Purism Hopes To Default To GNOME On The Librem 5 Phone, But Still Supporting KDE

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 1 February 2018 at 10:15 AM EST. 34 Comments
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Purism has been supporting both the GNOME and KDE projects with their mobile ambitions and looking to have both desktop environments feature their wares on the in-development Librem 5 smartphone. But as far as the default user experience/interface goes on the Librem 5, they are leaning towards GNOME.

While KDE Plasma Mobile is a lot further along than GNOME on the mobile front, Purism is hoping to see the converged GNOME Shell working in time for the Librem 5 iMX-powered smartphone that will hopefully be shipping in early 2019.

They are looking at using GNOME by default as they are striving for a unified default desktop environment across their Pure OS Linux distribution. With being happy with GNOME Shell on the desktop and already shipping that on their laptops, they want to continue and see GNOME used for unifying the experience with their privacy-minded Linux smartphone.

But Purism believes in diversity and thus continuing to support KDE as well and possible other partnerships in the future with other free software desktop/UI projects. Here's how they sum up their support:

KDE: Purism is investing in hardware design, development kits, and supporting the KDE/Plasma community, and will be sharing all early documentation, hardware designs, and kernel development progress with the core KDE/Plasma developers and community.
GNOME: Purism is investing the same in hardware design, development kits, and supporting the GNOME/GTK+ community as we are with the KDE/Plasma community. In addition, Purism is needing to lead some of the development within the GNOME community, since there is not a large community around an upstream-first GNOME/GTK+ for mobile yet.

Purism founder and CEO, Todd Weaver, outlined their KDE vs. GNOME stance in a blog post posted on the company's website this morning.
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