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

Posted by msmash on from the make-do dept.

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.'

7 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Gnome doing the UI? by Hognoxious · · Score: 3, Funny

    With Gnome doing the UI it'll be so private that even the owner can't find his shit.

    Captcha: frosty

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  2. The only thing that's dead, is Privacy. by geekmux · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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.

    1. Re:The only thing that's dead, is Privacy. by Thad+Boyd · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's quite clearly a product for a niche audience. Like desktop Linux. There's nothing wrong with that if you can find enough customers within that niche, but there's a definite chicken/egg problem there where most people don't want to give you money until your product is complete, tested, and stable, and you can't get a complete, tested, stable product without an existing market. It's extra daunting to know that even companies with the resources of MS and Canonical couldn't crack the market; smaller companies like Purism really have their work cut out for them.

      I think Canonical made a lot of serious mistakes in Ubuntu Touch, and that's a shame, because an alternative to Android and iOS would be nice. I tried installing Ubuntu Touch on my phone a few months back and I was really impressed with the interface and the depth and breadth of available packages, but, uh, it didn't work as a phone. Couldn't call, couldn't text, couldn't connect to my data network; asked for help on the UBports forums and never got a reply. So now I'm on LineageOS without Gapps; no Gapps means missing a lot of compatibility and functionality, but for the most part I haven't had too much trouble.

  3. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  4. Wait. by Thad+Boyd · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  5. no Purism for me then by KiloByte · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
  6. Re:Guaranteed to fail by JohnFen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't care if anyone unseats iPhones and Androids. I'd be perfectly fine with an alternative that is never widely adopted.