I don't know about Android phones, but I guess Purism does what it's doing, because as a small company with no influence on hardware parts manufacturers, they have to take what they can get.
If we have a look at available 5.7" panels [1], it seems like you have to go for a 1440x720 panel and scale the software output if you want more than 640 pixels width and/or no 4:3 format and if you want to have the touch matrix integrated (which I would prefer in Purism's situation).

That's what you do, if you have full control over the UI design. But Purism doesn't have that, they merely cooperate with Gnome on this project. That's one reason why I think they use Gnome's integrated zoom feature.
Basically pichlo's edit in #409 nails it.


Certainly not. But Estel has shown some quite interesting experiments with Easy Debian's LXDE desktop.
So I think at least LXDE and Xfce could be made to work quite well on a 5.7" touch screen. Of course they still wouldn't stand a chance in terms of modern fashion, which I guess is why Purism didn't consider them.

I use Xfce on a 12" tablet. I had to scale some things up, not for visibility but to hit the buttons. It looks a bit awkward here and there, but it works very well, even better than Gnome (which looks better but works worse).
I'm aware that 6" is a totally different story, but I believe fashion aside, they could have just as well made Xfce usable with the amount of work they had and have to invest into making Gnome work.

btw: I also believe that Purism will stick with Gnome. They just don't have the manpower or expertise to develop a mobile UI from scratch.
There are currently no FLOSS mobile UIs in good shape. What remains are probably some proprietary mobile UIs (Sailfish?) that don't fit their philosophy, and some half-baked desktop UIs that sort of work on a mobile screen. Among these, they chose the best-looking one, which is Gnome.


[1] http://www.panelook.com/modelsearch....igh=300&page=1