Purism Begins Work On Unified Themes For Convergent PureOS Devices

[sarmad]

So, given this report it looks like they will be defaulting to KDE for their phone at least. I doubt they will have enough time to prepare Gnome for the mobile in time for their next-year release.

Anyone knows if KDE is more optimized / lighter on the CPU than Gnome? I tried it once and its animations did feel smoother than Gnome on my gaming machine but ended up switching back to Gnome for other reasons. Not sure if it was just me, or KDE is indeed more optimized. Anyone knows?

[johanb]

The mockups looks good.

Great to see a phone which actually has a first-class support for a dark theme

[Guest]

Good layouts but please no material design icons. They are ugly, bland and uninformative.

[Guest]

It's a bullshit. Different devices have different purposes of use. Mobile devices needs simplicity, because they are used only for communication. Computers need to provide comfortable use with mouse(TouchPad) and keyboard, and big screen.

You can use mobile as a device for work, but you limit your productivity down to 5%. You can can use use computer with simple UI, but you rise number of mouse clicks, and therefore slow down yourself.

It doesn't make sense to make mobile and computer platforms with same UI. I really like my phone to be a phone, and my computer to be a computer. Don't mix them together on UI level...

[grok]

Mobile software is usually too dumbed down : no menu, no help, no documentation (readme.txt) so no way overall to know what's happening or control anything.
It's all bullshit for dummies so that billion dollar companies steal your dick pics and your call history.[*]

If you're making a happy-cloud-sync app, maybe there should be a dialog to choose which server to connect to.
If you're making some nice tennis game or whatever perhaps I'd like to choose between single player, internet multiplayer and local network multiplayer.
And a while ago, an OS had a tiny, very standard GUI element used on almost all programs which gave access to file open, file save, quit, cut/copy/paste, undo, help (ranges from only an 'about' box to complete documentation). Granted that was desktop GUI. It was Windows 3.0 in fucking 1990!

And yes these things must work off-line on phones because there are many millions smartphone owners with only voice service, or 1GB in a month.

/[*] it's much borderline or full-on computer crime, that's why whe need linux phones. If someone did that to you in real life, followed you in your home, sifted through your dirty underwear this would end in physical violence or calling the cops, and eventually a prison sentence or confinement to a mental institution for the repeat offender.

[grok]

It's a bullshit. Different devices have different purposes of use. Mobile devices needs simplicity, because they are used only for communication. Computers need to provide comfortable use with mouse(TouchPad) and keyboard, and big screen.

You can use mobile as a device for work, but you limit your productivity down to 5%. You can can use use computer with simple UI, but you rise number of mouse clicks, and therefore slow down yourself.

It doesn't make sense to make mobile and computer platforms with same UI. I really like my phone to be a phone, and my computer to be a computer. Don't mix them together on UI level...

Perhaps you're mostly right, but we're heading to a world with perhaps one billion desktop users and four billion mobile users (etc.)
What was a status symbol a decade ago, will now be found in places that don't have electricity, refugee camps, on homeless people. Perhaps the GUI will have to be right - not MS Word or AutoCAD etc. kind of GUI, but there should be functionality.

One example : many phones can't read an .avi file or an .mkv with xvid or whatever in it. Sure, you might be able to install a different video player that can read everything in software. Better still might be if there's encoding software so that you can make a h264 (or vp9, or..) in some standard container (like .mp4 or .webm) that any phone or default player can read. I won't care if it eats 1 Watt for hours while I'm sleeping.
I might want a file queue, and obviously encoder settings (e.g. the same one as in handbrake). That beats being stuck with unreadable files (or power hungry ones)

[Up123]

looks good, you can clearly see those are professional designers, I suppose they will somehow manage to do it right, Gnome already looks like it has a phone GUI and GTK3 apps are dumped down to a minimum

[fuzz]

I believe the complaint being made is about the creeping growth of HTML-based (eg. Electron) UIs in "desktop" applications as developers start to just push their "The Windows 9x ecosystem loves our special snowflake, uniquely-skinned apps" mentality to new platforms.

Eh, I think the big issue is companies insist on special branding for their stuff to "stand out". I don't understand who makes these decisions.

It's very much a case of designers vs engineers.

The fact is it's going to continue to be like this until we have more universal information-focused hardware standards. The way of the graphic-based UI is just a fad while people are still infatuated with technology.

Ironically, I think many in-game sci-fi interfaces hit the nail on the head (or get close to it) at presenting universal textual information in an easy-to-consume fashion without letting the UI get in the way.

It seems to me that's why email is still so relevant. It's a universal protocol-based information communication system. They just should never have introduced HTML into emails :/.

[Guest]

The way of the graphic-based UI is just a fad while people are still infatuated with technology.

What's a "graphic-based UI"?

It's very much a case of designers vs engineers.

It doesn't have to be either or. I think the best results happen when those two groups join forces (and get paid handsomely). By best results I mean macOS and to some extent iOS. Don't get me wrong, I still love Linux for its freedom but it's still got some way to go usability-wise.

[grok]

What's a "graphic-based UI"?

That's an interesting view he gives. No more thinking software in terms of "this button goes there, this bar on the bottom". You would implement say a contacts list - perhaps a read-only mode and an editable mode if that were useful. You implement or describe semantics, intent or back end only. The UI is someone or something else's concern and it generates itself at run-time, be it a text UI, a web UI, several kinds of desktop GUIs and mobile touch GUIs, etc.

Much like you don't go reimplementing Wikipedia for Unix terminals, Qt, GTK, Win32, OSX's toolkit, Android, and so on.
But in this example the contact list would look like other software on your system (same fonts, same choice of round or square picture if there's a concept of a "mugshot" to represent people).