I don’t think he implied it was, just that he is familiar with it from Portuguese.
I will say all of these distros coming out of the wood work for the L5 and Pinephone are great. The more the merrier.
It is, as “Dē gustibus (et coloribus) nōn est disputandum” is original to the particular culture (dating back to Phoenician and Greek colonies around 8th to 6th century BC), so I might not to reconsider to think twice if about “original” point of view is of any validity.
@kieran, a friend of mine, take for example what @Cicero said (wrote):
“Suum cuique pulchrum est.”
– To each its own is beautiful.
“Suum cuique tribuere.”
– To give each its own.
In short, if allowed, there is much more to life. Thanks for reminding me, @joao.azevedo, you’ve made my day again!
These projects had goals. Those goals were not met. This is the definition of a failure. That’s not establishing a narrative; that’s stating the facts. Saying “well, ignore all that, we don’t want this to look bad” is, however, very much the definition of “establishing a narrative”.
Some good came out of that failure, sure. Humans are good at salvaging something from their failures so it’s not a total loss. But it’s still a failure. Just like WW2 is still a disaster, despite having birthed our space programs.
Maybe it was like that in its early form, in which case, yikes! But I’ve never known it to do anything but automatically roll up at your first keypress in the blink of an eye. It also pipes that keypress directly to the login prompt, and doesn’t lose keystrokes even if the system is heavily loaded and the “curtain” doesn’t manage to get out of the way quick enough.
Its equivalent on Windows though? Urgh, who the hell decided that was in good shape to ship? Takes a variable number of seconds to disappear, and anything you type while it’s still visible is lost. Only Microsoft can manage to screw up a login screen… 
That’s not what Gnome does though. Gnome’s approach is “offer less options by removing the silly ones and offering sensible defaults”. Which bothered me too at first, because who do they think they are, deciding for me which options I can do without?
But there were some pretty decent arguments for simplifying the interface back then. Stupid example: Gnome 1.2 had this feature where you could automatically hide the task bar, IIRC. And you could control the speed at which it did that. You controlled it through a slider… With a granularity of 1ms. 
They rightfully decided that this was ridiculous, and went with a saner choice between slow, medium and fast. Because really, nobody needs that level of granularity for a disappear animation. Yeah, I lost some options I rather liked when they yanked out that whole airplane cockpit control scheme for 2.0 and replaced it with something my mother could figure out if she cared. But honestly, it was for the best, IMHO.
That said, I’m not saying Gnome is superior to KDE or anything. It’s mostly a preference thing. I used various WMs and DEs since the 90’s, and KDE was among them. For some reason I ended up staying with Gnome, and my preference is mostly due to familiarity. It’s not like I’m in a position to compare Gnome to the rest, as I haven’t used anything else in over a decade, and I won’t pretend to either. Use what works best for you. That’s the beauty of FOSS: if something bugs us with any part of our system, we can usually find an alternative that works for us.
1 Like
I’m not really following discussions on these forums these days but I thought I’d briefly respond here:
Fair enough. Let’s call them failures, then. I’m not terribly optimistic about mobile Linux in the grand scheme of things so I’m not looking to paint a rosy picture of its history.
Having said that, it’s not very positive when people constantly bring up the “failures” of the past to justify the way something is being done in the present day. It hardly encourages cooperation with other projects to take a shot at Canonical, Mozilla, Jolla and company every time someone asks about why the Librem 5 uses this software and not that software.
Plus, when there are setbacks or delays, people are happy to remember all the things that were said about them and turn them around. (Yes, some people do pay attention when people joke about phones not being able to make phone calls and are happy to return the compliment.)
6 Likes
There are two sides to that coin: if you consider it a failure, you can indeed use it to justify the way Apple and Google do things. But on the other hand, considering it a failure also allows you to analyse why it was a failure, what they did wrong, so you don’t make the same mistakes.
And despite my other criticism about Purism’s handling of this project, that’s the one thing I think you guys did right. You didn’t try to go the traditional route of running Linux with some custom DM, widget set and layer of mobile-specific apps on top. As far as I understood, observing from a medium distance, what you guys did instead is make changes to GTK to make it more mobile friendly. And as a result, some applications run fine in a phone form factor without any changes whatsoever. Whereas others just need some layout changes to make them more mobile friendly.
