Dear Purism Community,
Thank you so much for reading my post.
I wanted to create a forum post discussing the diversity of operating systems available on the Librem 5. Thanks to support of PureOS, Mobian1 and PostMarket OS2 (currently Alpine Based), I assume that it is very well supported in the GNU/Linux community.
However, I was uncertain if all major GNU/Linux mobile OSes were currently supported. Especially in a similar capacity to the diversity of operating system available for modern Desktops and Laptops.
Similarly, I was unsure if it supports other major GNU/Linux mobile projects such as Arch GNU+Linux Arm, Sineware ProLinux, among other projects.
Can the Librem 5 run any GNU+Linux OS with Arm x64 support? What is the current OS diversity of the Librem 5?
I am aware the Ubuntu Touch project does not list the Librem 5 as a supported project34.
There is an Arch Linux Mobile project that works about as well as postmarketOS and Mobian, last time I checked. All three work somewhat less reliably than PureOS on Librem 5.
I haven’t tried Debian arm64, but even if it could boot, you would likely be reimplementing everything PureOS/Phosh/Mobian have already done to make it usable on mobile.
Guix supposedly allows building arm64 images, but every time I have tried it, the build fails with errors. Also, many guix packages fail to install on arm64 anyway.
Maybe the Purism devs can explain this better, but from what I understand, you need to configure Uboot and make a device tree to port the Librem 5 to other Linux distros so it will boot correctly. See this guide for porting postmarketOS for some idea how this is done: U-Boot porting - postmarketOS
The Librem 5 is also not fully supported by mainline Linux, so you have to modify the kernel to add the changes that NXP/Purism have made. The original goal in the crowdfunding was to be able to use the L5 with any distro, but than means getting the L5’s hardware fully supported in mainline Linux.