Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

that's the spirt and that's why nothing changed in the last 10 years. There are different communites with their projects and they try to make that work on some old or obscured HW and every time some company that actually can make a new HW comes out with something they alway do the same, instead of using something that basically works they start from scratch.
Fragmentation in mobile linux is far worse than it was ever on android. And it just goes on. :(

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

For the question 1, I think they have nothing against it. On the contrary.
Looking at the blog post https://puri.sm/posts/gnome-and-kde-...cross-devices/, they said they want to support both KDE and Gnome on the phone, to give users a choice.
They added:
So confirming that KDE plasma and so the underlying Qt frameworks is already good enough, which is not the case for GTK on mobile.

So why spending time working on GTK ? They justified it like that:
That's just two quotes out of the full article I found that illustrate correctly their will, please read it all to have their full explanation.

As for the question 2 about the compositor, they have not explained it fully, except:
So it looks like they asked themselves the question before wanting to reinvent the wheel. Would be really interesting to see what those reasons were.

For the question 3, flatpak doesn't replace a package manager. There will be one (I can point to a Fosdem presentation where they explain that flatpak is only designed for standalone applications, not system packages). The question is only if they will make flatpak mandatory for app deployment, or only keeping that possible by making the system compatible as a lot of things may be moving to flatpak in the coming years.

my 2 cents...

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

You are incorrect in both cases (multiple libstdc++ & CVEs) - Flatpak works with the concept of runtimes, which generally contain the core and security sensitive libraries and provide a stable API (per runtime major version). This way apps can share common dependencies & get CVE fixes automatically via runtime updates.

Of course, a few conditions need to be met for this to work:

• apps need to be using dependencies provided by the runtime
• the runtime needs to be maintained

So if an app bundles something on top of the runtime, that's not going to be fixed by runtime update if a CVE shows up. But! It might actually not consume extras space if many apps bundle the very same thing (on binary level) - all Flatpak apps on a system live in a single ostree repo, which should automatically deduplicate everything:

It's some pretty clever stuff. :)

Also, Flatpak is not really a package management system as people generally understand it (RPM/DEB/etc.) but rather a dedicated system for distributing sandboxed graphical applications built against stable runtimes. As it is nota normal package management system you can do alo of stuff that's generally impossible with normal package management:

• install multiple versions of an application
• install applications without root privileges
• install any flatpak on any distro as long as the required runtime is available on it
• keep applications from touching stuff outside of the sandbox they have no reason to interact with (could be malware or badly coded apps)

Especially the last point it IMHO rather important if you want to support mobile apps the way people are used to them on mobile platforms (Android/iOS) - eq random application containers developed by random people submitted in binary form to an appstore.

As normal Linux software packages run scriptlets as root and there is zero sandboxing security in this case is based basically on a web of trust and code-review by distro package maintainers and I don't thinks that's going to scale for a mobile app store the way people are used to them on mobile platforms.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

First: It's not Qt. I'm actually quite glad as it brings back some competition to the market. Maybe not the correct choice of words but having an alternative approach is good for seeing things from a different point of view.

Second: Hildon was GTK. This is a possible solution/ help for my GTK3 experiments.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Some new blog posts :

https://puri.sm/posts/purism-collabo...t-werner-koch/ : Purism now has a partnership with Werner Koch, creator of GnuPG, to push hardware encryption on their devices.

https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-progress-report-8/ : weekly design report of librem5, focusing on services integration.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

In theory, the visions in this post are awesome. But they also are pretty much the same that Jolla tried. Jolla tried to integrate Facebook to Messages app, like in this picture:https://puri.sm/wp-content/uploads/2...m-1024x588.png

We know what happened, and I'm afraid that it will happen to Purism also. Companies/apps like Facebook, Whatsapp etc. aren't interested to integrate their apps with open source multi use hybrid messaging applications. On the contrary, they will try to prevent it if they can. Nor they will develop their own apps for Purism OS, at least if the phone isn't popular enough. And it won't be popular with those apps missing, so...

Later in that post, they state So perhaps they aren't even planning to integrate Whatsapp stuff. Same with other apps (phone, calendar etc). So they will end like "let's integrate these open services to one app and then use the proprietary apps separately (if available, and I doubt that)." I'm not blaming them, because this is basically the best they can do. But in a modern world, where some particular proprietary apps are quite important for most people, the user experience might be even more complicated if some services are integrated and the others doesn't.

I know that there is still a lot of people who don't use/need those proprietary apps. And the Purism phone is more dedicated to those people. But, it still looks like another Jolla. Big amount of money spent to development, and lack of sales because of missing features. Only "being different" is not a good enough advertisement for most people.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

The number of us who are simply not interested in
centralized proprietary apps with bleeding-edge security blunders
( like whatsapp facebook telegram and other corporate chokepoints )
is a number growing substantially every day.

The pressure to find an alternative to Android/Iphone
is no longer just a handful of nerds like myself and couple of devs.

The other side of that coin is that those of us who will buy
this tech are alpha consumers with money to burn on security,
unlike those who care only for the race to the bottom.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Hope you are right. But those people still demand good functionality of other features. Sailfish is still missing many of them. Particularly official Sailfish, but if I have understood correctly, it is also more complicated to port apps for Sailfish than for Maemo or some "typical" Linux distro and thus many apps and features are not so easily achieved.

People looking for alternatives for Android/iPhone still have their needs and they have got used of having those features in their phones. And those who are not nerds/devs, would like to have those features without any terminal hassle, workarounds etc. So the alternative phone still needs a very strong app ecosystem to be succesful. But I guess I shouldn't continue this worrying any longer.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

[citation needed]

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Puri.sm is a privacy focused company and People here talks about Facebook and whatsup integration seriously that is /facepalm

If you buy librem-5 for Facebook or similar crap you should probably rethink....