Librem 5 Will Begin Shipping In The Weeks Ahead, But Varying Quality Over Months Ahead

[Danielsan]

I am not pretty sure about Flatpak... I have not idea how space requires APK but I have installed 6 application with Flatpak and each of them requires almost 1GB of memory...

$ flatpak list
org.gimp.GIMP
net.scribus.Scribus
org.kde.krita
org.freecadweb.FreeCAD
io.atom.Atom

$ du -chs /var/lib/flatpak/  
 5.0G /var/lib/flatpak/ 5.0G total

Of course those aren't applications for a mobile but if each installation requires to bring down all the libraries with 64GB of memory you have space just for 10 applications...

[Venemo]

For those not familiar with the release state of the Jolla 1; The device was supposed to based on a Texas Instruments SoC and was even ready for mass production, but months from launch TI announced they were pulling out of the smartphone market with no warning. As a result Jolla had re-engineer the device based on a Qualcomm SoC in a crazy rush

It was ST-Ericsson, not TI.
Jolla could only survive the switch to Qualcomm by inventing libhybris which they have been using ever since.

A smartphone is not a laptop replacement though. Linux is quite easy on the RAM usage. With a little custom memory management in user space, I could easily see them getting it as lightweight as iOS, which does fine on 2 GB RAM. Oh wait, pureOS is based on Gnome, then 3 Gigs might not be enough

It is based on Gnome, but they don't use Gnome Shell, so in theory their solution could possibly use less RAM than Gnome Shell. That being said I've personally never seen Gnome Shell consume that much RAM on my system.

It would be a different story if the Linux community (particularly Gnome) had cared at all about mobile, but since they do not seem to, Purism has to invent the mobile interface themselves, make the GTK widgets adaptable, fix any papercuts involved in running Linux on a mobile device, and also build the hardware and upstream drivers.

There were attempts to do this in the past, Nokia N900 was GTK based, and did all the work to make GTK mobile friendly. However the work was never accepted upstream. Thus Purism now has to do all of it from scratch.

[Toggleton]

I am not pretty sure about Flatpak... I have not idea how space requires APK but I have installed 6 application with Flatpak and each of them requires almost 1GB of memory...

$ flatpak list
org.gimp.GIMP
net.scribus.Scribus
org.kde.krita
org.freecadweb.FreeCAD
io.atom.Atom

$ du -chs /var/lib/flatpak/
5.0G /var/lib/flatpak/ 5.0G total

Of course those aren't applications for a mobile but if each installation requires to bring down all the libraries with 64GB of memory you have space just for 10 applications...

Only Gimp scribus and Krita have a aarch64/arm64 build they use all a different runtime. If you use more Applications you will reuse runtimes.

Download size installation could be higher
1. org.gnome.Platform aarch64 3.32 flathub < 342,9 MB - Locale < 319,8 MB (partial)
4. org.gimp.GIMP aarch64 stable flathub < 102,9 MB

1. org.kde.Platform aarch64 5.12 flathub < 381,2 MB - Locale < 334,0 MB (partial)
3. org.kde.KStyle.Adwaita aarch64 5.12 flathub < 5,4 MB
5. net.scribus.Scribus aarch64 stable flathub < 129,9 MB

1. org.kde.Platform aarch64 5.11 flathub < 346,0 MB - Locale < 195,1 MB (partial)
2. org.freedesktop.Platform.ffmpeg aarch64 1.6 flathub < 2,3 MB
5. org.kde.krita aarch64 stable flathub < 101,2 MB - Locale < 4,6 MB (partial)

[starshipeleven]

Hardware is easy and marginal cost. Software is upfront and difficult.

Hardware design is the ultimate bitch. It's like software development, but each time you compile you pay thousands of $$.

[Danielsan]

If you use more Applications you will reuse runtimes.

When they match otherwise you have to download another version of the same runtime...

[oiaohm]

I am not pretty sure about Flatpak... I have not idea how space requires APK but I have installed 6 application with Flatpak and each of them requires almost 1GB of memory...

