Purism Librem 5: Most use Android smartphones. Others choose Apple iPhones, but there are also those who seek a truly free software smartphone without a trace of closed source or firmware. For them Purism and KDE started a collaboration to create the Purism Librem 5 smartphone.
Librem 5 is meant to be a secure smartphone with privacy protection by default. Its creators are planning to build it with free open source software running on a GNU / Linux operating system.
It is very likely to be based on PureOS of Purist, a Linux based system (Debian).
Originally, Purism had chosen to use GNOME as a workspace, but this particular DE is not 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 these smartphones include hardware that requires proprietary software to work.
This of course comes to conflict with KDE's principles of software freedom and openness. It also makes development difficult, as the proprietary software required by some hardware prevents full access to the code.
“The development of a free phone with Free Software for privacy has been a dream of the KDE community for a long time. We created Plasma not only for desktops and laptops but for the whole range 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 created an advanced, completely free platform with Plasma Mobile," said Todd Weaver, CEO of Purism.
“We believe that Plasma Mobile will become a serious contender who can break today's duopoly and bring a fully functional, fully free mobile open source operating system to market. We look forward to trying out Plasma Mobile on our test hardware and working with the KDE community. “
Sounds pretty good project, but Purism has accumulated so far only 323.375 dollars from the 1,5 million needed.
Here we should mention, that the history of an operating system that will replace Android and Apple iOS is not encouraging. Of the top six OS alternatives for cell phones that had been released (Blackberry OS, Sailfish, the Ubuntu Mobile, Firefox OS, Tizen and Windows Phone) have either stopped developing, or their development is progressing very slowly.
https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