1 Like
Does anyone here know if Phosh comes installed or can be installed to the x86 version of PureOS? I am looking forward to being able to do a remote login from my Librem 5, in to my home PC. From there, I’ll set the display back to my Librem 5 where it needs to be displayed correctly on the phone. Under such a scenario, one might be able to run any phosh-capable program on their Librem 5 without needing to even install it to their Librem 5. Everything would be executed on the x86 PC and used from the Librem 5 client. I could keep all of my files on my home PC that way. Admittedly, that might require a higher data use. But then again, maybe not since all of your data stays on your home PC, where it is generated and used. The Librem 5 would only see the small amounts of the data that you want to see on your Librem 5 display. This seems like the ultimate in revision controls for your data also. If someone steals your Librem 5, then you log in to your router and block your Librem 5 from your home network. Whoever stole your phone has no access to your data then. You could even create an alternate “Theft login” that you can activate remotely. The idea is to keep the thief entertained long enough for you to locate your phone and have the police retrieve it for you. If you label your hardware kill switches, any thief would turn them on to access the internet.
But the biggest value of running your programs remotely might come from processing power. The ability to run processor-intensive programs on your Librem 5 would be limited only by how much processing power you can afford to purchase in the form of a home or business PC and the capabilities of Linux to run on a virtually unlimited number of cores, RAM, hard drive or SSD space, etc… That’s how Google and the other big-data players do it. Most of the processing power of your Google-powered phone comes large servers that call-up the data you seek from them. If we want to keep big-data players out of our lives, we may want to re-create any critical functions they currently provide for us, at home or within a network we can trust and that we have control of. What is better for that, then from a PC sitting in your home office?
I wasn’t aware there was an x86 version of PureOS.
Like on librem laptop? 
But yes, there’s x86 qemu build with phosh
And here’s example package
Edit: Or this way
purism@pureos:~$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture amd64
purism@pureos:~$ sudo apt update
Get:1 http://repo.pureos.net/pureos byzantium InRelease [5851 B]
Get:2 http://repo.pureos.net/pureos byzantium-updates InRelease [4580 B]
Get:3 http://repo.pureos.net/pureos byzantium-security InRelease [4581 B]
Get:4 http://repo.pureos.net/pureos byzantium/main amd64 Packages [7089 kB]
Fetched 14.0 MB in 8s (1786 kB/s)
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
11 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them.
purism@pureos:~$ apt info phosh:amd64
Package: phosh:amd64
Version: 0.7.1-1pureos1
Priority: optional
Section: x11
Maintainer: PureOS Maintainers <pureos-project@puri.sm>
Installed-Size: 1427 kB
Provides: notification-daemon, polkit-1-auth-agent
...
Hm? That’s confusing. On the laptop, you don’t need to add amd64 because that’s the default.
And you can’t add i386 because it doesn’t exist. (Well, no packages exist)
@2disbetter did you mean i386 with x86?
Yeah, I was under the impression PureOS was x64 only.
Yes, on x86[_64] laptop you don’t need to add x86[_64] arch, I needed to add it because it was arm64 platform. And this was just to demonstrate the pureos repos have phosh build for x64 aka amd64 aka x86_64
Well yes, amd64 and arm64.
@ruff, also to be browsed here
https://software.pureos.net/package/bin/byzantium/phosh
In the PureOS Store
1 Like
To clarify the question, would PureOS (the version made for home or business Intel or AMD 32-bit or 64-bit processors) output a screen image that can be properly rendered for the Librem 5 with its ARM architecture? (X86 meaning a typical Intel or AMD instruction set, either 32-bit or 64-bit). A part of the question would require a person to know where the rendering resides and/or if the Intel vs ARM versions of PureOS come with the needed rendering tools needed for the Librem 5 to run a program under Phosh…
StevenR, the point I was making, that might have been lost in translation is that PureOS does not exist for 32 bit systems. It is 64 bit ONLY.
This is from the PureOS requirements page (emphasis added):
System Requirements
- A USB drive
- A 64-bit processor
- At least 1GB of RAM
- At least 15GB of disk space
Oh, thanks for clarifying.
If I understand correctly, once the communications between computers hits the network layer (level 3 of the OSI 7-layer model), the packets are all the same protocol, regardless of the hardware architecture. By the time the communications arrive at the presentation and application layers, the OS becomes almost irrelevant as long as there is an application to support the protocols.
1 Like
yes which can be either x86-64 architecture (AMD/Intel) or ARM architecture (currently owned by nVidia) …
might accommodate more in the future ?
so many names for the SAME thing … shacking-head
regarding the OSI layers (i’m not an expert) but the NIC (network-interface-card) ALSO has a dedicated chip that ‘handles’ the ‘signal’ and relays it to the main CPU … do we need free-software for the NIC or is it acceptable to ‘not-care’ about that ?
If you use a Purism product, all seven layers should be protected. The network card and any associated blobs or firmware are on the first layer (hardware) and maybe levels two and three.
Use snapd bro