Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Runs on the Librem 5 Smartphone – Week 2

puri.sm

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 78 posts

Re: Runs on the Librem 5 Smartphone – Week 2

#61

Post by RandomBacon »

justforpurism wrote: post #46
RandomBacon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why people seem to have it out for Purism. Did they wrong you? Are you a competitor? It's pretty clear you are being disingenuous.

> I don't understand why people seem to have it out for Purism. Did they wrong you? Are you a competitor? I love Purism. I mean no sarcasm here. But you have to know history and learn from previous mistakes, and try something different. If Purism's approach is the same as to what Openmoko was, it is not going to end well. I hope they will try something different. But, so far, they do exactly same thing as to what Ope…

They aren't "porting" apps.

Re: Runs on the Librem 5 Smartphone – Week 2

#62

Post by RandomBacon »

justforpurism wrote: post #51
flukus wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only surviving plan for any Linux-phone: make it web-centric. You have to port ONE app: Firefox. You are aware of the failure of firefox OS right? > Purism just have shown that they wasted precious time on badly looking GNOME Clocks, Emacs, Password manager, a game, a half-baked music player, Torrent client (on a phone!), and Drawing app made with their native UI. They haven't wasted time, pretty much all of th…

> You are aware of the failure of firefox OS right? Right. And this was a mistake by Mozilla: they tried to make an OS, and a browser and interact/negotiate with 3rd-party phone vendors. I did not care for FirefoxOS-based phones indeed because they where "same old ridden-with-firmware black boxes". Mozilla makes a good browser, they'd rather keep doing that. Purism is a different story. It seems they understand that…

Purism pretty much is doing what you're suggesting.

They're working with upstream packages so that when you install Linux on it, it just works, no hunting for additional drivers to make it work.

Those apps already exist. Again, they're working with those apps to make the phone "just work" when you install the apps/programs/packages/whatever. They don't need to reinvent Firefox, they can let Mozilla focus on that, and Purism can focus on what they're doing.

Re: Runs on the Librem 5 Smartphone – Week 2

#63

Post by dangus »

RandomBacon wrote: post #59
dangus wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that Librem laptops can run any OS like a standard PC. Many users perhaps don’t even use PureOS and put something else on. It’s this software or nothing, essentially. I realize it’s open and that we could theoretically make our own, but phones are still an incredible beast to tame at this point. This is going to work with basically zero carrier features and won’t even activate on important cellular…

I believe "Perfection is the enemy of shipping" is something that is mentioned here on HN quite a bit. Let's get the big stuff out of the way first and then continue working with Gnome to introduce a long press, etc. I'm no expert, but this device is a full-fledged computer, not something with a locked-down bootloader. I imagine people smarter than me could install whatever OS they want to on this device.

Locked bootloaders and proprietary components is what holds us back with alternative projects. In that sense Purism is giving us gold here.

I’m nervous though because hardware projects can fail so easily. Shipping and iterating on hardware isn’t the same as shipping software. In my opinion it just has to feel a little more “done” than this.

Re: Runs on the Librem 5 Smartphone – Week 2

#65

Post by logicprog »

RandomBacon wrote: post #11
logicprog wrote: post #9

I want to like Librem's smartphone, I really do. I like having control over my software, and I like being able to really understand how it works and tinker with it and stuff. But I have this sinking feeling that the Librem 5 is just vaporware, or worse, that it'll get released with a half baked UI and a barebones list of apps. On that latter one, I really don't see how they'll fix the problem. On the former, the thin…

It doesn't look like vaporware to me. The videos and updates seem legit. > it'll get released with a half baked UI and a barebones list of apps. Have you even looked into the project? It's running Gnome, on Linux, all the regular apps are there. Check out the videos in this link, it's not half-baked: https://puri.sm/posts/runs-on-the-librem-5-smartphone-week-3...

I've been following them for only a few months, sure, but I've seen that link and others, and watched many of their videos. It's extremely concerning that they use a stylus, they clearly don't have multitouch support, copy/paste is based on a control key, screen tearing is significant and some of the UIs aren't scaled properly, I haven't seen them do text selection and the keyboard didn't give feedback. That's just a few issues.

Also, the videos are legit for the software, but they are all running on the Dev Kit, not the actual phone hardware, which we haven't seen and have no idea what the progress on is like. So the hardware kinda does look like vaporware. In the link you have, for instance, the best they can do is take a fake circuit board image and fade it into a fake phone image. That's not encouraging.

Re: Runs on the Librem 5 Smartphone – Week 2

#66

Post by dmix »

bo1024 wrote: post #27
dmix wrote: post #2

GTK for a smartphone is an interesting choice. I'm curious if the Gnome team would ever commit to this. The use of a stylus in the video is a bit concerning though. Off topic but I hope Librem releases a high-end laptop in addition to their mid-tier one, ideally with a high performance AMD CPU. Something that could be the open-source friendly version of a Macbook Pro. The way they disable Intel ME and add hardware to…

I think the specs are already pretty competitive with Macbook Pro -- the only thing it doesn't have is a discrete GPU. Unfortunately I'd guess they won't use an AMD CPU anytime soon because I don't think we know how to 'purify' it, at least with Intel we can try to disable ME.

I disagree. The only option is an Intel HD Graphics 620 with an HDMI port (!) which can’t even host an external 4k monitor @ 60hz…

I also mentioned AMD CPU for a good reason as Nvidia is poorly supported by modern Wayland compositors.

