Why buy a super expensive smartphone if there’s no 5G to make it work?
So, you want to spend over $1,000 on a new Android or an iPhone with no next-generation wireless network? You’re nuts.
Read more: https://zd.net/2NHYVeB
Of course, just because a single application can run on different architectures without re-engineering only gets you so far. For example, an application that looks great on a laptop’s 15-inch display won’t be so pretty on a smartphone’s 5-inch display with its very different aspect ratio.
Purism knows this. To meet the problem, Purism is using “adaptive design.” Foster explained, “Purism is hard at work on creating adaptive GNOME apps — and the community is joining this effort as well — apps that look great, and work great, both on a phone and on a laptop. Combining the work of the free software ecosystem with Purism’s contributions means we can target convergence for all our Librem hardware line: both the 13- and 15-inch laptops and the 5-inch phone.”
With PureOS’s adaptive code as the window resizes, the column width dynamically changes to preserve a legible line width, until the sidebar and message view don’t fit at the same time. At this point the leaflet folds, only the message view is visible, and a back button is added to the header-bar, to allow navigation to the room list.
(Image: Purism)
Developers will also be able to customize their applications for PureOS by using the open-source libhandy. This is a GTK+ and GNOME mobile and adaptive presentation library. It’s packaged in PureOS and Debian. Programmers can also use it in flatpaks, simply by including it in your Builder flatpak manifest.
Will it work? It looks promising. But I’ve ridden in the one operating system for many platforms rodeo before. It’s not an easy ride. That said, there’s long been a demand for a mobile Linux-based operating system that’s not Android, so there are customers out there. Purism has beaten the odds before. I won’t bet that they can’t win again.
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