PureOS is convergent

My primary concern with this is that different applications are inherently optimized for the platform on which they were originally designed. There are some applications that have a very <i>dense</i> UI because there&#x27;s simply alot of functionality that the program handles (think of a video editor, an IDE, etc). Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just seems silly, and I fear that in the name of making &quot;everything work everywhere&quot;, we&#x27;re going to compromise a bunch of apps that worked beautifully on one platform in favor of making them work adequately on several platforms.<p>I mean, if someone said, &quot;I&#x27;ve successfully ported Vim to Android!&quot;, my first thought would be, &quot;Why in god&#x27;s name would I want to run vim on my phone?&quot;*<p>* Ruling out, of course, someone plugging their phone into external KVM.

The exciting part of this to me is not the ability to run the same software on two devices, but the potential to run two &#x27;kinds&#x27; of software on one single device.<p>This unlocks what is for me the most appealing computing fantasy: I have exactly one device to compute with. At home or work, I plug it into my dock, where it pairs to an eGPU&#x2F;monitor, external storage, keyboard, and mouse, and is my desktop computer. There, I can access the &#x27;pro&#x27; level apps we&#x27;re discussing below.<p>On the couch or on the go, maybe I slide it into a bigger touchscreen with some extra dumb batteries, and it&#x27;s now a tablet. Throw in a keyboard case, and now it&#x27;s a laptop.<p>And if I&#x27;m sitting on the bus or walking to work, it&#x27;s my phone, and I can edit today&#x27;s lecture right there, or access all my files. Maybe I&#x27;m not firing up emacs or MATLAB, but it&#x27;s still there if I needed to.<p>This, to me, is the fantasy of convergence. And considering we&#x27;re now currently paying $4000+ for the trio of a laptop, tablet, and smartphone, I suspect one could create something pretty compelling and high-end and still feel like a bargain to many.

This reminds me of the idea of &quot;wouldn&#x27;t it be great if we could use the same programming language for frontend, backend, and database queries&quot;. Well, maybe, but in practice not really. They are doing different kinds of things, you will have to use them differently, it doesn&#x27;t really help all that much to have the same language. It SOUNDS like this would be really helpful, until you get it, and then discover that it doesn&#x27;t really help all that much, because what matters most is not the language syntax, but the problem space.<p>Laptops and smartphones are made for doing different kinds of things. The real-estate requirements are different, as are the typical use cases, and even in the case where you solve them both with, for example, dynamic web pages, you still end up coding for both use cases separately, you just now have it all stuffed into the same codebase, which is harder in many cases instead of easier.<p>I believe Microsoft has been trying to make all OS usecases the same for decades. I believe they have not succeeded, not because Microsoft is deficient somehow, but rather because it&#x27;s not, fundamentally, a good idea.

I&#x27;ve become unenthused about this software &quot;dream&quot;. Having spent years designing and building UIs on the web, what I&#x27;ve learned is that:<p>1) Convergence works great for &quot;casual&quot; apps - messaging, stores, content feeds, etc.; anything where the amount of stuff you need to see on screen at once doesn&#x27;t need to be especially large. But the web already does a great job of making this type of application both responsive and cross-platform.<p>2) Advanced, dense professional tools will never adapt automatically to mobile screens in any meaningful way. And frankly, these are all I find myself installing natively on my desktop anymore.<p>The vast majority of software these days falls squarely into one of these two camps, and neither seems to benefit much from the prospect of convergence.

I worked on this stuff for Ubuntu. I think this can work pretty well for some classes of apps - browsers, chat&#x2F;messaging apps, voice&#x2F;video calling, terminal, contacts, gallery, music player etc - relatively light weight (at least in terms of interactions) apps.<p>Android&#x2F;ChromeOS and iOS&#x2F;MacOS are already moving to this direction for these classes of apps.<p>It doesn&#x27;t work so well (or is more difficult to execute well, or at all) on apps with very dense UI - video editing, 3D design, IDEs, interface design apps, CAD etc<p>An aside - I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;d use GTK+ for this. Why not Qt, or something like Flutter?

That&#x27;s cool, and it&#x27;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 &quot;all in one&quot; solution equivalent to Android. Admittedly I know that isn&#x27;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.<p>It feels like this announcement is missing a step though. What can we <i>do</i> 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&#x27;s shown in the videos). The idea of having the same programs running on your phone and laptop is nice in theory, but I&#x27;m quite happy with my own custom Linux setup on my laptop, I don&#x27;t want to install PureOS on there.<p>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&#x27;s great to see this sort of &#x27;responsive design&#x27; applied to native application interfaces - Android took a step backwards in this regard. But on desktop I&#x27;d rather use Firefox, and they have entirely separate builds for desktop and mobile. I wonder if Mozilla have any plans to support this?

