Is anyone from Purism able to provide some explanation as to how suggested apps are filtered or selected?
For example when submitting my votes I added to the suggestion box:
Bitwarden - GTK frontend for Xamarin App needed Mozilla Thunderbird - Works fine but mobile friendly UI needed Standard Notes - GTK frontend needed or more mobile friendly web app UI (more responsive)
None of those suggestions have been added to the list of options you can donate and vote for but others do seem to have been added.
Is it a question of how many people suggest them? How feasible they are to do? How much interest there is in working on them already within the Purism team? Something else?
i would address the following question to anybody working in support at Purism :
would you agree that it would have been better to just have people donate ANY value amount to Purism and simply send e-mails concerning the particular donation and what their wants/needs/interests are and just post the results of the paid-poll on the main site or as a blog post , etc.
that way people can express more and detailed individual interest while avoiding the narrow choices that the main ‘fund-your-app’ page offers by default …
also the lack of anonymous payment methods is a freedom limiting factor in some cases …
ProtonMail bridge actually works fine with Thunderbird on Mobian on PinePhone already so I’d expect it to work on Librem without too much hassle as well. That seems like the mostly likely route to a good general experience (or Geary) so that’s why I’d vote Thunderbird.
Also given the Open Source focus I’d back Jellyfin over Plex. Again kind of works on Mobian already (via the MPV Shim but could definitely use some work still)
Thunderbird is probably a common suggestion, it’s also my favorite mail client (although, admittedly, never tried anything new after migrating from Outlook Express (via Netscape/Mozilla Suite) two decades ago).
However, with Geary and Evolution, there are already two GTK clients with a straight road via libhandy. (Plus Gmail with whatever framework that means. Web-App?)
So, if Thunderbird was added, it could easily become the most-voted mail client, but also the hardest (if not unrealistic) to get working soon - that’s at least my impression from what I remember of these Ryan Sipes interviews:
2017: The Future of Thunderbird
2019: Thunderbird and Thunderdome
I would prefer Thunderbird too but, as I wrote about web browsers, I really only need one option that works well. I would prefer a wider set of application types, with one choice in each type, over a narrower set of application types, with several choices in each type.
There will be time enough in the years to come, if someone is desperate to have a choice of three or more mail clients, to try to wrangle the Thunderbird UI into a phone.
I wrote in Thuderbird too (Thunderbirds, go!) for mail and calendar, also “Malform” (advanced login options), location obfuscations layer, xlua, MAT (or any security apps - a missing category!), decent camera app (not funny filters but raw and manual controls etc.)… Many things missing from that original list and several apps there that should come with a huge red warninglabel.
If that’s the justification for not adding Thunderbird as an option then that might be reasonable but should probably be communicated better. It seems there are other similar “duplicates” though so I’m not sure that is necessarily the reason?
Also the Thunderbird icon makes an appearance on the screen of the Librem5 in the latest blog post ( A Librem 5 Video Made on a Librem 5) so somebody internally appears to be testing it at least.
Yeah they’re pretty good now. There’s been some big new releases in the last couple of months and can certainly vouch for the Android one (there’s also Gelli as a music player for it).
For Gnome there’s this https://github.com/iwalton3/jellyfin-mpv-shim which I think would be the best bet of having a media server front end work on Librem5 out of the box. It installs and runs fine on Mobian/PinePhone but video playback on that is pretty laggy in general making it a bit unusable still. I’m hopefully the improved graphics capabilities on the Librem resolve that.
True makes sense, but then I guess the largest benefit of convergence is being able to use the same apps, accounts, data etc across both form factors so I’m personally still keeping my fingers crossed for a mobile friendly UI at some point at least.