I don’t see it as a popularity contest though. No one isn’t going to use this phone because its WM isn’t KDE or Gnome… This is more about how to design the WM / UI of the only Linux phone on the market. It should be more of a long-term plan… Especially when so many call these windows managers bloated (rightfully so) - they were developed for desktop, not mobile, anyway. That’s part of why I’m surprised to hear that Gnome & KDE were chosen for this job.
Well, you seem to be saying that there will be people disappointed with/potentially avoid the phone if it does use GNOME or KDE, so I would think there might be some people disappointed/turned off by it if it didn’t use them.
Anyway, there are videos of the dev kits running out there, and while it is a little choppy, I think that is primarily just due to the early stages of the software and lack of optimization.
3 Likes
I must say, I was quite impressed with the boot speed.
(Relevant?)
Edit: It would be pretty cool if someone tried to phonify one of those lightweight desktop environments. 
1 Like
That is a very superficial view on that matter.
To be less surprised, you can learn a lot on all of this by checking out some of the older blog articles in that list. It’s not like Purism didn’t explain their choices and design decisions. (But for some, you have to go back 12+ months)
In general, I agree very much that our software is way too bloated nowadays. How did we end up with calculators taking up way more RAM than a fully functional Win95 desktop with multiple apps open?
Some is feature creep, some is (developer) convenience. But for the most part, it is laziness, unawareness and not seeing that as a problem because our computers are fast.
But a great deal is also how distributions package stuff and how much useless bells n whistles are actually activated.
Phosh is a brand new shell, so almost by definition it cannot be bloated (yet). The same goes for some of the essential phone apps. For other apps that are being adapted for convergence, I’m sure you’ll sooner or later be able to find alternatives if you find them to be too fat. You could start porting Thunar with libhandy…
Similarly, for KDE: How bloated it feels has a lot to do with the default packaging and which services are enabled. But what’s more important, Plasma mobile is a distinct project. It is not “Plasma plus touch input”. So, you can’t even assume it’s bloated, just because it shared the name and some common components.
So, neither of those projects “were developed for desktop, not mobile”.
Plasma mobile was directly developed for mobile.
Phosh was directly developed for mobile.
And the Gnome apps that were intended for desktop originally, well they just don’t see that as a disadvantage. It means that after making them flexible with libhandy, they are convergent. Meaning, you attach the phone to a docking station, resize the running app window and suddenly it has desktop features.
1 Like
You said, “So, neither of those projects were developed for desktop, not mobile” – 99% of the time the KDE and Gnome code bases have not touches mobile… Or am I mistaken? I think that does matter.
Also the argument that everything becomes bloated as you go seems like a non-sequitur in this case. My argument was to choose (start out with) less bloated stuff. I didn’t want to get into WMs in this thread so much, but it isn’t exactly off topic with regards to interface latency.
This thing about the docking station… Don’t you want to be good at one thing first? Instead of trying to be a good desktop and good mobile - why not focus and make a more successful mobile? I’m really going to have to start looking into the business staff at puri.sm.
Why would I waste time explaining anything further if you don’t even want to click any links I provide? I’ll not spoonfeed it to you. If you really care, soak up the existing information.
I’m differentiating “created by KDE” or “based on Gnome”… Fine these are two offshoots, but I was replying regarding KDE and Gnome to their usage above - not as plasma mobile or phosh (which is a shell, and I’ve been describing interfaces in general - sure you can find counter examples to KDE and Gnome related things being bloated).
Hoping to get some measurements from users now that the phone is out 
The reason for using plasma or gnome as a base is they needed a feature complete wayland base, and wlroots wasn’t ready to go when they started. That left those two, or writing one from scratch. KDE5 plasma is actually pretty light, if you trim out everything you don’t need (I often run kwin_wayland without plasmashell at all).
As for applications taking more memory now than in years past, you do have to measure the real memory used, not the virtual memory allocated. This is made more complicated by page reuse, and memory CoW. If you list every process and sum the physical memory used, you can easily find it adds to more than the physical memory the kernel says is used (or even more than the physical memory of the machine).
Makes sense. I’ve no issue with this. Mostly concerned about getting back to reducing the unnecessary layers of abstraction. iOS need not be so much less latent than Android, for example.
… now that the phone is out !!! Out of what??? Where are those phones besides the one for a chair member and the marketing boss?
I don’t understand your comment. I mean released. They’ve been shipped to the general audience that pre-ordered it now… Right?
So far we’ve seen no evidence of that. Closest we get is a single unidentified chat user who claimed they got the modem selection email. Given the confusion about modem selection vs batch selection email, it is quite possible they were mistaken, and even if not, there’s no indication the phone is actually shipping yet.
Yeah. what ever “shipment” means. Since Q4.19 we definately need a new definition for that. I am talking about those huge amount of L5 user content created after having received their devices. Sorry, but the only thing that I got for this situation is sarcasm.
I have to quit now, there is a new picture of the kill switches in an other channel. Somewhere. Again. We do not need videos of calls. Kill switches are the new main functionality for smart phones in 2019.
I personally am looking forward to using KDE plasma and will have it installed the first chance I get. I’ve never cared for gnome and can tolerate lightweight WMs. I know KDE and eye candy in general is more taxing on the hardware but that’s the great thing about PERSONAL computing, you make it to YOUR liking.
GNOME considers “completeness” to be an anti-feature / undesirable. It focuses only on the 80% or so that most people use, and considers the remaining 20% of functionality to be too complicated or confusing for their users. So I can use gedit for most of my text editing needs, and only be mildly annoyed when the word-wrap option is under a preferences window, and not a convenient menu item, but for some search-and-replace operations, I have to switch over to kwrite just for that one thing.
1 Like
or it could be vim or emacs ?
I try to stay away from controversial subjects
1 Like
I charge right in like a bull in a china shop
1 Like