To be frank, I don’t see the benefit of convergence. Admittedly, one code base is cool and convenient, sure but if one considers the additional cost of design, maintenance and the <i>loss</i> of the optimal user experience, I think convergence is rather a minus. A small touch screen requires a totally different convention of user interactions as a big screen with only mouse and keyboard support. It’s simply the reality.<p>Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel (admittedly a new and shiny one), why don’t we just stick to the well proven approaches and design different UIs and front ends for different platforms? The bulk of the codes would go into the common business&#x2F;security layers anyway. With CI&#x2F;CD, each user would have his&#x2F;her app with the same functionality but different UI for the optimal user experience without much headaches or additional burden.

Windows has had this with .NET apps for... Oh, pretty much since there has been a .NET. I had written several apps for Windows CE that ran both on desktop and mobile (same EXE file, even). Today, you can do it with UWP.<p>It&#x27;s a shame Windows Phones didn&#x27;t take off. They had a great UI paradigm and I think Microsoft has done a lot of very hard work that goes mostly unappreciated in the development world, just because Google&#x27;s reputation is still based on a decade-old memory of their (never official) motto &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot;. Microsoft hasn&#x27;t been the &quot;Halloween Papers&quot; company for longer than Google has been a company, period.<p>EDIT: I&#x27;m not saying MS isn&#x27;t an evil corporation. I think all corporations get to some degree of evil proportional to their size. But for some reason, Google and Apple don&#x27;t get that same evaluation, getting some sort of pass, that I think is worse in the specific case of Google (being an ad-tech company). We are collectively missing out on a lot of inovation and market diversity because of this cognitive dissonance.

I keep looking at their products (laptop &amp; phone) and can&#x27;t pull the trigger based on what seems like a lack of apps&#x2F;UX. I really want have better privacy and support companies with that in their DNA. I almost purchased a black-phone before.<p>I really think sandboxing built-in emulator for android apps has to occur for the phone to get traction. I think i&#x27;m their ideal consumer and still can&#x27;t see the value yet. I&#x27;m a technical person who is willing to deal with some issues&#x2F;trade-offs for privacy, but still can&#x27;t reach the tipping point to purchase.<p>I also think this a place where duckduckgo could partner with with their services. I think most consumers wants things to be polished and just work.

Was very interested in their stuff. I was very disappointed when I saw a demo of the current state of Librem 5 running on development hardware. It did not look good. Laggy and slow. Very bad UI&#x2F;UX.

Canonical has been trying to make a mobile OS since 2012, KDE since 2011. Do you guys honestly think a company of 27 employees is going to make this work?

As far I know Gnome 4 constraint-based layout [1] is still in planning phase. So how devs are going to build responsive UIs for different screen sizes? PS. I work on a Ubuntu laptop.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.gnome.org&#x2F;Projects&#x2F;GTK&#x2F;Roadmap&#x2F;GTK4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.gnome.org&#x2F;Projects&#x2F;GTK&#x2F;Roadmap&#x2F;GTK4</a>

I wish they just focused solely on the hardware, then used the die-hard fan&#x27;s money to develop the software. I&#x27;m going to run NixOS on this phone (maybe with an entirely CloudABI userland), and it&#x27;s going to be better than their distro. Yeah their apps will be useful in that context, but I would be OK with rewriting them too.

This is just a Linux distro, right? Not a new operating system.

Slightly off-topic, is anyone using Librem laptops? What has your experience been? They look nice.<p>I&#x27;ve always wanted a nice secure Linux laptop to work on but I&#x27;m not eager to waste hours upon hours getting the drivers to behave (my experience with Linux on the desktop is a bit dated).

I remember windows phones around Windows Mobile 5.x&#x2F; 6.x era: the executable programs that run on the phone, if the exes were to be copied onto a windows PC, the exes ran the same like native PC exes. I do not know if that is still the case with windows mobile.

It seems really familiar to the decision of going with many repos vs a mono repo.<p>Slightly OT but I hope PureOS doesn&#x27;t lock down root access like Android does. Or at least release an official way to root their devices.

Its neat, but doesn&#x27;t make sense for a majority of apps&#x2F;programs. Why would I run GIMP&#x2F;Photoshop or any Graphics-heavy program on my phone? Why run any GPS-enabled app on my Desktop?

I wish this don&#x27;t turn out like the Ubuntu Phone Convergence dream.

I bought a libre13 DESPITE pureOS.<p>PureOS is just a distraction. instead of adding a usbC port to their already outdated computer line, or lowering the absurd price (there is a reason their clientele is exclusively in california and germany) they are fiddling with linux distros like it is 1995.<p>This is the same old a phone-just-need-a-browser idea of 10 years ago. This will fail, for the same reason firefoxOS failed: There is no whatsapp (or lock-in chat app du jour) website.

This is incredible. I&#x27;ve been waiting for a commercially supported Unix&#x2F;Hardware vendor since Apple products have tanked in Quality under the new CEO.

I used to be really excited about the idea of convergence. I still think it&#x27;s cool, and I hope it gains more traction, but after working on more webapps designed for desktop and mobile, there are definitely challenges. The &quot;write once run anywhere&quot; pipe dream is quite elusive. I think something like React Native&#x27;s &quot;learn once write anywhere&quot; philosophy might be more realistic.

