There are plenty of people out there who would like the same Linux on both their smartphone and their computer. And now Purism, the open source laptop and smartphone vendor, is bringing that idea to life with future releases of its PureOS Linux distribution.
Purism’s Jeremiah Foster announced: “Purism’s PureOS has laid the foundation for all future apps running on both the Librem 5 smartphone and the Librem laptop, with the same PureOS release.” Foster explained that the operating system and its apps will have “a consistent look and feel, as well as the same functionality for apps running on both your phone and your computer. It turns out that this is really hard to do without full control of the software’s source code and access to the hardware itself. Even then, there’s a catch, the software has to be compiled for both the phone’s CPU and the laptop’s CPU, which typically have different architectures. This is a complicated process, but it shows that to build a truly converged device, we need to design it as such from the ground up,” Foster said.
Since Purism builds both its own hardware and software, it is able to address these inherent problems. Purism started in 2015 as a free-software laptop company. The hardware is designed to be as free as possible from any proprietary firmware or binary code. PureOS itself is a Linux-based operating system. In this, PureOS supports the GNOME and KDE Plasma Mobile interfaces.
With Debian as its foundation, Purism claims that PureOS can run on both laptop CPUs and smartphone CPUs.
Of course, just because a single application can run on different architectures without refactoring doesn't mean it will be perfect. For example, an application that looks great on a 15-inch laptop screen won't look as good on a 5-inch smartphone screen.
Purism knows this. To address the problem, the company is using “adaptive design.” Developers will be able to adapt their apps for PureOS, using the open-source libhandy.
The idea seems promising. However, it is not an easy undertaking and only time will tell whether it will ultimately be realized.
