It's likely not *quite* powerful enough for everything I'd need to do on a desktop, but if things like web browsing, light games, and videoconferencing work well, the rest I can likely offload to a more powerful machine.

(Powerful arm64 machines though are a bit hard to come by, so building software for the Librem 5 itself could be tricky...)

**Kyle Rankin** @kyle@librem.one · May 28, 2020, 20:43

**Kyle Rankin** @kyle@librem.one · May 28, 2020, 20:43

May 28, 2020, 20:43

Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one

@jfred @aral It's running the same PureOS as the laptops, just cross-compiled for arm64, so building software is no more difficult than desktop Linux

**Jon ☎️** @jfred@mastodon.sdf.org · May 28, 2020, 20:46

**Jon ☎️** @jfred@mastodon.sdf.org · May 28, 2020, 20:46

May 28, 2020, 20:46

Jon ☎️ @jfred@mastodon.sdf.org

@kyle @aral Sure, I'm mostly just thinking that it may not be powerful enough to compile some software on its own in a reasonable amount of time. Firefox takes aaaages to build on my laptop with an i5, for example; I can imagine it'd take a lot longer on an i.MX8M.

**Kyle Rankin** @kyle@librem.one · May 28, 2020, 20:47

**Kyle Rankin** @kyle@librem.one · May 28, 2020, 20:47

May 28, 2020, 20:47

Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one

@jfred @aral Well yes, big programs like FF or LibreOffice might take awhile, but they are already packaged for it and for others you could cross-compile on, say, a Librem Mini or other higher-powered x86 system

**Jon ☎️** @jfred@mastodon.sdf.org · May 28, 2020, 20:55

**Jon ☎️** @jfred@mastodon.sdf.org · May 28, 2020, 20:55

May 28, 2020, 20:55

Jon ☎️ @jfred@mastodon.sdf.org

@kyle @aral Yeah. I'm approaching it from the perspective of the distro I typically use on my other machines (Guix System) which I'd eventually like to run on the Librem 5 if it were to become my primary machine.

Compiling software there is still fairly common (because the build farm can lag behind sometimes) - the package manager makes that easy, but you do need the resources for it.