I am yet to share in the forums my 6 months review of the Librem 5 (I do not own another phone) and I found out that a lot of what I thought were issues with the Librem 5 are actually mentioned in the article as being issues with GNOME when it comes to performance.
I can’t test different distros or operating systems with my Librem 5 (it is my daily driver, after all), but, for the sake of a reference, my ThinkPad W530 has a 96Wh battery that, after a decade, has lost 20% of its capacity.
My installation is heavily customized. After booting, I don’t have more than 15 processes running. After starting X and OpenBox, I have perhaps 25 (I load a few accessories on top of OpenBox). With this setup, using WiFi, I get 5-5h30 hours of productive time with my machine. Windows gives 3h30-4h and, when I had Ubuntu with GNOME, I used to also get 3h30.
I wonder what we would gain in terms of lower temperatures, battery life, RAM usage and performance if GNOME didn’t suck as much as the author claims it does. (and, gnome-software, uuuuuuuuuuugh!!!)
I think “GNOME sucks” is the type of generalisation that doesn’t lend itself to making technical improvements.
Also “performance is not a goal of V1.0”.
I’m sure that if there are some strong specific wins that Purism finds then, at some point in the future, Purism would pursue them. However we also have to bear in mind the benefits of having the platform support upstream - if GNOME is not in agreement.
Not disagreeing with that but possibly booting from the uSD card would enable you to test other environments without breaking too much. However, as always, image your phone using Jumpdrive before getting adventurous.
The closest thing to being able to compare this that I’ve seen was the PinePhone. The PinePhone is also capable of running Phosh. But after I used it for Phosh, decided it was laggy and slow and crashing too much, then my Librem 5 arrived and wasn’t laggy and wasn’t crashing, I stopped using the PinePhone in favor of the Librem 5 because the Librem 5 was so much better.
But later a friend mentioned GloDroid. It was like a hack someone put together to make the PinePhone able to run Android.
It was honestly creepy, like a big slap in the face to Phosh and a reminder of how much money Google has. On the PinePhone, GloDroid made that hardware that was otherwise quite painful seem capable of a smooth, “makes you want to use it” Android experience.
I would be surprised if given sufficient development time whether it might be possible to run that on the Librem 5, too, and then it might have tremendous performance. But even in a world where that might work, would it subtract something from our collective experience to tempt us to just run Android on these things? Maybe it’s better if nobody gets GloDroid running on Librem 5, so that we don’t face that kind of temptation.
That’s mostly related to the graphics acceleration. I’ve tested the Pinephone with Phosh rather early and in some later stages. It improved drastically when Phosh implemented hardware acceleration. For example pulling down the quick settings panel from the top was a night and day difference. So I’m not surprised that Android feels that responsive already.
The most issues we have now using the GNOME software stack is actually on application level. Many applications still use GTK3 which leads to worse performance overall than with GTK4. Additionally many applications are developed for a desktop PC with pretty solid single-thread performance. However on mobile you end up with multiple low powered cores. So it’s much better if intensive tasks are handled asynchronous to make the GUI responsive during load. Users will feel the difference.
Last piece is that we need to get maximum of performance out of the hardware. So for this you actually want improvements on the GPU driver, support for modern APIs (for example to utilize the new unified GPU renderer of GTK) and improvements on scheduling.
Obviously there would be less issues when the hardware was simply more powerful. There are things a Librem5 can’t do because of lacking performance. But I think for most tasks, it’s totally fine spec-wise. It just needs more optimization.
a postmarketOS user thinks only thing working well on gnome is phosh made by purism.
Screen doesn’t increase temperature as bluetooth/modem/wifi does. I noticed battery is drained quickly when modem/wifi is on. Also using modem / wifi increase temperature which also reduces the battery charge.
Run PostmarketOS on librem 5
check battery life, RAM usage and performance.
Compare with Gnome
How can we boot pureOs without gnome desktop, only phosh?
It is possible and how to boot librem 5 with PostmarketOS from SdCard?
I may not have been clear. I was more about the application level. For example, when I run the terminal and run top, kgx uses 1.5% of CPU to draw the characters to the screen. My HP 712/60 with nextstep 3.3 also uses around 1.5% CPU to redraw the screen. Granted, kgx is way newer, loads a custom font, output is scaled and antialiased, etc, etc., but we are talking here about a multicore GHz+ CPU vs a machine with a 60MHz CPU and 128MB of RAM.
I don’t think the Librem 5 has to be faster, hardware-wise. The software has to get better. I am well aware that Purism is responsible only for a minimal part of what happens on the phone when running pureos but mankind seems to always make the software heavier way faster than it makes hardware faster.
For example… Feeds. Does it need to be so heavy?
Chat goes for a while high CPU usage when a new message comes. What is it doing? Isn’t it just receiving ~150 characters from the modem, writing the result to the DB and displaying the output? I know I am being overly simplistic here, but, I don’t know…
The answer to my questions may never come, and I am not a good enough of a programmer to be able to contribute in any meaningful way. It’s not so much about how fast the UI renders and how much better it could be with hardware acceleration but the fact everything seems to use more CPU and RAM than my sense tells me, and I wonder how much faster the phone would be and longer the battery would last if just booting to desktop and loading a few background services wouldn’t be so resource-demanding.
I may install and boot from my SD something else to compare.
The biggest culprit, in my daily use, is the web. But that’s not GNOME or phosh or Firefox - the web just sucks nowadays.
Indeed. It works the other way too. Faster hardware is used as an excuse for crappier software.
However unless someone can find something specific, not much will happen.
As you also imply, I think web browsing is an area where the problem is as much in the specification as it is in the software. If the specification is massively overengineered then it becomes difficult to write a fast, compliant implementation. Even with a fast implementation, you are limited by the web page itself, if the page includes scripts.
I often browse the BBC and at some point the ratio between data consumed for visible content vs invisible content was 20:1. I don’t know how it is now.
It’s insane to download (and process!) 10MB of data to get 500KB of images and 5KB of text. Browse some old school page, maybe one of Cameron Kaiser’s project pages, or even Wikipedia. It’s quite refreshing to see immediate reaction between a click and the screen refreshing, even over 2G.
What upsets me the most is all the talk about CO2 emissions and the sort. With all the efficiency improvements we had, if software had remained as efficient as it used to be, we would all be emitting way less CO2 and generating way less trash.
CO2 may be not a theme here as long as “people” drive on the seas with big holiday cruisers and “others” drive with some aircraft carriers day and night across the world
But really, any energy reducement ist greatly welcome on the L5. My /e/ os android phone runs easily 2 up to 3 days. Therefore may be some room for doing it better on the L5
Every piece of saved CO2 is a good piece. And I’m sure the amount of CO2 produced by internet advertisement is huge, too. Compared to the few “high power consumption L5 devices” in the world … I guess you know what I mean.
I think less power consumption is a requirement to open GNU/Linux phones for a greater amount of people. So here’s always a balance compared to internet ad that can be increased even further if industry wants it.
