Comment by wjoe
7 years ago
That's cool, and it's good to see work going on in more fundamental building blocks of Linux like Gnome to support mobile and reactive UIs. I always felt like this was the biggest blocker to using a Linux system on handheld devices - having a good ecosystem of open source projects that work for that, and having the ability to pick your own desktop environment and components rather than having to have an "all in one" solution equivalent to Android. Admittedly I know that isn't a killer feature for average users - they do want the all in one solution. But having these things available makes it easier for a company like Purism to build a product using existing software.
It feels like this announcement is missing a step though. What can we do with this? Does this allow plugging your phone into a monitor and then running your phone apps in larger windows (eg, the opposite of what's shown in the videos). The idea of having the same programs running on your phone and laptop is nice in theory, but I'm quite happy with my own custom Linux setup on my laptop, I don't want to install PureOS on there.
Of course, much more work will need to be done in other programs to support this. The Gnome Web example looks really slick, and it's great to see this sort of 'responsive design' applied to native application interfaces - Android took a step backwards in this regard. But on desktop I'd rather use Firefox, and they have entirely separate builds for desktop and mobile. I wonder if Mozilla have any plans to support this?
> ...I'm quite happy with my own custom Linux setup on my laptop, I don't want to install PureOS on there.
PureOS is just Debian with a few tweaks. This work is being done as part of the GNOME mainline branch, so any GNOME user is going to benefit from it down the road. And as "alternative" Linux desktops (MATE, Xfce, LXDE) transition to GTK3+, users of these environments will likely be able to make use of it, as well.
Exactly, and this is why it's an important development. But the article starts out by saying it's allowing "applications to run on both the Librem 5 phone and Librem laptops, from the same PureOS release." which is sort of missing the point - this isn't about about buying a phone and laptop from them so that you can use their software on both, but an important step on Linux for handheld devices.
Good to see that Gnome are involved in this themselves too, and it's not some Purism fork of Gnome.
LXDE transitioned to Qt, under the name LXQt.