PureOS on the Librem 5 USA has a long list of default capabilities and a longer list of applications that are available to install and an even longer list of applications that are coming:
https://puri.sm/posts/pureos-on-the-librem-5-usa-summer-2022-snapshot/
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If you stickied a thread in the forum titled “Capabilities of the L5” you (general “you”) wouldn’t have to write all these veiled advertisements.
That might work for people who visit the forum, but this thread is just serving as a discussion thread for our blog post, which aims to reach a wider audience who may not be aware of the forum or aware of the current state of the Librem 5.
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Fair enough, but I was trying (and failing, evidently) to point out that half of the blog posts look like ads. I personally don’t bother reading them anymore except for the how-tos, but even those look like tech demonstrations when I think they would be better served as guides (Guido’s last one, for example, demonstrated what the L5 can do… if you’re one of its devs).
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The “Purism Products and Availability Chart” at the end of the article only lists the Librem Mini, and none of the other products. (At least that is how it appears in Firefox and Chromium in LineageOS 16.) You might want to fix that.
I also skim most of the Purism blog posts, since they are mainly aimed at attracting new customers, which is fine. Purism needs to advertise and selling pays the developers’ salaries, which is what I care about, because that allows the software to keep improving.
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You have to scroll right to see the other products.
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Same for me.
It’s a company that sells computers, after all. It is to be expected that their blog posts are to promote their products.
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Right, but you remember the posts before the phone was done? They were about progress being made on the hardware and software. Now they’re just “we sell phones that act like computers. They have hardware kill switches. Break free from google!” The only software progress we ever get anymore is in this forum when someone complains about a problem and one of the devs posts a github link.
Promote the product, yes, fine. Its weird to do here, though, and since product promotion posts are being posted here, I am led to believe that there’s no other blog posts to post here (ie, all blog posts are being posted here). I think it would be a better use of Purism’s time to, particularly in this forum, post updates on development instead of only ever writing advertising material. That would also invite feedback on development direction from actual users.
As it is the posts are tiresome and starting to look a bit desperate.
I’m feeling the same to some extent. I guess all low hanging fruits were harvested, and the works are going on hard nuts, like a proper suspend or proper camera handling, where they need to get a lot of groundwork done. And the thing with said groundwork? It does not come along as a concrete feature to brag about.
Marketing vibes from Todd? I’m fine with them. They do not take away from developers’ time.
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The phosh updates would’ve been cool to hear about. Or volte. You’re right, the super technical stuff wouldn’t be, but "we’re working on these things that the users will see manifested as x, and here’s ", x being better battery time, smoother animations, less heat generation, whatever. And then tech article writers would have something to write about.
We make all kinds of posts aimed at all sorts of audiences. Some are progress reports aimed at existing customers, some are feature overviews aimed at people who haven’t heard of our products, some are like this post which is a higher-level snapshot of the current state of the phone, in an easy-for-everyone-to-consume format (blog post + video).
But we also have published plenty of technical posts along the way as well. We just publish fewer of them compared to thought pieces, general purpose guides, or other posts because the people who would write them are mostly busy doing the actual technical work so we are reluctant to take them away from that. But here are some recent examples of what I would consider content aimed at a more technical audience (newest to oldest):
As far as software progress reports beyond that, lots of them take the form of the L5USA Summer snapshot or the phosh post we just made when it’s something we can demo visually. The rest is often incremental plumbing work and bugfixes that are incredibly important but more difficult to demonstrate. The best way to stay up to date on all of those incremental changes though is simply through the release notes of the respective projects either through their gitlab pages on https://source.puri.sm or through the apt changelog.
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Sure, but… who reads those?
I seem to have missed a lot of those posts (or dismissed them because they all start with the same two promotional sentences, but maybe I’m the only one who does that). How about a stickied thread where all the posts go that can’t be posted to by regular users? If they want to talk about a given post, they can link to it from another thread.
https://puri.sm/posts/ this always has the complete list of all current posts. We also take advantage of tagging and try to be consistent in using it, so if you wanted to see all posts related to Librem 5 only, you could go to, for instance, https://puri.sm/posts/category/librem-5/
There is also an RSS feed and an email newsletter option for people who want to keep track those ways. For folks that want to find out about posts in the forum instead, we create a new discussion thread for each new post starting with “New Post: Post Title” so discussion can happen here, and in those threads try to post the first few paragraphs of the post before we link to the full thing so people can get a sense of what the post is about. I think that’s the best way for forum visitors to keep track of things we post.
If you wanted to maintain a separate thread of all of the news posts in the categories you find particularly interesting and keep it updated as new posts show up, that would be fine with me and you could gauge whether others found it valuable based on feedback I suppose. It would naturally bump back up to the top each time you updated it.
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Eh, I can’t bill Purism to inform the public what Purism is doing. I just figured if Purism employees are going to post things in the forum anyway, they might be better served sticky-ing a thread.
For the record, I’m trying to be constructive, not argumentative. If what you’ve got going on works, then great.
I think it is always going to be difficult for a company to be “all things to all men”. It sounds like you want an easy way to see or have highlighted to you blog posts that are specifically what you want to see. That is probably best handled on the client side.
For software changes, the changelog is definitely the right place to see the changes. But, @Kyle_Rankin, is that being populated yet when updates come through? (Sorry, I’m still on Amber and the changelog is not made available i.e. every change has a content-free description. I did raise an issue about this so maybe I will get an email if something is done to address that.)
Maybe the changelog could be published (automatically) on the web. The difference (benefit) there is that customers could see the changelog in advance of even getting the update, let alone installing it.
On Ubuntu, I definitely read the changelog before installing. That doesn’t have any integrity as such. I do this just to keep informed about what changes are coming through.
- A list of common core applications:
Backups, Calculator, Calendar, Clocks, Disks, Document Viewer, Files, Email, Image Viewer, Maps, Terminal, Text Editor, Usage, and Weather.
There is a “Calendar” app, true, but in my opinion hardly useful at all because even though it is “adaptive” in the sense that menus and such fit on screen, the display of the calendar items (events) is such that you cannot see the same of each item. You just see tiny boxes.
I think it would really help if it had a list view to simply show a list of upcoming events, instead of trying to show a whole week or month (or year!) as it is now. It tries to cram a whole week (or month or year) onto the small phone screen.
Is anyone here using the calendar app in a meaningful way? Are there ways to tweak it to make it useful?
At the very least you should be able to see changes with apt changelog <packagename> after you update it, if for some reason you can’t see the changelog from the GUI Store app.
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