Purism Librem 5: Most people use Android smartphones. Others opt for Apple's iPhone, but there are also those who are looking for a truly free software smartphone without a trace of closed source or firmware. For them, Purism and KDE have started a collaboration to create the Purism Librem 5 smartphone.
The Librem 5 is intended to be a secure smartphone with privacy protection by default. Its creators plan to build it with free and open source software running on the GNU/Linux operating system.
It is most likely based on PureOS , an operating system based on Linux (Debian).
Purism initially chose to use GNOME as its desktop environment, but that DE isn't designed for smartphones. Instead, KDE's Plasma Mobile is a desktop version of KDE designed for phones.
Plasma Mobile already works on some smartphones. But most of those smartphones include hardware that requires proprietary software to run.
This of course conflicts with KDE's principles of free and open software. It also makes development difficult, as the proprietary software required by certain hardware prevents full access to the code.
“Developing a privacy-friendly Free Software smartphone has been a dream of the KDE community for a long time. We created Plasma not just for desktops and laptops but for the entire spectrum of devices,” said Lydia Pintscher, president of KDE eV.
“Our partnership with Purism will allow us to prepare Plasma Mobile for the real world and seamlessly integrate it into a commercial device for the first time. Librem 5 will make Plasma Mobile shine as it deserves.”
“KDE has created a sophisticated, completely free platform with Plasma Mobile,” said Todd Weaver, CEO of Purism.
“We believe that Plasma Mobile will become a serious contender that can break the current duopoly and bring a fully functional, fully free, open source mobile operating system to the market. We look forward to testing Plasma Mobile on our test hardware and collaborating with the KDE community.”
It sounds like a pretty good project, but Purism has so far only raised $323,375 of the $1.5 million it needs.
It should be noted here that the story of an operating system that will replace Android and Apple iOS is not encouraging. Of the top six alternative mobile OSes that have been released (Blackberry OS, Sailfish, Ubuntu Mobile, Firefox OS, Tizen and Windows Phone) have either stopped development or their development is progressing very slowly.
https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
