Purism Making Some Progress On Convergence With Phosh Running On Desktop

One of many features not yet in place for Purism's Librem 5 smartphone is working convergence where one can plug-in a display and keyboard/mouse to the phone and have a working system, along the lines of what was originally envisioned by Canonical with Ubuntu Touch. But some progress is being made with at least getting their phone-focused "Phosh" Wayland compositor working on the desktop form factor.

While both Librem laptops and smartphones are running "PureOS" as their Debian derivative, it's not the same software stack right now on both. Among other differences, Librem laptops are running straight-up GNOME Shell while the Librem 5 is running some GNOME applications but on their custom WLROOTS-based Phosh compositor/shell. They have been working with their libhandy library and related efforts to make various programs adaptive to the screen resolution/orientation they are running on, but there hasn't been anything in place as far as allowing a converged experience of plugging a monitor and keyboard/mouse into the Librem 5 and having a working desktop experience. But then again, they are still tackling woefully short battery life issues, even the ability to make calls from the device, and other more critical tasks with the librem 5.

In any case, Guido Günther of Purism has been working on getting Phosh running on the desktop/laptop. Guido has shared a picture of Phosh running but no other real details, so it looks to still be in its very early stages of development. Nevertheless, interesting to see at least some progress being made.