Re: GNOME Mobile, or "GNOME on Purism's Librem 5"

[Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org>]

Hello Matthias,



2017-09-03 15:29 GMT+01:00 Matthias Klumpp <matthias tenstral net>:
> [ Please keep the CC list for replies ]
>
> Hello!
> So, is having a mobile UX something in scope for GNOME as a project
> and the GNOME Shell?



> Did anyone try to use GNOME on a smaller, phone-sized display already?

Well, yes, Nokia did Maemo 10+ years ago and it was all Gtk+ based:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo

The TL;DR of that story is... messy. They created a set of separate
widgets, hildon, that didn't have a good story as to how they would
make it upstream. Maemo's shell was stylus and keyboard driven and
once the iPhone appeared everything changed...

One thing they got right was making a product widely available to
GNOME developers (N770, N800, N900...).

> Is there interest in the community in actually making a "GNOME Mobile"
> a reality (of course, Purism would help with that)?

I think many of us would love to see that happening. But my take on it
is that it will only happen if people step up to do the work.


> I am looking forward to your replies!

I am not sure what you are trying to achieve with this email. Are you
just trying to assess if the community would welcome a GNOME Mobile
initiative? Because the response depends a lot on the specifics of how
you want to do things.

For example: are you going to be setting up a wikipage in
wiki.gnome.org or are you going to have an in-house
documentation/development process? Are you going to start writing
mobile friendly widgets/apps in git(lab).gnome.org or are you going to
host/bugtrack things yourselves? Are you going to start writing GNOME
Shell extensions and patches for a mobile shell and contributing them
upstream? Are you going to start profiling and improving GNOME Shell's
performance on slow I/O?

These are a few ideas on how you might want to procede:

- Communication: start communicating your vision of what a GNOME
mobile is and document it on wiki.gnome.org and be vocal about it on
planet.gnome.org as you make progress
- Design: engage your designers with the design team early to see how
we can create certain continuity between the desktop and the touch
GNOME experiences
- Planning: I would try to assess what are the specific technical
challenges of the platform as of now, and start sketching a plan on
how to overcome them
- Iterate: I'd start trying to write a simple app (say, the messaging
app) on a standard GNOME Shell session, look at the shortcomings, list
them and have your developers start proposing patches and/or
strategies to overcome those (at first, Gtk+ and GNOME Shell I'd say,
but in the future flathub and GNOME Builder are other projects that
you might want to engage wrt the developer experience aspect of
things)

There is another thing that would help Purism a lot, and it is the
availability of the form factor itself. It would be great if we could
have, say, a cheap (~100 USD) Intel based tablet that we could use as
a reference and figure a way to make it available to the upstream
developers willing to help and test. The 300 USD prototyping board is
already expensive enough that prolly many people are not even thinking
pledging for it (in my case, it'll be just another pile of circuits
lying around my drawer.

Another approach could be running GNOME Shell on your laptop and
access it remotely with an Android app, Jonas Adahl has been working
on the GNOME Shell infrastructure for remote access and this is
something that will certainly be feasible in the near future.

Long story short, if you guys want to pull this off, you need to lead,
with code, communicating a clear vision of what you want to achieve,
and engaging on concrete items to start figuring out how to do this
without conflicting with the ongoing plans of the GNOME platform.

> Kind regards,
>     Matthias Klumpp (PureOS developer at Purism)
>
>
> P.S: I hope this is the appropriate list for such a discussion -
> putting it here seemed like a good idea to me, in case it is not we
> could move this thread to another list.
>
> [1]: https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
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-- 
Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz