Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

almost had a heart attack and died when i saw 'parts ordered, 5.7" LCD' and missed the words 'development board'

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Screen Size

The Librem 5 will have a 720×1440 5.7” screen. Given the resolution, it is going to use a scale of 2, letting us with 360×720 points in portrait mode and 720×360 points in landscape mode.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

NOOOOO!!! all their promotional materials, everywhere, said 5"
i would legitimately not have bought one if i had thought that was something that was even up in the air... :( :( :( :(

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

</3 ten. characters.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

As if a bigger screen is a negative... :rolleyes:

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

I'm kind of scratching my head here. :confused:

So they build a device with almost twice the screen diagonal of the N900, (due to scaling) they still have a lower resolution, and on top of that they have to reduce the available screen space even further because they need an on-screen keypad.

Add to that the horribly space-wasting Gnome UI, and working in a terminal will basically fell like using an 80's one-line electronic typewriter.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

I know I'm missing something here and/or stupid, but how is that? I mean the scaling.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

720/2=360; 1440/2=720

Basically what they do is take a 2x2 square of hardware pixels and treat it like 1x1 pixel in software. It's like scaling up a picture in a picture viewer by x2 of if you drive your 1920x1080 monitor with only 960x540.
The resulting image will still be crisp, because your scaled image will still exactly match the display's pixels, but it will be "blocky".

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

In layman terms, a zoom in.

Given the screen size and resolution, UI controls such as buttons, edit boxes, menu and description text etc would be unreadable. For example you would end up with 1mm high text etc. So everything is scaled up 2x, to make it usable. But the drawback is that it effectively halves the screen resolution.

EDIT:
The alternative would be to create a completely different UI, designed specifically for mobiles. With 1:1 pixel mapping but where buttons and text would be ridiculously large if displayed on a big screen. But that is not what Purism is doing at this stage. They want to shoehorn a desktop UI into a small screen. Which makes scaling the only option.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

maybe not for you, but i have pretty small hands and a 5" phone is a one-handed device and a 5.7" phone is decidedly not.

in my opinion, 5" is the largest a phone can be before it becomes a small tablet.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Ok, thanks for explanation, you and pichlo. Another question: Is this common on phones? Like, there is Android phones having 1920 or even higher resolution. Are they designed the same way or is it just Purism? Because what's the point on having such a resolution for the screen if it is scaled to half?

edit: I have thought that UI (not just Purism but UI's in common) are made to fit to the screen and intended use. For example, if the buttons are too small on high resolution, they will make bigger ones. I'm just a stupid nurse with no skills to design anything, but for me it would make more sense than zooming everything in.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

I wouldn't say that. At the native resolution, the Librem5's DPI is only slightly higher than that of the N900, but scaled by factor 2 it is much lower:(source: https://www.sven.de/dpi/)

The UI of the Librem5 (native) would have to be scaled up by pretty exactly x1.06 to get to the N900's DPI.
My hope would be, that they just use Gnome's inbuilt scaling option, which iirc is supposed to work at x0.1 steps. That way the user could individually adjust the scaling factor.

The worst case would be for them to hard(ware) wire the scaling, e.g by some firmware or preprocessor chip, which would make it impossible for even 3rd party OSes (e.g. Debian) to change the scaling. But I don't believe that will be the case.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Yes, sulu, but would you call desktop UI on the N900 "usable"?

Maemo uses text size from 40 upwards. Buttons 60 pixels high (I do not remember the exact details but I do not think I am too far off). As opposed to text size somewhere between 8 and 12 on a normal desktop. That is what I meant by "designing a UI specific for small screens" in my later edit.

I tried a few desktop apps - both in Easy Debian and ones I compiled myself - and I would not call them exactly usable. You could use them in an emergency but not every day.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

You are right. Adroid, Sailfish, Maemo etc are designed specifically for mobiles and have the size of UI controls modified to be usable comfortably. Then they can use a normal, 1:1 pixel mapping for everything else, such as pictures and videos.

But Purism is taking a shortcut. They are using a normal Gnome or KDE desktop. I do not know whether this is temporary or designed to stay like that forever. Their App Development page makes me think it is there to stay. I hope I am wrong.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

I don't know about Android phones, but I guess Purism does what it's doing, because as a small company with no influence on hardware parts manufacturers, they have to take what they can get.
If we have a look at available 5.7" panels [1], it seems like you have to go for a 1440x720 panel and scale the software output if you want more than 640 pixels width and/or no 4:3 format and if you want to have the touch matrix integrated (which I would prefer in Purism's situation).

That's what you do, if you have full control over the UI design. But Purism doesn't have that, they merely cooperate with Gnome on this project. That's one reason why I think they use Gnome's integrated zoom feature.
Basically pichlo's edit in #409 nails it.


Certainly not. But Estel has shown some quite interesting experiments with Easy Debian's LXDE desktop.
So I think at least LXDE and Xfce could be made to work quite well on a 5.7" touch screen. Of course they still wouldn't stand a chance in terms of modern fashion, which I guess is why Purism didn't consider them.

I use Xfce on a 12" tablet. I had to scale some things up, not for visibility but to hit the buttons. It looks a bit awkward here and there, but it works very well, even better than Gnome (which looks better but works worse).
I'm aware that 6" is a totally different story, but I believe fashion aside, they could have just as well made Xfce usable with the amount of work they had and have to invest into making Gnome work.

btw: I also believe that Purism will stick with Gnome. They just don't have the manpower or expertise to develop a mobile UI from scratch.
There are currently no FLOSS mobile UIs in good shape. What remains are probably some proprietary mobile UIs (Sailfish?) that don't fit their philosophy, and some half-baked desktop UIs that sort of work on a mobile screen. Among these, they chose the best-looking one, which is Gnome.


