Purism Begins Making Their Own Wayland Compositor For The Librem 5 Smartphone

[dos1]

Who uses Gnome mobile? Oh, right, it doesn't exist.

It actually did exist and it was what the first incarnations of Openmoko Linux, and to some extent Nokia's Maemo, were based on. Later ditched in favour of Qt and/or EFL, in both Openmoko and Nokia cases.

[grok]

Gnome 3 is horrible at what I want on a PC: providing a useful 2D unaccelerated desktop that runs anywhere (including on 2006 hardware, on a VM, on low RAM etc.)

Here? A dumb downed, vanilla, GPU based experience is sort of what we want on a phone (though I do think 2D unaccelerated should be possible on a phone, e.g. only animate cheap outlines).

What is important? SMS, calls, settings, FM radio, contacts (w/ export to SIM), user authentication (and guest mode), keyboard, basic camera software. Then just let me run a program or a terminal. In fact even a web browser doesn't really have to be part of the base system.
Then if this is real linux you should be able to run different base accessories.. or the vanilla ones under another environment.
Later, maybe some will use the phone merely as their only way to securely run a few Android programs. Others will care about server/networking.

The fewer GUI features the better, perhaps.

(Well, the same thing done with KDE infrastructure wouldn't be bad. I don't want to put dirt on KDE or flame it. I did read some inflammatory things about EFL though)

[blackiwid]

This thread is not about if you like gnome or kde more, that decition is fallen very early and they never suggested that they will focus on kde. Just because they said that they also will support KDE doesn't give you the right to demand or expect that they must now let fall their gnome support. Stopp being ridiculous.

Why are always the smallest user groups the loudest and most agressive, if its the small minority that deeply hates systemd, most users either don't care or love it, but you can get 1000 Sites of pure hate. Same with Freebsd users, (they are partially the same group funny enough), they are pationated about their ZFS which is fine for enterprise, but because linux for private normal desktop users has much more users, and there is no buildin zfs support for most distros, most non-enterprise users ignore it. And because you need a nas with 5mio gb ram to use it. But this users hate very very much in every btrfs news article. Because they don't can't understand that lisenses matter and if you have a incompatible one with linux it does not matter what your software can do, it will become never the default in linux.

Now that, which is the most successful desktop in the linux history? Gnome 2 without any doubt, it was a big part in what made ubuntu the dominant distribution, what happend when canonical switched to a qt desktop (unity) people run away from ubuntu to gnome 3 to mint, to cinemon to xfce nobody run to kde, so >90% clearly prefer GTK look/feel over QT look and feel.

Heck canonical even failed with qt with ubuntu touch, another QT fail. So its nice that you as mini minority are so pacionate about your small qt project, but its not what most linux users care, get that in your system that most users prefer GTK / Gnome over KDE.

Also the point of that project is to start a hardware plattform for geeks, take their desktop pcs the distro they create for their laptops nearly nobody uses that distro. It's just one offering. One of the major points of linux is that its customisable, and if you and other devs love kde so much, I am sure you can port either the kde desktop or even this plasma distribution for desktops to it.

The whole point is that you want to have control over the hardware not another fixed software plattform like android where most stuff is fixed and locked down.

[grok]

And there is something odd about this. I was under the impression that they were going to work with Gnome and lead some kind of "Gnome mobile" project, and now they're going their own way? What were the reasons for that?

They did announce a little while back they discussed this with the Gnome upstream.
This happens as the Wayland scene is not a wasteland anymore. (are those libs good?)
You seem to consider Gnome to be more siloed as it is. Unity desktop was much based on Gnome 3. Pantheon? Budgie? (maybe someone could elaborate)
Cinnamon was Gnome 3, maybe still owes its existence to it ; they had to fork more things to avoid/curb the GTK treadmill (so it could run on multiple distros, or be upgraded on LTS)



I hope I did not say dumb things. Am interested in other comments on the story or project. This could be a very important, life-changing project.

[grok]

Now that, which is the most successful desktop in the linux history? Gnome 2 without any doubt, it was a big part in what made ubuntu the dominant distribution, what happend when canonical switched to a qt desktop (unity) people run away from ubuntu to gnome 3 to mint, to cinemon to xfce nobody run to kde, so >90% clearly prefer GTK look/feel over QT look and feel.down.

A correction here, Unity is/was GTK3. It's the "convergent" Unity 8 that was on Qt and MIR and fizzled.
Unity had people who liked it (e.g. on 16:9 laptops)

I'm trying to make the point it was an example of a reasonably mainstream Gnome derivative (how come it uses Nautilus) (yes people fled to Xfce, Mate, Cinnamon, lxde, KDE or even Windows)
It's not even dead, there's Unity 7 for 17.10 and 18.04 ; some people reported needing it to be able to use that 1920x1080 res on small laptops and still be able to read the damn things on screen.