$ flatpak list
org.gimp.GIMP
net.scribus.Scribus
org.kde.krita
org.freecadweb.FreeCAD
io.atom.Atom

$ du -chs /var/lib/flatpak/
5.0G /var/lib/flatpak/ 5.0G total

Of course those aren't applications for a mobile but if each installation requires to bring down all the libraries with 64GB of memory you have space just for 10 applications...

https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2017/10/02/on-application-sizes-and-bloat-in-flatpak/

You are kind of way off. Flatpak does not require all applications to bring down all the libraries. flatpak is auto deduplicating. Also you have used a flag with du that can cause a miss count on ostree style directories like flatpak uses. Ostree is using hardlinks so a du '-c' flag can in fact result in counting the space multi times over.

"du -hs" or "du -sh" is what you use on ostree directories if you want sanity the du -chs risks badly over reporting used. The du -chs figure is useful if you want to know how big the result will be if you do a straight copy but its not useful when you are wanting to see how much storage space is in fact being used on solutions using hardlinks.

Closer the applications are related to each other in libraries the less disc space they use.

1G is fairly much worse case with flatpak per application. The 6 applications you have chosen happen to have very little overlap but even so 5G would be high and would most likely because you have passed -c flag into du and got a incorrect report by basically making the deduplicated storage report the size if it was not deduplicated.

32GB of storage for applications you would expect to fit at least 16 applications using flatpak most likely a lot more. Why 16 is you only have really 16G to play with the other half is for user stuff.

[oiaohm]

When they match otherwise you have to download another version of the same runtime...

https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2017/10/02/on-application-sizes-and-bloat-in-flatpak/

No that is not how flatpak works. When you have two versions of the same runtime you don't in fact download two full copies of the same runtime. When you download the second version of a runtime you only download the differences to the first version of the runtime and only consume the disc space of the differences.

Flatpak is auto deduplicating due to using ostree.

[blackiwid]

It is based on Gnome, but they don't use Gnome Shell, so in theory their solution could possibly use less RAM than Gnome Shell. That being said I've personally never seen Gnome Shell consume that much RAM on my system.

That was true at some point, but with some release last year they reduced the ram (around 500mb) usage 1:1 to kde niveau. So at this point this is a urban myth... 500mb is not much, but even the older versions with 1gb would not be as big as the Java virtual machine they have to load into ram for android.

Android on my system (without playstore) uses nearly 700mb, and k9-mail a very very simple mail program uses 92mb ram Wire uses 122mb. Conversation a jabber client 39mb. I am pretty sure non-java Linux can beat that even with gnome.

The whole libreoffice monstreus application only uses 150mb, a mail program will probably use 5-15mb instead of 92mb.

[LoveRPi]

Purism is a software and product company. If you backed Purism, you really backed the software effort as much as the physical product. Based on their website, they seem to have dozens of professional engineers and a distributed operation. Their goal is to build a cohesive open source product.

Pine is a manufacturer management company. They manage suppliers and focus on delivering the cheapest hardware possible without considering basic design or legal items like licenses. If you take a look at the board "designs", they're not really designed so much as they slap together the ports on board. PinePhone is really a hack (A64 glued to a USB 2.0 modem) when compared to the Librem 5 with i.MX 8.

Throwing hardware at developers is the easiest thing in the world and cost next to nothing. An hour of professional software development is worth 10 dev boards. Please don't try to compare the two companies or products or open source support because there is nothing in common.

[danmcgrew]

Purism is a software and product company. If you backed Purism, you really backed the software effort as much as the physical product. Based on their website, they seem to have dozens of professional engineers and a distributed operation. Their goal is to build a cohesive open source product.

Pine is a manufacturer management company. They manage suppliers and focus on delivering the cheapest hardware possible without considering basic design or legal items like licenses. If you take a look at the board "designs", they're not really designed so much as they slap together the ports on board. PinePhone is really a hack (A64 glued to a USB 2.0 modem) when compared to the Librem 5 with i.MX 8.

Throwing hardware at developers is the easiest thing in the world and cost next to nothing. An hour of professional software development is worth 10 dev boards. Please don't try to compare the two companies or products or open source support because there is nothing in common.

PLEASE don't try to try and disguise your fanboy-ism behind a faux cloak of objectivity, "LOVE RPi".

Something, just a teensy something, tells me that you wouldn't have written this comment if the PinePhone were built with a Raspberry Pi as its core. But of course, in that case, you'd be justifying and defending all its problems, "LOVE RPi".