I just had another round of online research for the librem 5 and open source hard & software for smartphones.
then i came back here, and i realise that my most important question has not yet been answered in a satisfactory manner.
so maybe i will try to explain better:
what gets me so exited about the prospect of having real gnu/linux on a smartphone is the idea of having an actual, real, tiny computer with me in my pocket, one i can do everything with that i can do on my linux computer at home.
plus, i don’t need a separate device for making phone calls/sms, so this one minicomputer is enough to carry around.
to some extent i can do this with my current lineageos phone, but the problem with android is that there is always some technical limitations, for example video/audio codecs when streaming online is very limited, often something doesn’t work that i know should work.
and i can’t get inside there and fix it, because to me, android’s deeper layers are completely opaque.
and there’s always a few things i’d never dare do on an android phone, e.g. online banking.
so, in a few examples:
i’d love to be able to use mpv as my media player, because it has never failed me in playing both local & remote content, and in concert with youtube-dl it’s simply genius.
i’d love to be able to use gimp straight on the phone. I know the UX would probably be a horrible pita, but still. there’s nothing even close to that on f-droid.
these are just illustrating examples, saying: i’m more concerned about technical usability than UX (user experience, i.e. mobile-friendly interface blah).
not saying the UX isn’t important, though.
will it be possible to pinch-zoom every application? take the gimp with its non-responsive ui as an example.
i already own an ARM laptop with a version of armbian, which, in spite of its name, is based on ubuntu 16.04, and these and many, many more programs are available.
i also happen to know that debian’s ARM repos are (almost) as large as the ones for normal pc architectures.
is PureOS based on debian?
the usual way for distros based on debian is to use the debian repos, plus their own repos. this means that the whole debian universe (for ARM) would be at my fingertips on a Librem 5 with PureOS installed - is that so?