Is GNOME ready to tackle the smartphone?
This video is on TILvids, by the way. Also available on Youtube, I believe.
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Thanks for sharing.
Always good to see more PeerTube instances and creators. 
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I mean I know that the Librem 5 isn’t like MUCH faster than the Pinephone, but all the videos I’ve seen of the L5 running Phosh seem to run MUCH better than the Pinephone.
I mean I guess you get what you pay for. Understanding of course that the L5 is really about paying for the software. It is going to be a great phone for now and the future, and it has paved the way for generation 2 that really is able to take what has been accomplished here as far as it should.
He kind of touches on it here in the end, but having a computer in your pocket that can be used as a phone is the ultimate vision of mobile computing that we should have gotten from the very beginning. Nothing else in the mobile space gets me more excited than the idea of a phone with the most powerful hardware components in it running PureOS, that is able to truly replace my other computers.
Great work Purism. Keep your head up and keep punching forward.
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A nice look at the Phosh mobile environment by The Linux Experiment. Here are the parts where I have quibbles with his video that I posted in a comment to his YouTube video:
The Phosh mobile environment uses GTK/GNOME libraries and has adapted many GNOME desktop applications with the libhandy library to adapt to small screens, but Phosh uses its own Wayland compositor called Phoc, instead of Mutter, and Phosh has nothing to do with GNOME Shell. Maybe you can see similarities in the layout and design of GNOME Shell and Phosh, but they don’t share any code. Libhandy, Calls and Chats (i.e., chatty) have been accepted as official GNOME projects, but Phosh and Phoc are not part of GNOME, so your video shouldn’t associate Phosh with GNOME, because they are separate projects. Maybe in the future GNOME will accept Phosh, but I doubt it, because it isn’t based on Mutter.
Phosh is significantly smoother and more responsive on the Librem 5 than on the PinePhone. The Librem 5 gets 30%-50% better CPU performance (depending on the benchmark) than the PinePhone and 142% better OpenGL performance than the PinePhone, plus the Librem 5 uses LPDDR4-3200 (1600MHz) RAM, which is 2.4 times faster than than the LPDDR3-1104 (552MHz) in the PinePhone. See: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Benchmarks
Using a powerful SoC (such as a Snapdragon 800-series or MediaTek Dimensity) will certainly provide better convergence to use your phone as a desktop PC, but the Librem 5 should provide decent convergence for normal tasks like web browsing, office software, email clients, and movie watching, so it isn’t necessary to have more powerful hardware. The Librem 5 has a USB 3.0 port and supports 4K external monitors at 60Hz. Once the Librem 5 enables hardware acceleration with GTK4, framebuffer compression, and GPU DVFS to scale up to 1GHz, the Librem 5 should be an adequate desktop computer for the most common tasks that people do on their PCs. It won’t be enough for high resolution 3D games, CAD, video rendering and machine learning, but if all you need is a simple desktop PC to browse the web and edit documents, the Librem 5 should be adequate. The big limitation in my opinion is the 3GB of RAM on the Librem 5. See: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#213-how-well-will-convergence-work-to-use-the-librem-5-as-a-desktop-pc
All the distros using Phosh, such as PureOS, Mobian, postmarketOS/Phosh and Manjaro/Phosh, use the Phosh as the desktop PC interface in convergence mode, and not GNOME Shell, so stop talking about GNOME convergence. However, I agree with your assessment that Phosh provides better convergence as a desktop PC than Android, because it based on using existing GNOME desktop applications, rather than blowing up mobile apps to run on the desktop.
While I agree that enabling Anbox to run Android apps in Linux phones will be an important factor in convincing people to switch from Android phones to Linux phones, it is a temporary solution. There are thousands of desktop GTK and QT desktop applications available in Linux which can be adapted with libhandy and Kirigami classes to run on Linux mobile phones. Once the desktop Linux applications are adapted, mobile Linux will have a lot of available software to compete with Android, and these Linux applications won’t be based on spying on people and collecting their personal data. See: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#32-why-buy-the-librem-5-when-there-are-no-apps-for-it
Phosh currently doesn’t have a default file manager, so the distros which adopt Phosh are adding their own. Purism is working on adapting Nautilus to become the file manager for Phosh, but currently the Phosh developers recommend installing the Nemo file manage because it is designed to adapt to small screens.
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The PinePhone is certainly an underpowered device but I would use it right now over my Android phone if I could actually get the modem to work.