I don’t think that things will change that fast. There are too many construction sites to solve all those in just a year. But I don’t see it as something negative. The progress is visible (right now less because of the work towards to Crimson) and the goals are clear in many points.
I just think that people who can contribute to the core functionalities could speed up things a bit and maybe fix the most wanted features to make it for more people daily drivable. I have not such skills, else I would. But I found another way to support.
Do I remember wrong or the UI on the L5 is still being rendered by CPU only? I ask because I think I read something about it, some time ago, but I can’t find it anymore anywhere.
I already use it as daily driver. But I hope that Clocks will soon work as a proper alarm during suspension. From what I’ve read it’s already possible to time a resume via RTC but it’s not fully implemented in the software stack up to application level.
Otherwise the next ideal thing would be open firmware for the modem because that might allow to clock it lower and get more battery life out of it. But I’m not sure whether that will ever happen since it’s quite difficult to pull off. ^^’
The main problem with Open Firmware is that the Librem 5 Modem does not have enough RAM so it is impossible to run it. However i see Purism working in this in the pass, so yeah Purism is aware of this.
Yeah, everything in this blog post rings true except the performance claim. Web browsing is my #3 utility on the L5, and especially important with so many platforms only accessible via the web (e.g. no native app). It takes > 8s to open Firefox on my L5. It takes <1s to open Firefox in WayDroid on my L5. That speaks very plainly to it not being a hardware problem, but a software problem, and I sincerely hope that at some point the Purism dev team will be able to start working on addressing the performance gap between PureOS and Android (even when emulated on top of PureOS).
While I agree Firefox-esr and Firefox are different and Firefox on Android is even more different. Purism choosing to default with Firefox-esr is the correct thing to compare against other devices defaults.
And FWIW there is effectively 0 performance difference between Firefox and Firefox-esr on my librem5 so at this time it’s a moot point.
Well, Epiphany is the default browser on the desktop version of PureOS, or rather, it is the only browser installed. As far as I know, only the Librem 5 image has both browsers installed by default.
And both are slow on the Librem 5 as was pointed out and the context of this conversation. Being as this whole conversation has been in the context of the Librem5 I see no value in muddying the waters by pointing out that Purism is inconsistent regarding what is included in PureOS across release types, that is a different topic for its own thread.
Also, from what I recall, purism announced that Firefox-ESR is now the official browser of PureOS…
I just wanted to complete the view and make visible that it’s not a planned one way road. And as it sounds they also (want to) put resources into Epiphany (more than just hope). I may wrong, but you can do with that information what ever you want to do. I just think that’s not a totally useless information.
Not useless, but also not “on topic”. The relevant point was that Firefox/browsing on Waydroid (on the Librem5) is much faster than Firefox/browsing using native Librem 5 programs. New Post: The Real Speed of the Librem 5 - #15 by JCS . The fact that this has devolved into Firefox vs Firefox-esr vs Epiphany is muddying the waters since it’s true regardless of the particular browser.
Even if that’s true, why telling me with my 2 sentence side note? My post was not the first “off topic” and never really needed a reaction to drift even further into off topic … Let’s just stop this discussion of “is this post okay or not” and simply let’s go back to topic.
Which you continue by replying to mine. And I have now replied to yours. ad infinitum …
I’ll point out that @OpojOJirYAlG tried 3 times to politely point out that people were off topic. It’s true that you weren’t the first to be offtopic … but you were the first who tried to justify it by saying that the offtopic comment wasn’t useless.
Phosh, GTK apps, and Firefox did not have hardware acceleration from the GPU/VPU, but QT apps, Chromium and Epiphany did.
I would appreciate @dos or another Purism dev giving us updated info on hardware acceleration on the L5.
The bigger issue than speed for me is the heat of the phone and the short battery life, which are both caused by energy consumption. This can be improved to some degree in the software, if GTK4 can add support for OpenGL hardware acceleration or the Etnaviv driver can add support for Vulkan, so we get hardware acceleration that way.
However, even with hardware acceleration, the L5 will never be as fast or as energy efficient as a modern smartphone, because a modern Snapdragon, Mediatek or Exynos processor has about 20 times the processing power of the i.MX 8M Quad. A planar 28nm processor with 4 Cortex-A53 cores simply doesn’t compete with today’s FinFET 4nm processors with 8 cores.
Sadly, the i.MX 8M Plus, i.MX 95 and RK3566 look to be the only new Linux chips that can fit in the power envelope of a phone, and none of them have that good of performance. Without any Cortex-7x cores, they simply don’t have much processing power and none of them have strong GPUs. The I.MX 95 is probably the best, of the bunch, but its Mali-G310 is a pretty weak GPU, and NXP still hasn’t started production.
Maybe an underclocked RK3588 can be used in a phone, but I suspect that it will have a very short battery life, like the PhinePhone Pro with an underclocked RK3399S.
