebones list of apps. On that latter one, I really don't see how they'll fix the problem. On the former, the thing is that the affordences for bad UI design are a LOT tighter on mobile devices and it's taken a long time for desktop Linux to get their game together. Plus, all of Librem's other stuff is over priced and a bit cheap looking, and I'm not sure I want a phone like that.

TylerE 7y ago
I'm getting a lot of Ouya vibes from this project. Good UI/UX is hard, and "open platform" might get some kickstarter monies, but it isn't really something 99.9% of people care about.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  At the very least, they won't be trying to chase the fickle gamer market. It seems like Librem 5 is trying to cater to hackers, who would be the most tolerant of deficiencies in the UX.
  - TylerE 7y ago
    That's a pretty small market, and they're on the wrong end of the economy-of-scale curve to begin with.
RandomBacon 7y ago
It doesn't look like vaporware to me. The videos and updates seem legit. > it'll get released with a half baked UI and a barebones list of apps. Have you even looked into the project? It's running Gnome, on Linux, all the regular apps are there. Check out the videos in this link, it's not half-baked: https://puri.sm/posts/runs-on-the-librem-5-smartphone-week-3/ https://puri.sm/posts/runs-on-the-librem-5-smartphone-week-3...

joey_bob 7y ago

If someone were to develop an iphone-quality design with the same objectives as the librem 5, I'd pay $3000 for it. How much would the market shrink if that was the price of what would become the librem 5? It's rather niche to begin with, but there isn't any real competition the meets the same objectives, and I assert that the customer base has the money to afford it.

mac01021 7y ago
I'm considering ordering a librem 5, but I would go without any phone at all rather than spend thousands on one.

meruru 7y ago

This is incredibly exciting. For those that haven't seen it, here's a bullet list of the Librem 5 differentiators: + Does not use Android or iOS. The Librem 5 comes with the mobile version of our FSF-endorsed operating system PureOS by default, and is expected to be able to run most GNU+Linux distributions. + CPU separate from baseband, isolating the blackbox that the modem may represent and allowing us to seek hardware certification of the main board by the Free Software Foundation. + Hardware Kill Switches for camera, microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and baseband. + End-to-end encrypted decentralized communications via Matrix over the Internet. + We also intend the Librem 5 to integrate with the Librem Key security token in the future.

liamcardenas 7y ago

I’m sure people will disagree with this but I think they should focus on getting an easy way for people to target their devices with React Native, NativeScript, PWAs and every other cross-platform framework. That way they can much more easily acquire software. Seriously making an app from scratch is no small task, and often time isn’t worth it for such a small market.

TACIXAT 7y ago
Yea, I think PWAs are a great substitute for apps. I wrote a websocket chat that my girlfriend and I use. It works great on desktop and mobile, makes for a seamless transition from commute to work. I'm less hyped about the electron ecosystem, but something performant that allowed those front end tools would be great.
flukus 7y ago
Have you seen what development for this is like? You can slap together simple apps (the UI anyway) with a few dozen lines of C. It's extremely simple, lightweight and fast, everything react/PWA's/etc aren't. This is what excites me about librem the most, it's so easy to just write code with no bloated IDE, 15 xml files, AbstractFactoryBuilders and the rest of the android crapfest. PWA's and the like can stay away, I want software from developers that actually respect their users, software that doesn't waste resources, software that actually looks native.
- liamcardenas 7y ago
  I’m sure it’s just as easy as any other UI. My point is it’s so small, nobody will focus on it. However, if they can easily port their existing codebase, it will have more apps.
Apaec 7y ago
Web centric didn't work for FirefoxOS. Contrary to popular trends, programmers can know more than a couple of languages and not everything has to be javascript. I'm sure many hackers would be more excited to make an app with go, rust, haskell, etc than to do js, that just feels like work.

justforpurism 7y ago

Registered just to post this. Love Purism, want it to succeed. But... IMHO, the effort is going to fail miserably, unless folks stop wasting time trying to build a phone UI, i.e. another attempt to build Android/iOS ecosystem. There were Sailfish, MER, Openmoko, and whatnot attempts to make a pure Linux-running cell phone. Just stop it. You will burn through your money doing half-baked UI, there will be no adoption, then no developers, then no apps, and thus no users. As per OP link, Purism just have shown that they wasted precious time on badly looking GNOME Clocks, Emacs, Password manager, a game, a half-baked music player, Torrent client (on a phone!), and Drawing app made with their native UI. What a waste of time to re-write (or port) all of this, all over again. The only surviving plan for any Linux-phone: make it web-centric. You have to port ONE app: Firefox. Make it fast, make it perfect. Then, automatically you will get: - Adoption. http://m.uber.com http://m.uber.com http://m.lyft.com/ http://m.lyft.com/ work out of the box. I am not leaving home without the phone because it enables to access essential day-to-day services. Partner with companies that develop those web-based apps. - Adoption. Web-based music: Spotify, SoundCloud. Out of the box. Purism doesn't need to waste time on this. Just have pre-installed bookmarks to those apps. Partner with companies that develop those web-based apps. - Adoption. Endless web apps such as "Clocks", "Notepad", Games and drawing apps already exists. Purism don't need to waste time on this stuff. Just have pre-installed bookmarks for those apps. Partner with companies that develop those web-based apps. Once basic needs satisfied, those of us who need Emacs, will be able to port Emacs and Torrent clients themselves. Why waste your time, Purism? Focus on releasing the hardware, be different from other phones, be lean, get immediate adoption, community will fill the blanks.

RandomBacon 7y ago
> another attempt to build Android/iOS ecosystem Do you understand what they are doing? They don't have to build the ecosystem, it already exists! > Purism just have shown that they wasted precious time on badly looking I think it looks good. > What a waste of time to re-write (or port) So you still have no idea what they are doing. Why are you taking the time to create new accounts and post long comments if you aren't taking the time to understand what they're doing? > make it web-centric. You have to port ONE app: Firefox. They aren't making a web-centric device. We don't want a web-centric device. They are making a privacy-focused, portable Linux device that makes calls. --- It's weird. It seems like every Librem 5 post has new accounts that criticize it. Is there someone who doesn't want it to suceed?

mikece 7y ago

Is there any reason why applications cannot be written for the Librem 5 with Flutter? The Flutter framework compiles to ARM binary and the UI is rendered with Skia, a C++ UI layer. It's not like a bunch of widgets would need to be written and supported on Librem, just the Skia layer. What am I missing?

RandomBacon 7y ago
They aren't writing applications, they are improving Gnome to work with small touch displays.
maheart 7y ago
That would be a massive amount of work. In my opinion, Purism correctly limited the scope of the original proposal -- a FOSS phone that can make calls, and send messages (and maybe use a web browser?). libhandy (the library that allows GTK applications to "shrink" their UI for a phone) is intended to minimise work by allowing Purism to take advantage to existing software (e.g. Settings, Web browser). Even this is a huge amount of work (I've written about it here/Reddit in the past).

shmerl 7y ago

I'd welcome more push behind Plasma Mobile for it. There is practically no progress now. It could benefit from moving towards more touch oriented design, Sailfish like, dropping lingering elements inherited from the desktop UI.

panpanna 7y ago

Has anyone here attempted to develop software for librem? Mind share your experience with us?

jplayer01 7y ago

What was the reasoning for going with Gnome/GTK instead of Qt?