14 DAY TRIAL // GNOME developer Adrien Plazas, maintainer of the GNOME Games project, announced today that the upcoming Librem 5 Linux phone from Purism would ship with the GNOME 3.32 desktop environment by default.
GNOME 3.32 has recently entered development, and it will be the next major release of the popular desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems scheduled for release on March 13, 2019. According to Adrien Plazas, it will be the default UI for the Librem 5 Linux phone.
As such, the developer invites GNOME and GTK+ app developers to adapt their applications to work both on their favorite GNU/Linux distribution and on the upcoming Librem 5 Linux phone, which will use Purism's Debian-based and security-oriented Pure OS operating system by default.
"We are early in the GNOME 3.32 release schedule and the Librem 5 will be released a bit after it, so if you want your apps to work on the Librem 5, now is the best time: use libhandy 0.0.4 and up, use GTK+ 3.24.1 and up and target GNOME 3.32," Adrien Plazas wrote in a blog post.
Several apps, including GNOME Podcasts, Calls, Chatty, and Fractal, have already been adapted to libhandy's new capabilities, and many other apps will get the same treatment soon, including GNOME Contacts, GNOME Games, GNOME Settings, and Geary. libhandy 0.0.4 has landed in Debian Unstable and Arch Linux's AUR repos.
Librem 5 loves GNOME 3.32, coming April 2019
Purism announced last month that they have to delay the initial launch of the Librem 5 Linux phone to April 2019 due to some last-minute hardware issues, but now it looks like the delay wasn't bad news at all as the GNOME 3.32 desktop environment will be released in mid-March, just in time for Librem 5's launch.
As Purism said a while ago, the Librem 5 Linux phone will use a fork of the GNOME Shell user interface used for desktop Linux distributions adapted to the 5.5-inch display of the device, called GNOME mobile shell (internally known as “phosh”). Check out Adrien Plazas blog post for more details on adapting your apps for Phosh!