On Sat, Nov 03, 2018 at 11:14:01PM +0100, Alessandro Selli wrote:
>   AFAIK the customizations concern mainly the graphical interface, the
> presence of some drivers specific to the new device and a particular
> selection of applications

Sounds to me that fixing regressions in a base distribution is out of scope
for their project. You can't expect everyone to spend their time on a
particular part -- they care about a new GUI and drivers, not about how to
start daemons.

Yeah, systemd is a huge problem, but for a GUI system with no real
customizable daemons it doesn't really matter, and things that used to work
did get broken by systemd integration" on non-systemd systems. So phone
makers pick what -for them- works.

>   I'm curious to know how close it's going to be to a classic laptop
> GNU/Linux installation.  For instance, will it have a *syslog daemon
> with logs in /var/log?  And what about cron, at, locate etc?  Maybe not
> out-of-the-box, but I expect the packages for these services to be
> installable form the repos.  I really hope it's not going to be as far a
> departure from the classic distribution as Ubuntu Touch (aka Ubuntu
> Phone) was.

It's a _touchscreen_ phone, not a "real" computer. For that you want Gemini
or GPD Pocket. The input device is not fit for any real hacking. You at
most connect to it from the outside.

>   I'd love to try upgrading it's PureOS to Devuan too.  It shouldn't be
> too hard, as the Librem5 is designed to allow a number of distributions
> to run on it.  Or at least it was, I can no longer find references on
> https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ of alternative distributions that
> will be installable on the Purism5.

Crossgrading might be not trivial; vendors of such phones tend to customize
them in a way that makes running an off-the-shelf system require re-doing a
ridiculous amount of non-upstreamed changes.


Meow!
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