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PureOS is convergent

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Re: PureOS is convergent

#61

Post by rchaud »

SeripisChad wrote: post #15

I keep looking at their products (laptop & phone) and can't pull the trigger based on what seems like a lack of apps/UX. I really want have better privacy and support companies with that in their DNA. I almost purchased a black-phone before. I really think sandboxing built-in emulator for android apps has to occur for the phone to get traction. I think i'm their ideal consumer and still can't see the value yet. I'm a…

The app issue is a chicken-and-egg problem that ultimately sank Windows Phone, Blackberry 10 OS, Palm WebOS, Firefox OS, Sailfish OS and Samsung Bada OS.

Fortunately in 2019, mobile devices aren't as reliant on native apps. I use Uber's PWA and Google Maps Go PWA, which used to be my biggest app-only dependencies. For other stuff, I find that the stock music and video player apps are more than good enough.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#62

Post by rcthompson »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #20

My primary concern with this is that different applications are inherently optimized for the platform on which they were originally designed. There are some applications that have a very dense UI because there's simply alot of functionality that the program handles (think of a video editor, an IDE, etc). Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just s…

I guess we have to ask whether having a single OS running on phones and PCs means that every application written for that OS absolutely needs to be designed to run on both, or whether it's acceptable for an app launched on a phone to just say "sorry, you need a bigger screen" and quit.

In other words, is it acceptable to write non-convergent apps for a convergent OS?

Re: PureOS is convergent

#63

Post by ascii_only »

toast0 wrote: post #36
joekrill wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is nice, but what problem does it solve? It solves a _development_ problem, in that it reduces the amount of work needed to allow an application to reach a larger number of devices. Basically the same reason for things like React Native and PWAs. > Ubuntu tried this - how'd that go? So because someone else failed at solving a particular problem in a particular way previously, we should simply give up on it?

> It solves a _development_ problem, in that it reduces the amount of work needed to allow an application to reach a larger number of devices. That's great for developers, but how does that help users? As a user, I would rather use something built specifically for the device (and os) I'm using, I've used enough things that were supposed to work everywhere that it's a major turn off at this point. If developers want t…

>but how does that help users?

It helps users by providing apps.

Purism phone is very niche product. It is unreasonable to think that a lot of developers will start writing their application for PureOS. But hopefully some of them can port app if it will be easy enough. So instead of OS without almost any apps you will have OS with some apps.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#64

Post by tobiaswk »

Was very interested in their stuff. I was very disappointed when I saw a demo of the current state of Librem 5 running on development hardware. It did not look good. Laggy and slow. Very bad UI/UX.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#65

Post by wjoe »

0815test wrote: post #41
wjoe wrote: post #27

That's cool, and it's good to see work going on in more fundamental building blocks of Linux like Gnome to support mobile and reactive UIs. I always felt like this was the biggest blocker to using a Linux system on handheld devices - having a good ecosystem of open source projects that work for that, and having the ability to pick your own desktop environment and components rather than having to have an "all in one"…

> ...I'm quite happy with my own custom Linux setup on my laptop, I don't want to install PureOS on there. PureOS is just Debian with a few tweaks. This work is being done as part of the GNOME mainline branch, so any GNOME user is going to benefit from it down the road. And as "alternative" Linux desktops (MATE, Xfce, LXDE) transition to GTK3+, users of these environments will likely be able to make use of it, as wel…

Exactly, and this is why it's an important development. But the article starts out by saying it's allowing "applications to run on both the Librem 5 phone and Librem laptops, from the same PureOS release." which is sort of missing the point - this isn't about about buying a phone and laptop from them so that you can use their software on both, but an important step on Linux for handheld devices.

