UBPorts Ubuntu Touch To Be Supported By The Purism Librem 5

[starshipeleven]

Let's just shut up, let them fail spectacularly (or succeed, or just be "good enough") and leave it at that because it does not seem like they are going to change their minds.

Sorry but this is wrong. If there is something wrong you point it out and keep doing so until something changes. For the very least.

So, until they either succeed or fail or deliver an inferior product people can and should complain about the overwhelmingly inefficient choice they made. If they listen or not is their choice, but people should still voice their opinion so that there is another thing to listen to that isn't just their official statements, and others can see and make their own decisions on what Purism is and if it is indeed worth your money or not.

They are focusing on GNOME,

No they are developing their own thing using "GNOME technologies" (i.e. they don't want to make it sould like they are making somethign from scratch), they aren't even using Mutter but want to make something new.

this is a collaboration so it does not seem like it will be developed in-house but that the UBports team is receiving devkits and actually doing the hard work themselves.

sending SDKs and get others to work on your device isn't what I would call cooperation. That's sure nice, but meh.

[johanb]

Sorry but this is wrong. If there is something wrong you point it out and keep doing so until something changes. For the very least.
So, until they either succeed or fail or deliver an inferior product people can and should complain about the overwhelmingly inefficient choice they made. If they listen or not is their choice, but people should still voice their opinion so that there is another thing to listen to that isn't just their official statements, and others can see and make their own decisions on what Purism is and if it is indeed worth your money or not.

Fine, your opinion.
However I'm still tired of reading the same thing which I agree with over and over again knowing that it won't affect anything, it just wastes my time.

No they are developing their own thing using "GNOME technologies" (i.e. they don't want to make it sould like they are making somethign from scratch), they aren't even using Mutter but want to make something new.

No, they are not. They say they do but it's a lie. They use their own compositor (a fork of Rootston), write a custom shell, and ship GTK apps with it. That's not Gnome. Gnome would be to use Gnome Shell as compositor and shell.

Until you have proof of that they are lying, I'm going to continue to believe them but be sceptical.

Yes it's a fork of rootston, but there are very little modifications except for things which fit a phone better such as maximizing apps upon startup and such.
The shell itself is where most of the work seems to have been made seem to not be too dependent upon the compositor from a quick glance at the code, so you could likely switch out the compositor in the future.
Hell, even the git repo for the shell "phosh" states that it's a prototype, if that's the case and they haven't even modified the README in their rootston fork you should not count on that they will even use rootston when the product releases.

Also, the GNOME team wrote a blog post about replacing mutter with a wayland-native compositor for the future and Purism stated that their aim was to create a compositor which would satisfy the requirements they stated so it could be upstreamed in the future.
Let's just assume that they are not a lying pack of dicks which actually give a crap about upstreaming the code, in that case it sounds good.

Sure they are ambitious and they are likely going to release a half-complete gnome stack and possibly even sub-par hardware, but until they prove to not do their best on doing what they have promised I won't complain. I am not expecting the software to be decent at launch and if you are you are naive, however I do believe that unless they are a bunch of dicks they will deliver (the question is just if it's going to be a decent experience a few months after the release or a couple of years after the release).

My point is that Purism are horrible at communicating their progress and working transparently on a open-source project, you have no idea what their long-term plans are so you should stop doing assumptions and base your comments on what they have publicly stated.

[Vistaus]

Well, while we're at the, we could also get the Sailfish community do at least a community port (despite Purism not interested in working with Jolla for a commercial port, on ground of "not all got has been finished being converted to GPL yet").

I'd much rather see the LuneOS community do a LuneOS port 'cause I really, really miss webOS/LuneOS! (and I don't want to spend almost the same amount of money on a used Nexus 5 to put LuneOS on it if I can get a nice, new, open phone like the Librem 5 with a LuneOS port!)

[GI_Jack]

I can't trust Purism after they screwd up plasma mobile. We're in talk with them Jolla, plasma mobile and others at Fosdem. It feels like they have no idea what they are doing.

That depends. I got hands on with some purism hardware. Really well built. They pride themselves on having and open bootloader so you can run whatever you want.

I'm not giving up an android for my daily driver being used for actual phone duties.

The purism might actually be the return of a decent pocket tablet that we had last decade that culimnated with the N900, and before that the rest of the nokia N series.

What I am not hot about is they are shipping alpine linux, which I think is an odd choice for such powerful hardware.

In any case I will be running debian stable, if I do get one. Looking more for a pocket computer, less for a cell phone. I believe the two should be seperate for security reasons, and usability reasons. Android makes a loveley phone, but has some rough edges trying to use it as a laptop

[kingu]

I can't trust Purism after they screwd up plasma mobile. We're in talk with them Jolla, plasma mobile and others at Fosdem. It feels like they have no idea what they are doing.

Name a single thing the few representatives from Librem said to that effect during that meeting, minding i was there in the room with you. Give me an idea of how you know what it is that they should be doing that they aren't.

[Luke]

From my perspective, what is needed is an OS like this that can be installed fully encrypted save the bootloader, run Signal, tether, run Firefox desktop version or else Adblock browser, make calls, preferably use the camera and play video(though those are optional)-and can replace Android on cheap $80 phones once they have been rooted. Nothing else needs to work, not even GPS and no compatability with any other apps needed. Would be a quick and certain way to set up an almost-safe device for Signal without having to know exactly how to kill all the Google stuff in Android. Remaining attack vectors would be baseband radio attacks, and any weak encryption passphrases chosen by users at setup. You would not have to worry about sending a sensitive message to someone else on this and having the metadata(or worse) collected and uploaded by say, the Facebook app because that would not be installable.

You can stop the data collection and sale by Google in Android, but you have to know what you are doing. You also need to know where the vendor-installed malware is (if present was in the OTA updater in mine) so you know what binaries to shitcan while rooted. With Android, you need to root, shitcan the malware, disable Google Play store and services, remove all social media apps, then unroot to lock out root-level malware that doesn't come with its own rooting exploit. A non-rooted device for example slows down Cellbrite's attacks by police, though a heavy-duty encryption passphrase is the only sure way to sink Cellbrite.

Best thing though is this: never buy a phone from a carrier, as those phones carry ISP-installed spyware and often carrier restrictions on things like tethering that you have to root anyway to remove. The cheapest piece of Chinese junk is safer against carrier snooping than the most expensive Nexus or iPhone purchased locked from the phone company.