You can certainly boot to the microSD card. In the worst case, you can boot to the integrated OS, then kexec to the SD card. The only potential hard part there is making sure the drivers to access the SD card are in the initramfs, but that’s pretty simple.
2 Likes
From what I have seen, Phosh is a fine graphical environment for a phone. However, once convergence as a desktop PC starts becoming a reality on the Librem 5, I am going to want to replace GNOME Shell with Cinnamon or some other GTK-based desktop environment.
I really hate “innovation” in desktop environments. After trying many different desktops, I always decide that the first graphical desktop that I ever used, which was Windows 3.0, is the best design. IMHO, the only useful innovation since then has been the addition of a search bar in the menu.
3 Likes
Aye, I pretty much agree with that. I used the taskman program from windows 3.11 until it quit functioning, sometime around windows XP. Clean, simple, customizable groupings, haven’t found anything quite like it since.
These days, I don’t care about DE at all, so long as it handles global shortcuts and can run yet another quake (or some other quake-style terminal in a pinch). Also, some sort of movable windows is a significant bonus. Honestly, if I’m in X land, it’s often wm2, as you don’t get much simpler than that.
Yes, but I want to use it for backup and recovery, so it needs to work in scenarios where the eMMC disk is not bootable because someone has hosed it (i.e. disk hardware functioning but content not usable).
A USB disk connected via the USB-C port (with adapter if necessary) would be an alternative to booting from µSD card.
Booting from µSD card has been discussed inconclusively before:
Aye, that’s certainly a good point. In theory, if you’re booting first to something like GRUB2, it should be able to redirect to the SD slot. It’s often the case that if GRUB dies, the data on the drive is not recoverable and the drive itself is likely to die. Then again, the extra grub modules can easily be on a partition that gets borked, at which point getting GRUB to successfully chainload elsewhere can be a significant challenge. Still, there’s probably something possible that route, which doesn’t rely on a dongle hanging out of the device. I suspect we’ll need to wait to actually try it before we can predict the limits…
with m$ bringing the edge (chromium) browser to linux sometime in the future … maybe they’ll consider bringing the whole GUI over to this side … the new terminal is open-source no ? or is that just the linux-subsystem ?
also ubuntu’ market share has grown to almost 2% with the 20.04 LTS release during the lockdown …
You mean PowerShell? PowerShell core (rebranded to just PowerShell as of version 7) is open source and available for Linux. It works really well and I personally like the Verb-Noun syntax.
I don’t think we’ll end up with a MS Linux distribution, but I do think more and more of their applications making their way over is something we’ll get over the next several years.
There already is a M$ linux distro, it’s called Sphere OS. Mostly intended for IoT, but still…
1 Like
To make GNOME on L5 look better out of the box, add this to your .profile:
export GTK_THEME=Adwaita:dark
3 Likes
I wonder if using Adwaita:dark will give you extra battery life. Maybe HackersGame can make a video on how to gain a couple extra minutes of battery by using a darker theme. 
1 Like
I doubt that it would have any impact on battery life.
bridging between color and battery life … flashlights who emit 6500k blue LED light have better battery life than flashlights that emit 2700-4000k for the higher CRI ratting … so it seems that having the most NON healthy light emitting into our eyes is better for the battery … if only slightly
imo the dark theme is nice but it would be better for the eyes if it was darker and more orange-ish neutral.
i don’t enjoy the daylight to night-time auto-settings … who decides how my work to sleep pattern daily rutine should be distributed … this period has been so disturbingly CHAOTIC for me from this point of view 
1 Like