
Librem 5 design report - OberstKrueger
https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-progress-report-11/
======
danShumway
I'm pretty excited about the Librem 5, if it comes out even halfway decent
it'll be my next phone. I'm basically banking on my current phone lasting just
up until their release day.

When they initially launched their campaign I was a little pessimistic about
the whole thing. But since then I've realized a couple of things:

\- I really dislike the current trend in phone hardware, and Librem will fix
most of those problems (kill switches, replaceable battery, etc...)

\- Most of the focus on the latest and greatest phone hardware is wasted on
me, especially if I can control the entire software stack. Using Linux a lot
has since taught me that high performance is often only necessary because
large tech stacks with mandatory upgrades degrade heavily over time. And I
don't really do heavy graphical work with my phone, so I just need good enough
performance.

\- Most of the focus on app compatibility is wasted on me. Android has a ton
of apps, and theoretically I could learn Java and develop more of them... but,
I don't like Java, and I don't like Android's development experience, and most
of the apps I download are trying to hack support between my phone and my
desktop anyway. Ironically, I would probably be able to get better integration
and more useful software for a phone running Linux.

When their campaign was first announced I know a lot of people (myself kind of
included) were thinking "well, it's never going to compete with Android." And
at some point, something flipped in my brain and I realized, "I don't care."

It doesn't need market penetration, it just needs to be more useful for me. If
they can build an experience of even just decent quality, then that'll be an
improvement over my current Android situation.

I've grown more to realize that I really value controlling my own software
stack, and that the more I control my own software stack, the less I care
about stuff like 3rd-party compatibility, because... well, it feeds into
itself. I don't want to run much of that 3rd-party stuff anyway because I
can't control it.

~~~
Avshalom
>> "I don't care."

I realize that many people love their various apps and in some cases depend on
them (I imagine any one using square) but all I want is a web browser, sms and
if I have to: phone calls.

Though I'm very much in the ~200$/3yr range for phones so I probably can't
afford one anytime soon.

~~~
jsilence
maps and navigation?

~~~
nikolaplejic
These all work fairly well in modern web browsers.

~~~
drdaeman
Navigation in a browser? Like, typing a destination and getting proper driving
directions - like, a lane info, real-time route updates in case of known road
accidents ahead, etc?

I beg your pardon, but I think this is something yet non-existent with webapps
- the best you can get is a prepared list of directions, and maybe you can set
the tab to auto-update once in a while. And this is something any half-decent
navigation app does.

------
jbk
I, for one, don't understand the push for Gnome here. I am a backer of librem,
and I really don't get it.

KDE Plasma Mobile is something that actually cares about mobile, is developed
by an actual community and still needs a lot of work. Developing another
Mobile Shell, on Gnome (that don't seem to care about anything else than Linux
desktop) feels like NIH and a waste of time and resources...

Doing a Mobile Shell (+toolkits +all basic applications) that works reliably
is a lot of work and doing it twice is a bit sad.

~~~
chrismorgan
The impression that I get, with no basis in data whatsoever, is that these
days, people that explicitly like KDE use KDE, a few people with strong
opinions or definite resource restrictions use other environments like XFCE,
LXDE or a tiling window manager, and pretty much everyone else is using GNOME,
and so the momentum is behind GNOME, with even Ubuntu recently switching back
to GNOME.

I think that this is targeting the sorts of people that are more likely to be
familiar with and like GNOME than KDE, so there is advantage in using the same
software, and producing software that will be able to, as depicted, run on a
laptop as well as a phone without feeling out of place anywhere.

Note also that they’re working with both GNOME and KDE, so that both will have
first-class support: [https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-gnome-and-kde-
collaboration/](https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-gnome-and-kde-collaboration/),
[https://puri.sm/posts/gnome-and-kde-in-pureos-diversity-
acro...](https://puri.sm/posts/gnome-and-kde-in-pureos-diversity-across-
devices/) (that latter link includes content very similar in meaning to my
remarks above).

~~~
niftich
There's a fair bit of people who use GNOME because it's the default (in their
distro), and if I made an unsubstantiated assertion that those people
outnumber those who are discretionary, deliberate users of GNOME, I don't
think I'd be wrong.

But Purism's project is heavily focused on relatability and advancing the
community's current state-of-the-art [1], which is different from the more
common model we've seen from other players, where they start fresh, get it
working, dump the code in a public repo where it sits largely unused because
it's so divergent and specific to their custom setup, and although the code is
technically open, much more effort is required on part of volunteers to apply
that anywhere else.

Purism seems intent on actually architecting their software such that all of
it can be upstreamed. GNOME, which doesn't have a strong answer to a touch-
first UI metaphor, can greatly benefit from this. KDE has already done a lot
of this hard work, so in a post like this, there would be fewer custom things
to show off.

[1] [https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-gnome-and-kde-
collaboration/](https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-gnome-and-kde-collaboration/)

------
freedomben
I tried to fight off the urge to get excited about this phone but I can't
anymore (been disappointed many times by linux-based phone plans). Librem, you
now officially have a place in my hopes and dreams. I'm really excited.