The article started off with a wild assertion, that &quot;Purism is beating the duopoly to that dream&quot;. A duopoly on computing? Windows is still by far the biggest desktop computing platform. They may have messed up mobile, but that doesn&#x27;t make them irrelevant.

The opportunity here is not just convergence but multi modal. We have bits and pieces in the current world but frankly it&#x27;s a big stinky mess that is poorly integrated. Most of this stuff is just horribly limited and single vendor walled gardens.<p>A good positive example or how things should work is spotify. I regularly switch between my desktop, laptop and phone and the spotify instances seem to be aware of each other. I accidentally started playing music at home while at work today because my laptop spotify was still targeting my home desktop. Just works.<p>What matters here is that spotify is available on multiple platforms; it moves files around for you as you need them. All you do is sign in and it will serve you your music, playlists, etc. In the same way I can continue reading a e-book on my phone that I was reading earlier on my Kindle. Browser state is replicating across platforms as well.<p>The logical next steps would be devices where after authentication, your apps and data are just available and adapt to the device in a way that makes sense. Right now setting up a new laptop is a chore. You have to worry about installing stuff, configuring stuff. signing into stuff, backing up stuff, etc. Ideally all that goes away and you basically just pick up a device and start using it with zero effort. Or better even, the devices are integrated into the environment and simply adapt to you being there. Some apps won&#x27;t make sense in all form-factors but many do.<p>Ever walked into a hotel room and after briefly fiddling with some alien hotel entertainment system simply watched netflix on your laptop? I watched netflix on a recent transatlantic flight and ignored the entertainment system 20 centimeters from my nose it&#x27;s just better and I charged it using usb-c from my laptop. So, I walked out of the plane with a fully charged phone. What if those devices in hotels, planes, etc. would basically provide you all your stuff after a simple signin? Walk into a hotel and all your digital stuff is already there by the time you walk into the room?<p>And yes there are all sorts of concerns with privacy, security, etc. All solvable problems.<p>For device manufacturers this would liberate them from selling only one or a handful of devices per person. You could turn phones into fashion accessories. They pretty much are already but why just have one phone when you could have one to match each pair of shoes? Why fiddle with your phone when you step in your car that these days might have a huge touch screen and plenty of computing power. Convergence is much broader than just your phone + laptop.

I&#x27;m really excited about the software side of Purism but I can&#x27;t justify buying a 2 year old processor on the laptop at a price still more expensive than alternatives, especially since that refresh happened in the last few months.

Everyone in this thread complaining about phones without keyboard and Blackberry had a keyboard android phone flagship for a decade but nobody cared.<p>You all deserve crappy media-consumer-only phones. :(

Lots of haters here. This company is trying to build a real alternative to the Apple&#x2F;Google&#x2F;MS oligopoly based on open source and respect for privacy. I&#x27;m really really tempted.

Don&#x27;t the screenshot just show the GNOME desktop environment?

Convergence is not something of great value to me, but I don&#x27;t object -- as long as mobile and desktop versions don&#x27;t have to have the same user interface.

Those are pretty expensive, but the idea to have fully supported Linux phone and 15&quot; laptop is great! I&#x27;d very much like to own those.

&gt;If you’ve ever had an app on your phone that you wanted on your laptop, you’ve wanted convergence.<p>Isn&#x27;t that just called portability?

I just hope that better touchscreen &#x2F; tablet support is realized from the efforts put forth in this project!

Here&#x27;s a report of the effort involved with making the Subsurface dive log desktop application run on mobile as well. The tl;dr seems to be that<p>1) it was a <i>lot</i> of work<p>2) users don&#x27;t like the result very much<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;780031&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;780031&#x2F;</a><p>There&#x27;s a huge mismatch between how users want to interact with desktop and mobile applications that makes convergence really hard to do effectively in a single codebase.

What&#x27;s the state of running linux natively on Mac these days?

Looks like somebody found a new buzzword.

I want my desktop OS to act like a proper desktop workstation and my phone to act like a typical smartphone. Don&#x27;t force Windows 8 like experience onto me.

My hats off to purism for putting in the effort to free people from stinking thinking. Proprietary walled garden surveillance capitalism is not smart choice for people, your kids will be owned and controlled by the goolag. Stop deferring choices to terms and agreements for momentary fomo. If you live without GYTFA Gee-Your-Twit-Face-Azhole you can start to make the world a better place. Unless your paycheque depends on them keep prostituting your life and feeling useless.

This is nice, but what problem does it solve? Mobile and Desktop operating systems solve different issues on their own.<p>Ubuntu tried this - how&#x27;d that go?<p>Second issue is: how do I use it? How can I install it on MY devices?<p>I&#x27;m all for privacy and I want to is it, just seems like a dream and it will never come to fruition

remember Ubuntu Touch?

I&#x27;ve got to switch to your laptop and your phone to get the benefit of being in sync? No thanks. Not worth it to me.