FrOSCon 2023: The year of Linux On Desktop^WMobile

Hardware Librem 5
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@evangelos.tzaras has given a talk today at FrOSCon 2023 that’s happening in Sankt Augustin right now, trying to answer the question of how the quest for mainline Linux on mobile phones is faring - and there’s a recording of it for you to check out :slight_smile:

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I just curious why evangelos.tzaras is showing the Librem 5 with Mobian and not with PureOS when HE works for Purism.?

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AFAIK he had two Librem 5s at/for the talk, one with PureOS, one with Mobian. As Evangelos is also a Debian Maintainer and a Mobian project member, this makes perfect sense to me. After all, PureOS is a Purism-polished Debian.

(I also am not so sure he got paid to do this talk by Purism, but that’s just a guess.)

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Thanks for link !

Doh, every year the same. Missed a highly interesting convention in my neighborhood… :sob:

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I like his T-shirt! :smile:

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The phone I gave the presentation from (and that I rely on a day-to-day basis) is on PureOS byzantium.

The second phone is my tinkering device and so far Mobian and an early-ish PureOS crimson made it’s way onto it (and I’m sure to be flashing pmOS too at some point).

I would’ve loved to show crimson but I did not feel like reflashing and reconfiguring things to be honest and it’s also not quite done yet, so I took the path of least resistance
(and as people have pointed out, I’m also a member of the Mobian project - this is what got me started working on FOSS Mobile in the first place!!!)

Edit: I cannot remember which phone the screenshots and videos I used were taken on (but if I were to look closely I would definitely find out).

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I (and others!) will surely be going to FrOSCon next year again!

Edit: We also organized a dev room, some impressions:

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Thanks for reply.

I just sad that you not represented PureOS/Purism BETTER as Purism put all the manpower for Phosh(gnome mobile) NOT Mobian either PMOS or Whatever. But also Purism worked a lot (NotForFoss) but in Free Software. Also Purism make the best true gnu+linux mobile device(NotPine64)(pinephoneS are freaking toy).
So Purism deserve a lot of fancy credits everywhere about gnu+lnx mobile and gnome mobile stack.

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I just sad that you not represented PureOS/Purism BETTER as Purism put all the manpower for Phosh(gnome mobile) NOT Mobian either PMOS or Whatever.

re: BETTER:

  • iirc I mentioned several times how Purism has invested massively into the whole ecosystem
  • and sure I could’ve showcased PureOS as well, but:
    • I was not at FrOSCon to give a marketing talk (and if I had I think it may have been received less well)
    • Also: Mobian has more recent software (this is just a fact) and carries less patches, so I would make the argument
      that showing Mobian bookworm will give a very good idea of how PureOS Crimson will look like (!)
    • rougly half of the images/movies shown are on PureOS

so to summarize: I think that that I’ve represented PureOS / Purism really well without being a complete Fanboy :smiley:
(which I definitely am; seeing as I’m working there, you know? :stuck_out_tongue: )

But also Purism worked a lot (NotForFoss) but in Free Software.

You don’t have to tell me :))

Also Purism make the best true gnu+linux mobile device(NotPine64)(pinephoneS are freaking toy).

I fully agree with the first half: For me it’s definitely the best phone and overall polished experience.
But have to somewhat disagree with the second half: I think it was instrumental to the success of the whole ecosystem because that got A LOT of phones into the hands of developers (I was one of the early adopters; also I could not afford pre-ordering L5 at the time) at a time where Purism was not yet able to mass produce.

After having received the “PinePhone BraveHeart edition” I started contributing to gnome-calls, phosh and Mobian, so it will always have a special place in my heart. And phosh itself actually runs pretty smooth on it, of course starting applications is painfully slow… but that is to be expected given the specs).
So I agree to some extent with the “toy” sentiment, on the other hand: This was my daily driver until I got my L5 when I started working for Purism

And the PPP honestly has pretty comparable performance on paper.
From what I see (and maybe that has to do with the early revision that I got my hands on) it does have some problems, especially in the area of charging. So: great if you want to write charge controller kernel drivers,
but less so if you want an “end user experience”.
And that difference in polish is due to people actually being payed to work on everything from bootloader, kernel, lower level system components all the way to the graphical toolkit and applications is reflected in the price.

So Purism deserve a lot of fancy credits everywhere about gnu+lnx mobile and gnome mobile stack.

Yes, it deserves a lot of credit!
Making a phone is certainly not something you do in one weekend! :slight_smile:
And I’m pretty sure that I explicitly mentioned that I don’t believe we would be anywhere near to where we are today without Purism pushing the envelope :rocket:

In my talk I aimed to give the most complete picture and
I am confident that I attributed fairly and honestly (to the best of my knowledge at least),
but this means talking about other devices and (sibling) distributions as well!

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