Let’s take a look at what the Librem 5 software team were busy with in March 2020 (weeks 10-13). Some items are covered in more detail in separate blog posts at https://puri.sm/news. The idea is to summarize the coding and design efforts for the month and showcase how we’re standing on the shoulders of giants. Reusing existing free software allows contributions to flow back and forth between communities. These reports are usually rather link heavy pointing to individual merge requests on https://source.puri.sm or upstream (e.g. GNOME’s gitlab).

Adaptive Apps

This section features improvements on adaptive apps and the underlying GTK based widget library libhandy:

libhandy got a new avatar widget

libhandy also got a new deck widget, a spatially aware stack widget, supporting orientation, and swiping gestures.

A version of gnome-clocks with haptic feedback support is now available for the phone.

An adaptive version of Déjà Dup is now available on the phone

Phone Calls

Calls, our phone calls app, saw some visual improvements and internal rework:

Short and instant messaging

Chats (aka Chatty) handles SMS and instant messaging via XMPP. It has experimental support for various other formats via libpurple. The team spent a lot of time refactoring the internal and user facing parts of Chats:

Compositor and Shell

This section highlights progress in the graphical shell (phosh) and its wlroots based compositor phoc:

Phosh

Phoc

We fixed the compositor to work without no_supertile hacks. This needs some more work to get it integrated upstream.

hacks. This needs some more work to get it integrated upstream. Phoc now builds with -Wshadow Thanks anteater!

We guard wlr-output-power-management usage with header existence check to help downstreams to build against released wlroots versions.

Sebastian updated the wlroots submodule.

Releases

On-Screen Keyboard

Squeekboard now ships a “manifesto” to motivate some design decisions.

The modifier API was merged to support keys like Alt and Control.

Dorota released squeekboard 1.9.1 with these changes.

Gnome Control Center (Settings) / GNOME Settings daemon

System-Level integration

Linux Kernel

The process of upstreaming our Linux kernel work is covered in a separate report. The current one is for Linux 5.5 and 5.6 so this is about downstream improvements:

Documentation

The developer documentation saw several updates:

Visual Design

The visual design section shows progress on mockups that might get implemented eventually but it also has news on new and updated icons and other related artwork:

Lambda

If you made it down here and want to start contributing join us on matrix. We certainly welcome patches and issue comments on https://source.puri.sm. If you want to grab an issue and can’t think of a particular problem check the easy and helpwanted tags in our GitLab instance. See you next month.