GNOME Foundation partners with Purism to support its efforts to build the Librem 5 smartphone [LWN.net]

Last week KDE announced that they were working with Purism on the Librem 5 smartphone. The GNOME Foundation has also provided its endorsement and support of Purism’s efforts to build the Librem 5. "As part of the collaboration, if the campaign is successful the GNOME Foundation plans to enhance GNOME shell and general performance of the system with Purism to enable features on the Librem 5. Various GNOME technologies are used extensively in embedded devices today, and GNOME developers have experienced some of the challenges that face mobile computing specifically with the Nokia 770, N800 and N900, the One Laptop Per Child project’s XO laptop and FIC’s Neo1973 mobile phone."

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GNOME Foundation partners with Purism to support its efforts to build the Librem 5 smartphone

Posted Sep 20, 2017 18:24 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (8 responses)

Is it like a relay race? First there was KDE Plasma for tablets, then there was Unity for phones and now GNOME. And the first two failed ignominiously.

GNOME Foundation partners with Purism to support its efforts to build the Librem 5 smartphone

Posted Sep 20, 2017 21:17 UTC (Wed) by adam820 (subscriber, #101353) [Link] (1 responses)

They were going to put GNOME on it regardless, even pre-Plasma announcement, so this is just GNOME saying "Hey, we endorse this and will help make this work better where possible." I don't see why not?

GNOME Foundation partners with Purism to support its efforts to build the Librem 5 smartphone

Posted Sep 21, 2017 1:07 UTC (Thu) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link]

I'm pretty sure Purism doesn't know which desktop environment they're going to use yet. The initial announcement said GNOME, but ever since their comments have been hedging and wishy-washy. It doesn't matter too much either way: the goal is to get to a free software phone, and both GNOME and KDE want to support that regardless of which tech gets used to build it.

GNOME Foundation partners with Purism to support its efforts to build the Librem 5 smartphone

Posted Sep 21, 2017 0:32 UTC (Thu) by aryonoco (guest, #55563) [Link] (2 responses)

It's not like this thing is going to reach its funding target anyway, so who cares.

For all those who are crying to have an alternative to Android and iOS, well, here is another proof that there is just no market for such a device.

GNOME Foundation partners with Purism to support its efforts to build the Librem 5 smartphone

Posted Sep 21, 2017 5:44 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

I wouldn't say that nobody cares. Obviously a lot of existing users care. If they don't care then they should. Having a open source as possible phone is extremely valuable in it's own right.

I really don't think the OS matters that much to the phone really. It's just a hardware platform. It's the hardware that matters. It's going to run Android if it runs anything. So it will quite happily meet the needs of most any smartphone users. Everything else will be a bonus. It will have the added benefit of having the ability for people to hack around on their own thing and work on sailfish or whatever else they feel like.

GNOME Foundation partners with Purism to support its efforts to build the Librem 5 smartphone

Posted Sep 21, 2017 10:26 UTC (Thu) by moltonel (subscriber, #45207) [Link]

People *do* care, as evidenced by this latest attempt. Consider the fact that people still support this campaign despite the many similar projects that failed before it, despite the hefty price tag for the expected hardware, despite being a smallish shop in a very crowded market, despite big uncertainties as to what the software will look like...

They've reached 38% of their goal with 32 days to go, they might actually make it. I hope they do, and have contributed my 60k cents. If you're so sure that the funding will not be reached, go ahead and pledge money towards it anyway, since it's an all-or-nothing and you'll get your money back if it fails ;)

GNOME Foundation partners with Purism to support its efforts to build the Librem 5 smartphone

Posted Sep 21, 2017 5:34 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

It goes back further then that.

Meamo with Gnome, which was then hacked up to support QT and turned into the OS that shipped on the Nokia N9. And the dozens of different variations and OS projects that have been spawned from that failed effort.

As long as it can send and receive phone calls, do texting, play audio files, and have a map program then essentially all my smartphone needs will be met. I don't care what OS or desktop or toolkit it uses. Totally irrelevant.

I still suspect, however, to get the most out of the phone people are going to realize that they really need to install LineageOS on it or some other variation of AOSP. If people really want a open source phone then it seems the path of least resistance is to work on improving the alternatives to the APIs and basic set of applications usually provided by Gapps. Working on trying to transform KDE or Gnome into a phone OS is a huge amount of work compared to just helping on improving one of the already existing FLOSS versions of Android. Later on they can work on getting Android functional on a vanilla kernel.

We are talking about the difference between months of works versus years of work.

GNOME Foundation partners with Purism to support its efforts to build the Librem 5 smartphone

Posted Sep 21, 2017 10:48 UTC (Thu) by moltonel (subscriber, #45207) [Link] (1 responses)

It's a goal that many people still believe is achievable despite the odds and history of failures. Can you blame them ? The main roadblock is not technical, it's getting enough people behind the project to support it until it's out of the door, marketing to sell enough units... and the large amount of luck required for any new business. As long as it looks attainable, people will try, and hopefully eventually succeed.

GNOME Foundation partners with Purism to support its efforts to build the Librem 5 smartphone

Posted Sep 21, 2017 17:41 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

I don't mind people working on stuff that interests them. However, in case of KDE it caused a lot of distraction among the core developers. Knowing GNOME, we'll see a spate of feature removals with justifications like: "it doesn't look good on mobile".

Ethics

Posted Sep 21, 2017 8:08 UTC (Thu) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (10 responses)

The only thing keeping me from investing in Purism is the Fairphone. I've already decided that once my Nexus 5 is finally dead, I'll make ethical concerns my top priority when choosing a phone. So now there's my firm believe in free software vs. my believe that we need to do better with regards to social and environmental challenges. If only they'd join forces :/

Ethics

Posted Sep 21, 2017 9:41 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (5 responses)

The Fairphone people are sympathetic towards Sailfish OS, which while not entirely free is certainly more so than Android.

