Questions about Librem Phone

Hardware Librem 5
1

I have some questions about the Librem Phone

  1. Do you plan using Libreboot or Coreboot?

  2. Is there a Desktop Environment that you want to use or do you plan to create your own? I’m asking because most DE are made for screens at least 10" big.

  3. The “Essential Applications” you mentioned in the Survey, do you plan to create them by yourself or do you plan using existing ones? If yes, are they gonna be open source?

  4. What about a Browser? Office? Gallery App? They need proper touch support too.

  5. What are your thoughts about Android Emulation? Jolla does this with their Sailfish OS and Blackberry too. It could be a good thing because there are not much Linux Applications made for 5"-7" Screens and Touch Input.

And can you tell something about the hardware you are planning to use? I’m interested to know why exactly this hardware was chosen.

2

Maybe…

  1. DAS U-Boot.

  2. GNOME or KDE Plasma mobile.

  3. fully free forks.

  4. firefox or webkit based broweser, office app is unknown and GNOME imagem view or anoter GTK+ based or QT based for photo app sounds proper.

  5. is possible to make a compatibility layer like “wine” for exemple, but it’s require a lot of work.

just my speculation…

3

Hi,

first of all, notice that this is still research phase but I will try to answer your questions:

  1. Probably U-Boot
  2. plasma-mobile is the current favorite but maybe we end up working with GNOME community to bring their interface for it
  3. we usually aim not to fork much (or better to say we try to go with what FLOSS world offers) but we can easily end up filling some gaps if we find them (or fork if that works better for our case but decision are made case by case). All will be Free software.
  4. add your opinion to survey
  5. currently we don’t plan any Android emulation (but even if we did, it would only be for F-Droid compatibility)

You have more details in survey.

4

will be possible to port cyanogenmod / replicant to librem phone?

5

Gnome apps are more and more focused in desktop mobile convergence and applications like Web, Music, Photos are not doing bad at all in a small touch screen. They are well maintained and should keep getting better and better even on mobile devices.

6

Thanks for the information, it sounds pretty promising!

7

It should be possible although I am not sure how easy or hard it would be.

8

For 5. it would probably be shashlik but as I said, currently that is not aim at all.

9

The Official Purism Twitter Channel posted this today:

@Puri_sm Did we mention that we plan to run @gnome on the phone? Surprise, surprise!

Please share.

#linux #privacy #security #phones

Source: https://twitter.com/Puri_sm/status/782241450063003648

So, Twitter says Gnome, you say Plama Mobile and maybe Gnome, what’s real?

10

I’m interested in Plasma Mobile, but the project seems to be stuck in early stages.

Speaking of being stuck: looks like there is not much going on with Shashlik.
http://www.shashlik.io/news/2016/03/02/shashlik-0-9-3/

11

Another interested app, Android IMSI-Catcher Detector should be powerful with a free baseband, but now is just in alpha.
https://cellularprivacy.github.io/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Detector/

12

Like Zlatan already said: this is still in research phase. We will have more information for the public in the upcoming months.

13

You said GNOME and Plasma Mobile are the favorites at the moment, but what’s about Unity 8? It runs pretty well on some Phones and a Tablet already…

14

We’ll take it into consideration, thanks.

15

Plasma Mobile is based on Ubuntu Touch anyway, but Canonical has CLA on all its work so that is a huge stopper for people who care about Free software (and we don’t need to fork it because of Plasma Mobile basically did it).

16

Okay, I don’t know what a CLA mean exactly for a Company like yours, but Unity 8 seems a lot more progressed and ready to use than Plasma Mobile.

But it’s more than a year til the Librem Phone and things can progress a lot.

17

CLA is their license agreement which means all contributors to Unity (directly upstream) must sign it, which in turn means all contributions belong to Canonical and that is bad because they can turn it into proprietary software at any given point without asking community for input.