GNOME Partners With Purism On Librem 5 Linux-based Privacy-focused Smartphone (betanews.com)

BrianFagioli writes: The Librem 5 smartphone by Purism has a long and difficult road ahead of it. Competing against the likes of Apple and Google on the mobile market has proven to be a death sentence for many platforms -- including Microsoft with its failed Windows 10 Mobile. Luckily, Purism has found itself a new partner on this project -- one of the most important organizations in the Linux community -- The GNOME Foundation. The GNOME Foundation explains, 'The Librem 5 is a hardware platform the Foundation is interested in advancing as a GNOME/GTK phone device. The GNOME Foundation is committed to partnering with Purism to create hackfests, tools, emulators, and build awareness that surround moving GNOME/GTK onto the Librem 5 phone. 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.'

Comments

oh good

[Anonymous Coward]

because what I need gnome to do is pull a mozilla and half ass a phone for a few years
that will suck up resources and put them behind on their core product
which will then lose most market share and eventually die
awesome

The only thing that's dead, is Privacy.

[geekmux]

"Competing against the likes of Apple and Google on the mobile market has proven to be a death sentence for many platforms..."

No, competing against the ignorant masses who no longer value privacy at all is exactly why this project will fail, especially when the first fucking thing your "privacy-focused" smartphone customers will ask is, "Where's the Facebook app?"

Not only is privacy itself dead, but the demand for privacy is as well. Manufacturers need to wake up to this reality.

Guaranteed to fail

[Anonymous Coward]

People keep trying, like battering their heads against the walls of Jericho, but they will not unseat Google and Apple. The mobile world is utterly dominated by the first-mover advantage, and Google and Apple have a 10-year head start. That's before we even get into the pathetic quality of FOSS operating systems when it comes to UX design consistency and simplicity or even working out of the box, all of which are utterly indispensable in the mobile world. No one wants to use a terminal to unfuck their packages on a tap-to-type keyboard.

If Amazon, Mozilla, and even the evil empire of Microsoft can't do it, why would a bunch of what amounts to nobodies in the mobile world stand a chance?

This stinks of groupthink and unearned optimism.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Wait.

[Thad Boyd]

Wait, didn't they announce last week that they were going with Plasma?

There's certainly nothing wrong with a device that will run either one as the user chooses (I've currently got KDE on my main desktop, GNOME on my HTPC, and XFCE on my laptop), but it seems like picking one to focus on to start with might be a good idea.

no Purism for me then

[KiloByte]

If it has GNOME on it, no thanks. I have yet to see any sane person to voluntarily choose GNOME for anything; this includes distributions.

For the latter, you have Ubuntu. Most others merely used sort-of usable Gnome 2 then had it mutate into a monstrosity into then.

In Debian, Joey Hess switched us to XFCE but then got overruled by a "rational choice" with a score sheet which looks just like a case of government procurement: requirements tailored towards a specific choice with scoring that's in some cases reversed compared to what anyone without an agenda would pick: for example, "systemd integration" gives +1 -- ie, a desktop environment that is universal and works with any init gets negative score while something systemd-only gets +1 just for that. No score for "media size" despite the promoted answer being massively bloated. A whole -1 for "tasksel quality" which anyone who has seen that DE can make perfect within minutes. And the biggest gem? As of Jessie, GNOME worked on only two architectures (amd64 and i386) at all -- out of 11 primary 12 secondary archs. Even on x86, it suffers from dog-slow software emulation if you try to run it in a VM or anything that has one of supported GPUs. So did GNOME get a RC bug that keeps it from Jessie at all? Meh...

And this doesn't even mention the oh so insignificant question about basic usability and ergonomy. GNOME beats even Win8.0-era Metro in obstructing simplest tasks.