[blackiwid]

A correction here, Unity is/was GTK3. It's the "convergent" Unity 8 that was on Qt and MIR and fizzled.
Unity had people who liked it (e.g. on 16:9 laptops)

I'm trying to make the point it was an example of a reasonably mainstream Gnome derivative (how come it uses Nautilus) (yes people fled to Xfce, Mate, Cinnamon, lxde, KDE or even Windows)
It's not even dead, there's Unity 7 for 17.10 and 18.04 ; some people reported needing it to be able to use that 1920x1080 res on small laptops and still be able to read the damn things on screen.

Well you can spin it both ways if unity was gtk that makes my point even more, people used unity / gnome / xfce / mate and then the other 5% maybe used kde. Whatever even in a time where people were very unhappy and homeless (because of the switch away from gnome2) most did not consider to switch to kde. So they must do something wrong at least for the mainstream. They might do exactly the right thing for their small niche but purism can't only focus on this small minority. They would not get their crowdfounding thing done with only kde support.

And even if they would have got that, they clearly commented from day 1 where they are going, to now cry that they stick to their plan is pretty lame.

I would even make the argument that there were despite ubuntu backstabbing gnome, more gnome-shell users than kde users the whole time. But I have no hard numbers to show that, but many distros with gnome-shell default had high user counts or interests in distrowatch, like fedora / debian, centos... but again its not purely about gnome vs kde its also about qt vs gtk and there gtk is the clear winner in the desktop space.

It may be possible that there are some folks that use amarok or some other qt apps in gtk desktops, but the desktop itself was and is heavily dominated with gtk based desktops.

[dos1]

but the desktop itself was and is heavily dominated with gtk based desktops.

Which is a pity, seeing how increasingly hostile GTK+ scene is becoming. Without such domination, maybe developers of apps and libraries like mpv, SDL, Allegro etc. wouldn't have to choose between implementing window decorations on Wayland all by themselves or leaving their windows with no decoration under GNOME ;P

(also, while it's true that Debian bundles GNOME on its CD, it doesn't really matter much in 2018, as it asks you what desktop you want to install and downloads it automatically - as a long time Debian user I've never had a Debian with GNOME)

KDE lost much when distributions started to release their stable versions with unstable KDE 4 SC. Before that, in KDE 3 era, there was no such strong domination. Somewhere around KDE 4, the quality of Kubuntu variant also dropped significantly - some KDE devs have some horror stories to tell about how horribly mispackaged their software used to be :P This generally led to bad first impressions during time of the most dynamic growth of desktop Linux.

(looking at recent GTK+ development, I get the feeling that GNOME camp has a somewhat similar event lurking around the corner for them)

Now, having the long perspective and after working with both GTK+ and Qt, both as a user and as a developer, both on a desktop and on mobile devices, nowadays I feel a strong preference towards Qt and KDE (desktop and apps); even despite of strong preference towards C when compared to C++ :P


Anyway, getting back on topic - I wouldn't choose GNOME as a platform to base my product line on, but Purism did, and it's kinda understandable what they're doing now with Librem 5, at least from that perspective. However, we've seen so many failed attempts on mobile Linux already - I've personally been a user (and contributor) of most of them - that this behaviour definitely can and should trigger some red blinking lights in our heads.

For the beginning, just follow the Openmoko history and their various software distribution versions. There's a lot of lessons to take from there.

[Falcon1]

I still don't see any mention of GPU driver work.....closest news I know of is what Collabora did last year for that i.mx6

Without proper GPU and hardware acceleration, you cannot have a nice smooth UI, and this will remain a hobby project.

IMX6 and 8 have a Vivante GPU. For IMX6 there is a driver and they have been working on IMX8 as well. Browse the Phoronix articles

[starshipeleven]

The Xfce desktop does run with Pentium III and never cpu without gpu hw acceleration. You can even play YouTube videos with an octacore cpu that gives only 45 000 antutu points.

Can it run on a battery the size of a biscuit for a full day?

Because that's what GPU acceleration is for. Lower power consumption, because in a mobile device it matters.

[andreano]

I still don't see any mention of GPU driver work

Vivante is one of the well supported ones. Reason alone to choose i.MX8, I would think:

Broadcom (BCM) = As good as it gets. They got 1 man fulltime: Eric Anholt.
Vivante (Etnaviv) = Good despite being a hobby project. 5 main contributors. GC7000 support is in the works.
Adreno (Freedreno) = Good despite being a hobby project.
Mali (Lima) = In bad shape. Only ever supported MP400/450.
PowerVR (No driver) = Utter crap obviously.