> _As the implementation of the Librem 5 goes on, we are quite aware that time
> is limited given our January 2019 target, and we are therefore focusing on
> robustness and efficiency for the first version of the mobile UI shell
> (“phosh”), which we wish to push upstream to become the GNOME mobile shell._

Terrific! I love Gnome shell and use it every day, and I'd love to have it on
my phone. Those mocks looks great!

------
mattnewport
Happy to hear they're going with a decent size battery over the thinnest
possible form factor.

------
donttrack
I am a bit sceptical. What kind of quantities are they shipping? I can’t
imagine it will be hundreds of thousands. Even at quantities like 50.000 it
seems to me it would be very difficult to source a custom designed
screen/touch at a reasonable price. At 50.000 it would probably even be
difficult to find someone even considering delivering the order

~~~
sfotm
Why would they need a specially designed screen? I would guess that they're
looking at what's on offer from various vendors and comparing them to see what
works, right?

~~~
donttrack
Most of the time the touch and display is delivered as one module (similar to
the iPhone where the whole front is one module) The front would probably need
to be customized so it fits their design and they would probably need a flex
designed also so it fits with their board design... maybe they are designing
their board around an off the shelf display module? It’s usually a puzzle -
not easy

------
saagarjha
I'm interested in what work they're doing on UI, rather than hardware design.
Devices like these often lack polish, so I'm curious what solutions they've
come up with.

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bo1024
Very excited for this, but 5.7" is monstrously large. Still can't wait.

~~~
icefo
5.2" is the maximum for me because if it's bigger I can't reach the top of the
screen with my thumb holding the phone normally.

Still wish them to succeed and I'd like to buy a "mini" librem phone in a few
years

~~~
chupasaurus
Same to me, but I'm a backer. I already think about overriding screen
resolution to pin down a screen.

edited: typo

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bscphil
>We are now aiming for a 5.5″ to 5.7″ screen with a 18:9 ratio

A 2:1 ratio?

~~~
Ethcad
Yeah, that’s a bit of an odd way to write it. I guess it’s intended to be easy
to compare to 16:9, 21:9, etc.

------
gravypod
I love the contacts integration. I wish there was also some way to send SMSes
directly from your computer to your device without sending to a 3rd party
(outside of your service provider and receiver).

~~~
craftyguy
Considering the Librem5 is essentially Just Another Linux System, this would
be fairly straight forward to implement... The most basic implementation would
be something like a script that you run on your computer, that connects over
SSH to the phone, and uses ofono's dbus interface to send a SMS.

I haven't been as excited for a device as I am now since the N900.

~~~
danShumway
> Considering the Librem5 is essentially Just Another Linux System, this would
> be fairly straight forward to implement

This. The moment I started getting really excited for the Librem 5 was when I
thought, "half of the problems I'm trying to solve for my phone right now are
trivial to solve on this Raspberry Pi sitting next to me. Why isn't my phone
running the same OS as the Pi then?"

~~~
craftyguy
I know, right? Developing _anything_ on Android, for example, requires Java or
Kotlin, tens of GB of SDK stuff and emulator images (if you don't have a
device with the specific Android API you want to target), and using Android
Studio or fighting with gradle manually. Or you could 'root' your device and
fight with Android to run your arbitrary scripts in a severely reduced shell.

I'm sure some Android dev is going to say "but what about blah blah new API
new tools whatever?" in response to this.. but my workflow is autotools or
meson (and for the Librem5 a crosscompiler) + vim. Or I could write shell
scripts using a plethora of cmdline tools and not install anything extra to
develop useful, powerful stuff for this device.

------
philg_jr
Does anyone have more info about the Librem 5's baseband? I know they say it
will be separate from the app CPU and have hardware kill switches for all of
the components/sensors, but I'd love to hear more about the firmware running
on it.

~~~
jlgaddis
I don't know anything at all about it to be honest, but I can assure you it
won't be open. It'll almost certainly be the firmware provided by the chip
manufacturer. If you're lucky, they'll have _some_ (but likely very limited)
ability to slightly modify/tweak it.

 _That_ is the killer feature I'm waiting for in a mobile phone. Someday, I
hope. (Hey, a guy can dream, right!?)

~~~
chupasaurus
AFAIK modems with open source firmware are banned in 100+ countries including
US (I lost the source where I read about the global situation, in US there are
FCC restrictions).

~~~
seba_dos1
Well, at best it could be "open" in a tivoized sense, but nothing more than
that.

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msl09
> Not android

For what reason?

~~~
sfotm
Differentiating themselves within the market isn't too far from the list of
reasons, I'd suspect. Who would be reading about this if it were just another
Android mobile phone?

This is targeting a small market of Linux enthusiasts with a different kind of
operating system. If this were running Android, why wouldn't those enthusiasts
just buy one of the market-leading phones and use a well-supported ROM?

