January saw development take off again after the end-of-year break, and following on from the Chestnut shipment of the Librem 5.

Some of the activities below were already mentioned in their own articles in Purism’s news archive; others will be covered in more depth in future articles. This is just a taste of all the work that goes into making the Librem 5 software stack. You can follow development more closely at source.puri.sm.

Power management

A lot of power management work continues to happen in the kernel, but we’ll mention a few of those items here:

Keyboard

Squeekboard saw a few new releases, adding higly requested features:

1.6.0 with emoji

1.7.0 with an automatic terminal layout

1.8.0 with an on-demand terminal layout

1.8.1 containing minor fixes

We are now using xkb layout names from GNOME.

Kernel

Shell and Compositor

The following ease-of-use improvements to Phosh/Phoc help to make the user experience more fluid:

Behind the scenes, work continued to help with the robustness of the compositor:

Audio and Calls

The latest versions of libqmi and ModemManager were packaged and made available on the Librem 5:

Other changes include:

Work continues on audio routing features, with a new issue to explore options.

A change to the call display ensured that only the microphone is muted when the mute button is pressed, not the speaker as well.

When calls are disconnected, the displayed message became more user-friendly.

Design

Design input to GNOME Software resulted in upstream changes:

Contributions were made to GNOME Web/Epiphany improvements:

Contributions to Geary bring the messaging composer closer to the adaptive mock-ups. This time adding an adaptive toolbar.

Apps

Chats got a few new classes during refactoring:

Other improvements to Chats and related components include:

Updates to other applications and libraries include the following:

Documentation

With phones being used and tested by users, the known issues list got longer: