Ok, thanks for explanation, you and pichlo. Another question: Is this common on phones? Like, there is Android phones having 1920 or even higher resolution. Are they designed the same way or is it just Purism? Because what's the point on having such a resolution for the screen if it is scaled to half?

edit: I have thought that UI (not just Purism but UI's in common) are made to fit to the screen and intended use. For example, if the buttons are too small on high resolution, they will make bigger ones. I'm just a stupid nurse with no skills to design anything, but for me it would make more sense than zooming everything in.

I wouldn't say that. At the native resolution, the Librem5's DPI is only slightly higher than that of the N900, but scaled by factor 2 it is much lower:(source: https://www.sven.de/dpi/)

The UI of the Librem5 (native) would have to be scaled up by pretty exactly x1.06 to get to the N900's DPI.
My hope would be, that they just use Gnome's inbuilt scaling option, which iirc is supposed to work at x0.1 steps. That way the user could individually adjust the scaling factor.

The worst case would be for them to hard(ware) wire the scaling, e.g by some firmware or preprocessor chip, which would make it impossible for even 3rd party OSes (e.g. Debian) to change the scaling. But I don't believe that will be the case.

Yes, sulu, but would you call desktop UI on the N900 "usable"?

Maemo uses text size from 40 upwards. Buttons 60 pixels high (I do not remember the exact details but I do not think I am too far off). As opposed to text size somewhere between 8 and 12 on a normal desktop. That is what I meant by "designing a UI specific for small screens" in my later edit.

I tried a few desktop apps - both in Easy Debian and ones I compiled myself - and I would not call them exactly usable. You could use them in an emergency but not every day.

You are right. Adroid, Sailfish, Maemo etc are designed specifically for mobiles and have the size of UI controls modified to be usable comfortably. Then they can use a normal, 1:1 pixel mapping for everything else, such as pictures and videos.

But Purism is taking a shortcut. They are using a normal Gnome or KDE desktop. I do not know whether this is temporary or designed to stay like that forever. Their App Development page makes me think it is there to stay. I hope I am wrong.

I don't know about Android phones, but I guess Purism does what it's doing, because as a small company with no influence on hardware parts manufacturers, they have to take what they can get.
If we have a look at available 5.7" panels [1], it seems like you have to go for a 1440x720 panel and scale the software output if you want more than 640 pixels width and/or no 4:3 format and if you want to have the touch matrix integrated (which I would prefer in Purism's situation).

That's what you do, if you have full control over the UI design. But Purism doesn't have that, they merely cooperate with Gnome on this project. That's one reason why I think they use Gnome's integrated zoom feature.
Basically pichlo's edit in #409 nails it.


Certainly not. But Estel has shown some quite interesting experiments with Easy Debian's LXDE desktop.
So I think at least LXDE and Xfce could be made to work quite well on a 5.7" touch screen. Of course they still wouldn't stand a chance in terms of modern fashion, which I guess is why Purism didn't consider them.

I use Xfce on a 12" tablet. I had to scale some things up, not for visibility but to hit the buttons. It looks a bit awkward here and there, but it works very well, even better than Gnome (which looks better but works worse).
I'm aware that 6" is a totally different story, but I believe fashion aside, they could have just as well made Xfce usable with the amount of work they had and have to invest into making Gnome work.

btw: I also believe that Purism will stick with Gnome. They just don't have the manpower or expertise to develop a mobile UI from scratch.
There are currently no FLOSS mobile UIs in good shape. What remains are probably some proprietary mobile UIs (Sailfish?) that don't fit their philosophy, and some half-baked desktop UIs that sort of work on a mobile screen. Among these, they chose the best-looking one, which is Gnome.


[1] http://www.panelook.com/modelsearch....igh=300&page=1

me too

I use Xfce on a variety of tablets with zero problem.
after the original hours fiddling to personalize.

Which means that some team with a few hours
could institutionalize whatever XFCE standards
for their particular hardware.

XFCE is not rocket science,

and it beats GNOME in far too many important aspects to list.

The monolithic philosophy of Gnome is a flaw that cannot be undone.

agreed as well,
I have used xfce quite happily on a couple tablets.
Gnome is a a heavy monster in compare.


what we need here is Gerbick D.A. (Devil's Advocate) to step in ..

The issue of resolution is about reducing power consumption:

What is the resoluton of the built in display?

The screen resolution will be 720x1440 on a 5.7” screen. (There are more details on our Phone Constraints page.)

Having 720x1440 pixels within a 5.7” screen has the benefits of clear pictures and 2:1 square pixel ratio. Also, higher resolutions would have a higher heat dissipation and increased power usage since more pixels need to be moved around so we are purposefully reducing the heat dissipation and power consumption.

Like that of the Linux kernel?

Or Sailfish system updates?

Sorry, it was impossible to resist. It is an age-old bugbear of mine