Having more incentive doesn’t necessarily matter if one is spread too thin to actually follow through, otherwise most software (and similar) issues I experience would have been solved a long time ago by myself, and Purism’s Librem 5 probably wouldn’t be so delayed. Furthermore, there are also matters of taste, where the default software may be incentivised to follow a different path than what I would prefer; and support in the other operating systems I have looked at already seems to be much better than Purism’s in regards to more options for system software.
Actually, I even have a specific example of why it won’t work to rely on this: For by far one of my most important usability issues in Phosh, they have already said “scarce time is better put elsewhere”: Per-application GUI scaling? - #7 by guido.gunther . So I basically have to either make a pull request to fix it myself, or see if someone else has already made something better. My use case, of making desktop-class software work as well as it possibly can on a touch screen with as little compromise as possible, is different than the design focus of making better mobile-class apps.
RE: Texts and Testing: I was more referring to which specific daemon is responsible for retrieving calls and texts, how to set it up if I install something like Gentoo that doesn’t come with it, and whether they would persist between user interfaces if I stayed on PureOS but switched from Phosh. If I were to move to another OS full-time, I would want it to have full texting functionality. If part time, I will probably just turn off the hardware kill switch for the modem. I generally prefer having a bunch of different UIs available in the same OS than to constantly switch distros as that means I do not have to worry about migrating files every single time I want to use something different. That also means I probably wouldn’t be testing a bunch of different distros on an SD card; even if I knew of more than 2 available, it’s a lot less chaotic to find only 1 OS that supports everything and then switch between GUIs on that. Ideally I would either find some method to test them all on PureOS; or find some other distro which works better to test them on, do some initial testing on SD card, then switch to it full-time.
The kernel is by far one of the easier packages to compile because it is written in C. What I’m really worried about are those packages based on C++ and Rust, especially the HUGE ones like QTWebKit. QTWebKit takes well over 1GB of RAM per compile thread in my experience so would probably end up overwhelming the Librem 5 with its 4 threads and 3GB of RAM. And even the smaller Alacritty ended up completely overwhelming my Librem 5 virtual machine when I tested compiling it quite a while ago. If I am remembering correctly, one step that often takes a ton of RAM isn’t even just the compiling itself but the linking, and I’m not sure it’s possible to do the linking step entirely on the remote system with Distcc, so that is one of my main concerns.
The specific methods I would be using, via the Gentoo Wiki, would either be Distcc - Gentoo wiki or Binary package guide - Gentoo wiki . Distcc might have problems with bandwidth, and still being somewhat dependent on the original system, while the binary package host would require compiling many packages in advance, and both would require a degree of setup.
Interesting. I am referring to the latter, as I often see software suggesting using some custom PPA repository to install on Debian-based distros so thought it might be more normal and expected to use them on Debian-based distros like PureOS. Do you have any more information or links that go in-depth about how this is an issue?