"But let's get real -- the idea of a green future is not gonna happen because people need fossil energy & to pollute to do business"
Sure business-wise & cost-wise it might be better, but should we accept it ?
Also none of this is "essential" at all. It is only needed in a world where the competition does it too because they think it will give them a competitive advantage.
If we could decide that those kind of tracking becomes illegal, then all those big companies will be totally fine. We'll still be buying them the products we need
Yes this is totally true, I should've been more precise.
There are two parts : 'Phoc' and 'Posh'. Phoc is the Wayland compositor (Wlroots & C), Posh is the launcher UI (GTK).
Phosh is just "an app" (with special privileges to talk to Phoc). All it does is display app icons and windows thumbnails (which are not actual live windows but just screenshots of the apps (like on Android)) it does not composite windows, it does not stand between the apps and Phoc.
This is unlike Clutter & JavaScript which do stand between the apps and the Wayland compositor (Mutter) on GNOME.
So my point is that apps on the Librem talk directly to Phoc (not Posh) which is a super minimal layer and can draw pixels on screen with almost no overhead (and potentially none at all when they'll support hardware layers)
(Note : this is the Librem architecture as far as I understood, maybe I missed something)
During Librem 5 development, they considered using GNOME but, after talking with the upstream devs, they abandoned the idea.
Gnome is slow even on laptops, it was made for X and later ported to Wayland, it uses Clutter/Mutter, JavaScript, etc. So here yes definitively it's layers upon layers.
On the other hand, Posh is based on Wlroots and there is no layers. It's pure C code talking directly to EGL/DRM/KMS (And in the future Vulkan) stack.
Even more interesting, Wlroots allows the use of hardware layers and with that you directly write to the screen and compositing is done in hardware. You can't go more optimised than that.
With this kind of approach you can totally write a convergent, both phone & desktop, environment which is butter smooth on low spec mobile.
But of course then the whole question is which apps you run on that environment, the typical Electron app won't run smoothly (but it wouldn't either on a IPhone 1).
On the other hand, GTK 4 should be GPU accelerated and Qt too so those could run pretty smoothly
"
We released a petition for, and continue to work with Intel to free it entirely (what Intel is calling a “ME-less” design).
"
Do you have a better solution that trying to neutralise it + starting a petition + talking with Intel to remove it ?
If you to want to criticize brands for selling privacy snakeoil, and not making you "the de facto owner of the machine" then we should address your criticism at Apple, not Purism
Even if they are not yet 100% sure, it's still far better than any other laptop from any other brand who don't even bother trying to do anything about it
With or without WebComponents, with or without <insert feature X here>, the web is an horrible platform anyway. The web was never made to make UIs, it was made for documents and it's not even that great for that either.
The alien & legacy HTML language & the total incomprehensible mess of CSS rules/layout, the requirement to use JS and nothing else... Everything is a total mess.
Looking back, a big mistake of the web was drawing the line too high for the API. The web forced on us JS that nobody wants (and Typescript & Wasm is the proof of that). The web forced us to use CSS & HTML that nobody wants either (Figma and other design tools systems based on simple elements and constrains is the proof that too).
What we should standardize is a lowlevel code representation + a set of sandboxed APIs. That's all we need.
Wasm + Wasi seems to aim at that, yet they on Wasm side they insist on "how are we gonna make DOM accessible from Wasm ? how are we going to interop between JS and Wasm ?". I don't want the DOM, I don't want JS, I want none of that crap.
I hope that Native UIs compiled to Wasm+Webgl(or vulkan or webgpu or whatever we'll agree on) are the future for the web. So that we can write once and run everywhere decently fast.
When I see the speed of makepad.nl, the power of Godot Engine running in the browser and the simplicity of Figma & the Fidget framework it feels like prehistory that we are still making UIs and apps with JS&CSS&HTML