Hacker News Reader

Comment by AsyncAwait | Hacker News Reader

I backed this originally when it was supposed to ship in January 2019. The project had a lot to tackle, developing unique hardware and software with a tiny budget compared to Google/Apple.

I am so glad the guys at Purism reached this point and did not give in to the folks who said the project would fail.

Phosh, their GNOME-derived shell, is now also used by many distros on the PinePhone, which is exactly the spirit of free software I wanted to see for the smartphone when I originally backed this.

View on HN

Something I have been noting when working with this community is Purism employees actively helping the Pinephone community developers with software support/coding and vice versa. It has been awesome to see such cooperation between the two communities (and I think there is a huge intersection between the two).

It is something I think that is truly awesome to see, and like you said, it has been in the spirit of free software. I am hoping that with more folks with a Librem (and Pinephone), that the software will mature even quicker.

> Phosh, their GNOME-derived shell, is now also used by many distros on the PinePhone, which is exactly the spirit of free software I wanted to see for the smartphone when I originally backed this.

It is hard to overstate the importance of this, no matter how you feel about Purism's hardware or the company...

Whether somebody personally prefers the Librem 5, or the Pinephone, or is holding out for some future higher-spec Linux smartphone - chances are that the work Purism did with phosh, phoc etc will benefit the entire community greatly.

I have waited on this phone since I pre-ordered it in 2017. Worth the wait and I'm happy to have contributed financially to all the hard work that has been put into making a much better linux experience on mobile devices in general, not only the Librem 5.

Same here.

Totally agree.

Nipick : Posh is not related to GNOME shell in any way. It is a from-scratch implementation of a mobile window manager in C on top of Wlroots (while Gnome is JavaScript on top of Mutter)

Phosh doesn't share a common codebase with gnome-shell, but it does build on and integrate with most of the same GNOME technologies and libraries.

Also, phoc is the compositor and window manager; phosh is the shell-equivalent.

In my opinion the biggest mistake Purism made is to try to build their OS from the ground up, when acceptable and proven alternatives existed already. This has repercussions even now, when users are justifiably annoyed at a mass produced phone with a non functional camera app.

The Sailfish OS and Mer communities have had a working plumbing and porcelain stack for years (granted Sailfish's UI is not fully opened source) but Purism insisted on bootstrapping their own instead of building on those. I feel like they could have forced Jolla's hand to open source the last bits of their proprietary UI and everybody would have been happier.

Here is why they chose this path: https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2020/08/05/advantages-of-ph....

Yes, I can understand the principial reasons of why they made the choice. But it's still a bad one form a pragmatic point of view.

It's the camera kernel driver that's not complete yet, not the app. There are several apps that should already work once the driver is there.

Regarding the whole stack, I recommended reading https://puri.sm/posts/what-is-mobile-pureos/

> It's the camera kernel driver that's not complete yet, not the app.

I was sure I saw in a different discussion that it's the other way around. Maybe you have a link ?

You can see some bits from the ongoing progress at https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/linux-next/-/issues/44

Once it works it will be just a regular V4L2 device on the system, there are plenty of GNU/Linux apps that can consume it and there are now even mobile-focused ones like https://git.sr.ht/~martijnbraam/megapixels/ and https://gitlab.gnome.org/jwestman/camera

Reply on news.ycombinator.com