Ethics

Posted Sep 22, 2017 10:46 UTC (Fri) by thomasg (guest, #114185) [Link] (4 responses)

Well, that's just not true.

While it is easily possible to use a completely open source android distribution on many phones (excluding the kernel portion which in all cases will include closed source driver blobs), it is not in any way possible to use a open source sailfish OS.
AOSP does ship most relevant GUI functionality in open source form, while Sailfish does not.

Sailfish is an entirely proprietary operating system which is based on some open source components (most of which not developed by the company behind Sailfish directly). The majority of code written by Sailfish developers is closed.

AOSP is an entirely open source operating system with all developed code being under open source licenses.

Their marketing people really did a good job of convincing the public, that Sailfish is an open source OS. It isn't.
And the driver situation, which is the largest problem of AOSP, is just the same in Sailfish; they use an android kernel after all.

Ethics

Posted Sep 22, 2017 11:16 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (3 responses)

Android ≠ AOSP.

It's misleading to say that Sailfish OS contains “some open-source components” because in fact most of the system consists of (open-source) stuff that one would otherwise find on standard Linux machines, including systemd, Wayland, Qt, Python, and so on. The closed-source bits are mostly special GUI components (built on top of Qt) and standard applications (built on top of Qt and Jolla's special GUI components). Jolla has made noises about open-sourcing more (or all) of those, which would probably be a sensible move because many of the standard applications could use some refining, but we will have to see what happens.

Ethics

Posted Sep 22, 2017 14:58 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

Regardless AOSP _is_ Android and it is a functional open source mobile phone that you can actually go out and use just using open source code. Sailfish is not.

The closed source bits are typically Google add-ons (optional) vendor add-ons (avoid avoid avoid) and closed source drivers (which depend on the phone/device you are using).

People have tried before to make phones and mobile devices using stuff from 'standard Linux machines'... and they ended up being a terrible match and extremely detrimental to getting a working phone. It's not just technical, but cultural and waffling between QT and Gnome-based environment is a perfect example of why it hasn't worked out.

People really need to study Android and understand why it was successful (example: why the traditional Unix model of users and applications suck for modern ways we use computers) while all the other efforts to build Linux-based phones are not. Otherwise it's just a waste of time if your goal is to have a product that appeals to a larger audience. (if your goal is not that then it is much less of a problem)

Ethics

Posted Sep 22, 2017 21:12 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

People have tried before to make phones and mobile devices using stuff from 'standard Linux machines'... and they ended up being a terrible match and extremely detrimental to getting a working phone.

Actually, Sailfish OS works pretty well on my Jolla phone, thank you very much. The hardware isn't that great by today's standards but even so the UI is fairly zippy. It is nice to be able to scp stuff to and from the phone instead of messing about with abominations like MTP. And of course you get to write apps in Python (which I personally greatly prefer to Java). Et cetera …

In any case, the Jolla people must have done something right considering that the phone runs for three days on a single charge, which is something that I never managed to get out of any Android phone.

Ethics

Posted Sep 22, 2017 21:45 UTC (Fri) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

> It is nice to be able to scp stuff to and from the phone instead of messing about with abominations like MTP.

I do that all the time—on Android. There are SSH clients and servers available if you want to use them, and even terminal emulators if you prefer the command-line. (I use Ghost Commander for SSH file transfers, but there are other options.) They're not built in but they are simple to install. Android is perfectly capable of running most of the standard Linux software; see https://termux.com/ for one example which doesn't require root.

> In any case, the Jolla people must have done something right considering that the phone runs for three days on a single charge, which is something that I never managed to get out of any Android phone.

I have an Android phone (a Nexus 5) which has run for most of a week on a single charge. Granted, it didn't have hardly any apps installed, but that's probably the main factor in your battery life as well. Not having any battery-draining mainstream apps available for the platform will do wonders for battery life. Then again, so will turning off the phone.

Ethics

Posted Sep 21, 2017 9:46 UTC (Thu) by mbukatov (subscriber, #96216) [Link]

From my point of view, this is not in a conflict. Fairphone without drivers and other code in upstream projects like kernel, mesa, ... can't really fully deliver on it's ethical promise, at least with respect to it's livespan. What use would such phone be for me when there is no software to run on it after few years? Moreover without all the code upstream, the choice is already limited from the start. And for this reason I really agree with you that it would be great if they join forces ...

I still have my 11 year old laptop as a backup and I'm running latest Fedora on it without much problems. If I really wanted, I could have installed ArchLinux instead and compile the latest vanilla kernel on it and it would work just fine, because the drivers are a free sofware maintained upstream. But with smartphones and theirs proprietary drivers, I can't even select Android distribution and keep it updated.

Ethics

Posted Sep 21, 2017 18:09 UTC (Thu) by vv01f (guest, #105111) [Link] (2 responses)

so then have fun with Android 6 on the fairphone 2. no plans for a new version on horizon

Ethics

Posted Sep 22, 2017 11:28 UTC (Fri) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (1 responses)

At least that'd be what I'm used to already since Android 6 is all that's available for my Nexus 5.

Ethics

Posted Sep 23, 2017 0:31 UTC (Sat) by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039) [Link]

Just FYI, LineageOS does provide Android 7.1 (the latest version they provide for any hardware) for the Nexus 5, and I see no reason to doubt they'll also provide Android 8 in due time.