Hi,
I am joining this discussion to expose the vision from the UI/UX design side of PureOS.
In term of UI/UX design, we are conforming to the Ethical Design manifesto (https://2017.ind.ie/ethical-design/) . Based on that we have defined a few guidelines that we want to make sure are respected.
- One of them is that we target the majority of the population in term of user experience. This means that we should think in term of "democratic" choice. The question we keep asking ourselves is : Will the defaults work best for the majority of human beings? The idea here is to avoid proposing different flavors for different tastes but to focus on defaults that targets the majority.
- Another guideline we would like to be respected is that we should contribute upstream. No matter which project we want to adopt, we shouldn't put our effort in forking it but instead in joining the community in that global effort for the sake of everyone.
In that regard, we are currently contributing to the GNOME project as the default PureOS DE on both the laptop and the phone. We have been working for the past year, along with the GNOME design team in designing the GNOME mobile interfaces as well as bringing convergence to the desktop (laptop) platform. This is a work in progress that is being implemented by both the Purism devs and the community.
Some of that work has already been implemented as part of GNOME 3.32.
My point here is that GNOME, as a whole, along with GTK+ will dramatically evolve in the next few years in order match the user experience that we are designing and developing for the Librem products. Our goal is to define a tight integration and consistent experience between Librem Laptops, Librem Phone, PureOS, Librem One and the Librem Key.
We need to experience the experience that we design and that the devs are implementing, as well as delivering to the people in a not too long frequency.
So if we decide to go for a stable long term release of the core OS, one solution for us would be :
- To have a "dev" PureOS repository that would let us test the latest GNOME and GTK updates (along with the stable packages of the core system in order to test the stability of a release within the current core packages?)
- To be able to release GNOME upgrades to our users in a not too long frequency (maximum 1 year) ideally the 6 months GNOME release cycle.
I think this is a critical time for us in term of user experience so we must not rush in the decisions and make sure we find a good compromise.
Thank you!