almost had a heart attack and died when i saw 'parts ordered, 5.7" LCD' and missed the words 'development board'

Screen Size

The Librem 5 will have a 720×1440 5.7” screen. Given the resolution, it is going to use a scale of 2, letting us with 360×720 points in portrait mode and 720×360 points in landscape mode.

NOOOOO!!! all their promotional materials, everywhere, said 5"
i would legitimately not have bought one if i had thought that was something that was even up in the air...

</3 ten. characters.

As if a bigger screen is a negative...

I'm kind of scratching my head here.

So they build a device with almost twice the screen diagonal of the N900, (due to scaling) they still have a lower resolution, and on top of that they have to reduce the available screen space even further because they need an on-screen keypad.

Add to that the horribly space-wasting Gnome UI, and working in a terminal will basically fell like using an 80's one-line electronic typewriter.

I know I'm missing something here and/or stupid, but how is that? I mean the scaling.

720/2=360; 1440/2=720

Basically what they do is take a 2x2 square of hardware pixels and treat it like 1x1 pixel in software. It's like scaling up a picture in a picture viewer by x2 of if you drive your 1920x1080 monitor with only 960x540.
The resulting image will still be crisp, because your scaled image will still exactly match the display's pixels, but it will be "blocky".

In layman terms, a zoom in.

Given the screen size and resolution, UI controls such as buttons, edit boxes, menu and description text etc would be unreadable. For example you would end up with 1mm high text etc. So everything is scaled up 2x, to make it usable. But the drawback is that it effectively halves the screen resolution.

EDIT:
The alternative would be to create a completely different UI, designed specifically for mobiles. With 1:1 pixel mapping but where buttons and text would be ridiculously large if displayed on a big screen. But that is not what Purism is doing at this stage. They want to shoehorn a desktop UI into a small screen. Which makes scaling the only option.

maybe not for you, but i have pretty small hands and a 5" phone is a one-handed device and a 5.7" phone is decidedly not.

in my opinion, 5" is the largest a phone can be before it becomes a small tablet.