PureOS has laid the foundation for future applications to run on both the Librem 5 phone and Librem laptops, from the same PureOS release, in contrast, they say, to Google and Apple’s ecosystems which still have separate OSes for mobile and desktop.
Now, Google and Apple seem to be intent on converging their mobile and desktop platforms, leading to fear and consternation from desktop OS power users, who assume that the move will dumb down desktop OSes. While this technical aspects of the PureOS team’s accomplishment are interesting and laudable, I’d suspect that the bigger challenge for any mainstream platform will actually be a user experience challenge, especially bridging familiar UI elements between mobile and desktop user environments.
Its been attempted before with various projects like kde plasma active, ubuntu touch/phone etc.
Its just really hard to get hardware manufacturers to give up things like drivers for even very basic functionality. We basically need to have a compaq clone for phones.
Plasma active was by far the best, imho. The system would figure out what ui paradigms made sense on which platform and adjust. But it had a lot of very basic issues with things like the onboard keyboard only working in some apps and not others…
Maybe Maemo was the closes to being really functional? I didn’t get much of a chance to play with it during its prime but it seemed really good in quick hands on demos.
in case you didn’t know, purism is working with kde to ensure plasma active works on the librem 5.
i used to be a big kde fan but am now on gnome. who knows, if plasma active proves as good as you’ve mentioned, i might need to swap back
Bill Shooter of Bul,
Same here. I really wish it were easier to swap out mobile operating systems without risking bricking or having to get new hardware. For better or worse, these indy mobile OS projects tend to be marketed against expensive flagship phones, but that doesn’t do much for people who need affordable phones. My current phone was < $200 and the specs are fine for what I need. I might like Librem 5 phone, but $650 to preorder is a lot of money that I can't afford to spend on a phone.