Good to see that Gnome are involved in this themselves too, and it's not some Purism fork of Gnome.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#66

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

jancsika wrote: post #56
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #20

My primary concern with this is that different applications are inherently optimized for the platform on which they were originally designed. There are some applications that have a very dense UI because there's simply alot of functionality that the program handles (think of a video editor, an IDE, etc). Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just s…

> Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just seems silly, and I fear that in the name of making "everything work everywhere", we're going to compromise a bunch of apps that worked beautifully on one platform in favor of making them work adequately on several platforms. Which are the Linux GUIs that currently "work beautifully" on the desktop? > I m…

You may have missed that part where I said "Ruling out, of course, someone plugging their phone into external KVM".

My point was not someone simply running vim on their phone. My point was that if someone rewrote vim to be idiomatic within the smartphone UX (e.g. replacing keyboard motions with swipes and gestures), it would largely defeat the purpose of vim as a modal editor and render it simply as another generic text editor.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#67

Post by ascii_only »

chongli wrote: post #50
joekrill wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was typing that comment, I was actually going to elaborate on this point, but decided not to for brevity. The reality is, if a developer can generate greater reach, it gives more options to the consumer. And so in that regard it does solve a problem for the end user - they have more software options to choose from. Perhaps there is more competition, which I think we can all probably agree is good for users.

Sure, I get that it's important for your product to attract developers in order to present a thriving software ecosystem to the users. It is, but the users don't care how you do it. So marketing developer-centric features to end users is a waste of time and money.

But their market audience are developers/power users.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#68

Post by moron4hire »

Windows has had this with .NET apps for... Oh, pretty much since there has been a .NET. I had written several apps for Windows CE that ran both on desktop and mobile (same EXE file, even). Today, you can do it with UWP.

It's a shame Windows Phones didn't take off. They had a great UI paradigm and I think Microsoft has done a lot of very hard work that goes mostly unappreciated in the development world, just because Google's reputation is still based on a decade-old memory of their (never official) motto "don't be evil". Microsoft hasn't been the "Halloween Papers" company for longer than Google has been a company, period.

EDIT: I'm not saying MS isn't an evil corporation. I think all corporations get to some degree of evil proportional to their size. But for some reason, Google and Apple don't get that same evaluation, getting some sort of pass, that I think is worse in the specific case of Google (being an ad-tech company). We are collectively missing out on a lot of inovation and market diversity because of this cognitive dissonance.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#69

Post by maxsilver »

_bxg1 wrote: post #29

I've become unenthused about this software "dream". Having spent years designing and building UIs on the web, what I've learned is that: 1) Convergence works great for "casual" apps - messaging, stores, content feeds, etc.; anything where the amount of stuff you need to see on screen at once doesn't need to be especially large. But the web already does a great job of making this type of application both responsive an…

> Convergence works great for "casual" apps - messaging, stores, content feeds, etc.; But the web already does a great job of making this type of application both responsive and cross-platform.

I'd argue this is where Convergence actually works best. (Especially the way Windows does it, anyway).

For most people, "casual" apps are 95% of what they need a computer for. And the web does a good job, but not a great job, at making these apps responsive and cross-platform. Usually, these applications sacrifice lots of performance and/or usability and/or reliability, just for the benefit of being able to run in a browser. Which is fine if that's a trade-off you want to make, but this is usually not being done out of benefit for the user.

Convergence can help fix part of this, by reducing the cost of native app development even further while preserving the majority of the quality/performance/usability benefits native apps provide.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#70

Post by Vinnl »

dcdevito wrote: post #5

This is nice, but what problem does it solve? Mobile and Desktop operating systems solve different issues on their own. Ubuntu tried this - how'd that go? Second issue is: how do I use it? How can I install it on MY devices? I'm all for privacy and I want to is it, just seems like a dream and it will never come to fruition

The problem it solves is writing an app suite for the phone from scratch. There's now a really quite capable web browser running on their phone, which is likely to be a far better experience than had they written it from scratch. Pair that with upstreams that appear to have enough goodwill to agree to maintain their patches for them, and it's obvious why they're pursuing this.
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