[1] http://www.panelook.com/modelsearch....igh=300&page=1

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

me too

I use Xfce on a variety of tablets with zero problem.
after the original hours fiddling to personalize.

Which means that some team with a few hours
could institutionalize whatever XFCE standards
for their particular hardware.

XFCE is not rocket science,

and it beats GNOME in far too many important aspects to list.

The monolithic philosophy of Gnome is a flaw that cannot be undone.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

agreed as well,
I have used xfce quite happily on a couple tablets.
Gnome is a a heavy monster in compare.


what we need here is Gerbick D.A. (Devil's Advocate) to step in ..
:D

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

The issue of resolution is about reducing power consumption:

What is the resoluton of the built in display?

The screen resolution will be 720x1440 on a 5.7” screen. (There are more details on our Phone Constraints page.)

Having 720x1440 pixels within a 5.7” screen has the benefits of clear pictures and 2:1 square pixel ratio. Also, higher resolutions would have a higher heat dissipation and increased power usage since more pixels need to be moved around so we are purposefully reducing the heat dissipation and power consumption.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Like that of the Linux kernel?

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Or Sailfish system updates?

Sorry, it was impossible to resist. It is an age-old bugbear of mine :)

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

The same is true for a 1:1 pixel ratio. So this doesn't count as an argument for the 2:1 ratio.

With all due respect, I believe that's a made-up argument that one of your tech guys mentioned as a joke during lunch while the PR guy he was sharing his lunch with thought it would make for a great "tech-sounding" excuse.

Of course, more pixels will need more computation power, and hence, produce more heat. That's basic thermodynamics.
But unless you intend to decode videos in software I would assume, that the effect whether the GPU has to compute 1 million pixels or 260000 pixels is negligible.
I would even claim, you can't even measure the difference, because the effect is dwarfed by measuring inaccuracies of your thermometers and fluctuations in ambient temperatures. If I'm wrong and you can do that, I'd like to see the data.

I think it's much more likely, that you tried Gnome (and probably KDE) at the native resolution and saw that all the controls are too small for fingers.
Then you looked for an easy way to scale the controls up without making the rest look ugly. You found Gnome's scaling option and saw that it produced nice-looking results.
This was probably the point where you decided to anounce that you'd rather go with Gnome instead of KDE.

It's the path of least resistance and I don't blame you for going it. But please, cut the PR crap!

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Are we sure that GPU can even render everything in that resolution? One certain manufacturer that makes SOCs for Android TV is well known for underpowered GPUs that can't render UI at native resolution so TVs have to do upscaling.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

With my usual respect,

You are welcome like everyone here to express yourself
But
Your assumptions are just that. So please do not come with "cut the crap of public relations".

For the record. I'm not a PR guy or a PR guy friend. Don't go with that assumptions. Let me know if this is enough clear to you, so you don't go wrong again about your assumptions.

Anyone can look for GPU Benchmarcks and test by himself if it wants.

I am just sharing the site explanation. Period.

Have a good day.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

The SoC is an i.MX 8M. [1] The internal display is almost certainly connected via DSI, via which the SoC could theoretically output 4k signals while it's supposed to be able to decode h.264 and h.265 at that resolution in 30 respectively 60 fps. [2]

It would barely notice the workload of outputting the largely static content of a desktop at 1440x720.


[1] https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-progress-report-3/
[2] https://www.nxp.com/products/process...rs:IMX8-SERIES

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Well, exactly that's the problem. This statement about reducing the desktop resolution for temperature reasons makes absolutely no sense.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-progress-report-18/
=> Interesting point of view regarding branding on devices

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Probably not such a big deal for phones, especially if you use a case. However, while my case covers the brand name of phone (Huawei), it does not cover the brand name of camera on the phone (LEICA)..

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Updated System Screen design and gesture details
mobile-shell-gestures.png

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Looks nice. Some elements of Sailfish, N9 and Pixel there.

Wonder how many folks here have ordered the Librem 5. I have.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

I have ordered one [sort of].

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

The same unreachable top bar to 'quickly' access certain switches and other settings and notifications as in Android, iOS... Why?

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Interesting point. Actually several android launchers allow you to pick a gesture and place on screen (like a one or two finger swipe downwards on the right half of screen) to access settings and notifications. Rooted phones can give you many more ways of doing this.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

I have ordered one as well.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Just occurred to me. For a device with a selling point that emphasizes privacy and security, maybe folks should not disclose that they bought one! Too late for me!

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

nah if all you want is security through obscurity just keep using sailfish

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

It looks like they've resolved the communication issues of other projects and are frequently forward facing. That's really great on their part and I wish them nothing but the best of luck.

Unfortunately I am not part of the preordered group. Not really in the mood to back anything else until it's being fully delivered. Twice burned.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-progress-report-19/ they write mainly about the SMS application, "Chatty"

Unfortunately it seems that the development boards are not shipped yet (they were delayed to August) as there is no mention of them.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Delays worry me given previous experience. Based on the updates when do folks think the first devices will be shipped out, if at all...

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Essentially the problem is with the iMX8 target SoC, it hasn't been released yet and the release has been held back to fix an issue with the produced silicon.

So at this stage its entirely out of purism's hands as to when NXP will decide to actually release the iMX8 properly. All the work purism has done so far as been for an iMX6 development board which isn't really up to the task of running a modern smartphone experience.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Yeah, and the problem is that by the time they have sorted out the iMX8, it may no longer be up to the task of running a modern smartphone experience!