The Librem 5 Smartphone Software Made More Progress In May But Still No Hardware Signs

Purism just published a monthly summary of their activities pertaining to the Librem 5 smartphone this month. They continue working on their software stack with the Librem 5 developer kit but there still is no sign of their production hardware design yet or if they'll be able to ship next quarter as planned.

Among the progress made on the Librem 5 Linux smartphone during May were:

- Ongoing work to figure out why PCM audio coming out of the developer kit is noisy and distorted.

- Various work on the messaging support.

- Continued work on libhandy integration with GNOME Web (Epiphany) to make it suitable for their small form factor web viewing experience.

- Improvements to Geary as their email application.

- Working towards getting a Linux 5.2 based kernel working on their developer kit to replace their Linux 4.18 kernel.

- Work on switching from Rootston to "Phoc" as their new Wayland compositor.

- Other kernel upbringing work including for the Etnaviv graphics.

It's still a long trek ahead until the software will be ready to go for the Librem 5 smartphone even as any sort of developer/user preview. Hopefully in June we'll finally see the production hardware design for this long talked about privacy-minded Linux smartphone and some reassurances if they'll be able to ship in Q3, already well off their original goal of shipping in January. At this stage I'd be quite surprised if any meaningful release would be ready by the end of Q3.

The latest May details can be found on the Purism blog.