The wireless card is also Atheros 802.11n with no a/c support.

Librem 15 is very much a mid-tier laptop.

Re: Runs on the Librem 5 Smartphone – Week 2

#67

Post by liamcardenas »

Apaec wrote: post #53
liamcardenas wrote: post #18

I’m sure people will disagree with this but I think they should focus on getting an easy way for people to target their devices with React Native, NativeScript, PWAs and every other cross-platform framework. That way they can much more easily acquire software. Seriously making an app from scratch is no small task, and often time isn’t worth it for such a small market.

Web centric didn't work for FirefoxOS. Contrary to popular trends, programmers can know more than a couple of languages and not everything has to be javascript. I'm sure many hackers would be more excited to make an app with go, rust, haskell, etc than to do js, that just feels like work.

Yes, FirefoxOS was certainly web centric and mostly did not succeed. That doesn’t mean it failed /because/ it was web centric. Every mobile OS has struggled other than iOS and Android because getting adoption for a new OS is hard.

Some additional thoughts:

1) maybe shipping a new OS with hardware, catering to a privacy focused niche is key to succeed this time

2) maybe web technology wasn’t ready to have wide adoption for making cross-platform apps at the time FirefoxOS was launched, but is now

3) maybe PureOS will fail regardless of how apps are built. In my opinion, the best chance of succeeding will be from actually being useful. In order to be useful, it needs software. Unless, of course, you seriously believe that getting hackers excited by not using web technology will be a better solution.

Re: Runs on the Librem 5 Smartphone – Week 2

#68

Post by liamcardenas »

flukus wrote: post #25
liamcardenas wrote: post #18

I’m sure people will disagree with this but I think they should focus on getting an easy way for people to target their devices with React Native, NativeScript, PWAs and every other cross-platform framework. That way they can much more easily acquire software. Seriously making an app from scratch is no small task, and often time isn’t worth it for such a small market.

Have you seen what development for this is like? You can slap together simple apps (the UI anyway) with a few dozen lines of C. It's extremely simple, lightweight and fast, everything react/PWA's/etc aren't. This is what excites me about librem the most, it's so easy to just write code with no bloated IDE, 15 xml files, AbstractFactoryBuilders and the rest of the android crapfest. PWA's and the like can stay away, I…

I’m sure it’s just as easy as any other UI.

My point is it’s so small, nobody will focus on it. However, if they can easily port their existing codebase, it will have more apps.

Re: Runs on the Librem 5 Smartphone – Week 2

#69

Post by meruru »

RandomBacon wrote: post #57
dangus wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh?

You think the video shows it will fail. I think the video shows it will succeed. You say it doesn't look enjoyable or practical to use, I'm saying 'Duh, it's a prototype not in a case, sitting flat on a table.'

He's talking about the software so your comments about cases and tables feel unrelated. If you just mean to say it's still a prototype, it could've been phrased better.

When you said "I agree" then followed up with a statement opposite to what he said, that also felt like a non-sequitur.

Re: Runs on the Librem 5 Smartphone – Week 2

#70

Post by hajile »

flukus wrote: post #49
justforpurism wrote: post #26

Registered just to post this. Love Purism, want it to succeed. But... IMHO, the effort is going to fail miserably, unless folks stop wasting time trying to build a phone UI, i.e. another attempt to build Android/iOS ecosystem. There were Sailfish, MER, Openmoko, and whatnot attempts to make a pure Linux-running cell phone. Just stop it. You will burn through your money doing half-baked UI, there will be no adoption,…

> The only surviving plan for any Linux-phone: make it web-centric. You have to port ONE app: Firefox. You are aware of the failure of firefox OS right? > Purism just have shown that they wasted precious time on badly looking GNOME Clocks, Emacs, Password manager, a game, a half-baked music player, Torrent client (on a phone!), and Drawing app made with their native UI. They haven't wasted time, pretty much all of th…

I think Firefox OS didn't have to fail.

1. Allow non-kernel updates without carrier interference. Google has had to learn this lesson the hard way. Let the carriers lock down the lower layers, but Firefox and the user-facing stuff should still be able to update well enough for a few years.

2. Don't launch on crap, low-memory devices. KaliOS works on low-end devices, but that's because it is hyper particular about which apps run and what web APIs they use (and a lot of websites don't run very well). There's no reason a web device can't work for high-end devices. Most people run the same 50 apps as everyone else (and 25 of those ship with the phone anyway). High-end devices also open up other options like running Android in a linux container (like ChromeOS does).

3. Make WebAssembly (then asm.js) first-class. "Native" wasm apps with more direct access to APIs and access to a standard set of canvas widgets (sorry, HTML sucks for a lot of things). New APIs need to be available for more specific cores (especially things like DSP or ML units). Finally, add support for fully-native processes for trusted programs because sometimes 25-50% slower is too much and sometimes a spec (eg, Vulkan) simply isn't available as a webAPI yet but competition is needed here and now.

4. Be different. Make something that tries to clone Android and people will expect it to be Android. Firefox OS would have gone much farther looking and acting like webOS (which is still a better UI than Android more than a decade later). You can't disrupt a free, mature project with an identical, but immature project and a bunch of ideals that 95% of people simply don't understand.

Post reply on HN