Librem 5 Evergreen vs. Pinephone

Mainline Linux support means the device is going to be supported for a very long time. For Android phones you're always relying on the manufacturer - even with the likes of the FairPhone you're still beholden to qualcomm's willingness to provide updates.

You also get the same software running as you do on desktop Linux - just hook up a display and you've got a regular Linux desktop. You can print from the device itself, because of course it can just run CUPS. You can direct audio output from each application (including to the earpiece) because it's just running pulseaudio. Hook up a webcam, a Wii mote, once you have actual control of the hardware the possibilities are endless.

I own a Pinephone with the latest revision board which was bought in the July 31st batch this year (and got shipped in September/November within the EU).

I have to say that hardware-wise, the Pinephone got very _very_ far already. It's an amazing hacker's device, especially with the USB-C host.

The only issue that persists is software. Phosh is pretty much useless because not a single app will work as a real mobile app, let alone act in a responsive manner with their underlying design philosophies. It all feels like Android 1.x, which was barely useable outside the context of shitty car navigation handhelds.

The available cross-compiled versions of Browsers (e.g. Firefox or Chromium) are totally broken, as they are made for Desktop and do not even downscale their user interface, and are neither responsive anyhow. So for now, I am using my own (prototypical) Browser Stealth [1] due to lack for alternatives because there at least the UI doesn't crash every few seconds when being used within a WebKit2GTK webview.

I don't have many requirements for my phone, to be honest. I don't use social apps, and only communicate via telegram. But currently the amount of software that's available for phosh is still the one reminding me of a developer environment or say, an Android emulator image.

I seriously thought about taking ownership in creating a few apps for it, like one for openstreetmaps, notes, text editor, which are the more important ones for me.

But to be bluntly honest, I don't even know where to start with the whole GTK shitshow. It's absolutely impossible to develop an app without any working examples. There's no non-auto-transpiled-bindings-documentation, there's no libhandy examples that actually work, and there's certainly not any responsive GTK app examples that would show how to make a "real mobile" app. How do people develop apps for mobile GTK?

Seriously, I cannot understand it. I want to, but there's no way anyone can keep the mood up digging through a _mobile phone's gdb output while the on screen keyboard crashed_ to figure out how the API works.

I think what GTK really needs is something like Electron, but maybe based on WebKit2GTK and (maybe?) gjs. Something that allows bundling your assets to build an app that is offline-ready, and is easy to build with common methodologies of UI frameworks.

Because currently I don't see the reason why libhandy exists. It tries to fix a problem, and doesn't fix the underlying cause. GTK boxes and their layouting (and reflow?) concept just isn't made for an adaptive/responsive UI, so you'll always end up with a totally broken UX by modern standards. (You're welcome to challenge me on this, but as long as "make a sidebar that can fade-in/fade-out with a swipe" takes more than a week to build, I think you're wrong.)

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

It's worth noting that postmarketOS and Mobian already support Librem 5, and running other distros like Arch, Fedora etc. on it by yourself is not a challenge for someone reasonably comfortable with GNU/Linux. Running Plasma Mobile via pmOS is a no brainer, and I've almost got UBports (Ubuntu Touch) to run there already as well (it struggled with one quirk of the etnaviv driver last time I tried it, resulting in garbled display content, but it worked otherwise).

Should smaller countries just close their borders if they don't have a large enough economy to support compliance with ~200 other countries requirements?

Even now I know factories that only export to the EU, or only ship to America because supporting 2 sets of complex regulatory compliance requirements isn't manageable given their team size.

> It’s as easy as loading the distro onto an SD card, and then booting the phone. You don’t even have to flash anything to the internal eMMC in order to run it!

FWIW while the Librem 5 can't run the bootloader straight from the SD card, the kernel can use the rootfs from SD card just fine - I have multiple distros installed on SD card there this way.

The Librem 5 also supports booting via fastboot (uuu), which personally I find to be a more convenient option for emergency fallbacks than having to juggle with SD cards like you have to do on the PinePhone.

FYI - the reason why L5 doesn't boot straight from the SD card is that the SD card reader is on the USB interface behind a hub, because both SDIO interfaces available on i.MX8MQ are already taken (one by eMMC and other by WiFi).