I'm daily driving #postmarketOS

https://connolly.tech/posts/2023_12-10-im-daily-driving-postmarketos-pt1/

#blog #LinuxMobile

@cas I'm currently playing around with Non-android Linux on my Pixel 3a. I originally wanted to use #postmarketos, but I had to use the unstable version (which turned out to be really buggy and not usable).

Luckily I found Mobian and the experience is much better for me, but there are some teething issues (like how I had to change the DPI in order to install LastPass on Firefox, how a few websites don't work correctly, how interacting with a video on Firefox is not as counter intuitive, etc.)

It good enough to use as an equivalent bedroom iPod Touch, but I hope the experience improves one day...

@cas
I'm sorry you've run into all these issues! I've been daily driving pmOS (stable) on my op6 since July of this year, and I've had a pretty stable experience. I was daily driving a pinephone pro for about 6 months before that.

What I've noticed:
- With the lockscreen, start swiping up from above the arrow
- I use WebCord for discord (Window>Toggle Side Bar helps a lot, and zoom out a bit)
- I've been texting/calling just fine, in the U.S. on Mint Mobile (TMobile MVNO)

I should also say I installed with gnome mobile, and then installed phosh (so i have both with gdm)

@krafter Thanks, I'm really glad to hear it's been working well for you!

I'll definitely give webcord a go.

@cas very well written, Caleb! I’ve enjoyed your code contributions but didn’t know you were a writer :)

@nikodunk heh, not by trade, but i dabble (and want to try and do so more often)

@Baonks81 x3

@cas

Thank you.

I know it's largely thankless work, but I am confident that bit by tiny bit we WILL get to the point where it becomes "good enough" for a core group of early adopters to daily drive and then expand out to the wider Linux community and wider again from there as use and thus interest and thus contributors pick up again.

We'll get there, and until then, your efforts ARE appreciated!

#MobileLinux

@Blort yeah, we'll get there.

It's already good enough for those who are determined (and familiar with Linux). But urgh I just want smoooooth UX

@cas

Yeah, I know. I'm exclusively using my #PinePhone tomorrow, and then probably my #PinePhonePro the after that (I'm part way through flashing #PMOS+#Phosh on the EMMC and #PlasmaMobile and #GnomeMobile on SD cards). Still lusting on a #Librem5 so I can actually take a reasonable photo.

Until then, I'll stay close to my charging port and keep my spare battery on hand. 😉

@Blort hoping for oneplus 6 to join the camera club soon™

@cas @Blort Is "working camera on openplus 6" just a hope, or is there some progress towards that? Having another mobile camera to play with would be nice.

@pavel @Blort well I've been very loosely following @libcamera progress as well as my colleagues work on the x13s camera stack (similar to the sdm845 one). Thanks to libcamera and arducam there is already a driver for the primary imx519 sensor found in the op6, i just need to have another go at wiring up all the pieces and hope the video frontend bug where it gets stuck is fixed (as i suspect it is)

then we can get data

i juuuust need to find the time

@cas The lack of gesture recognition in GTK you describe looks OP6 (or maybe high scale factors) specific (which then also affects e.g. app closing in phosh). Try a Linux first phone or investigate 😄

And please don't claim that people don't want to fix something while at the same time you lament you don't have enough time either to fix things like camera. Just don't expect people to have your priorities.

(oh, and I think we know of some places that introduce stepping)

@cas …and welcome to the club of #LinuxMobile daily driving people. Hope this helps to move the experience on the OP6 family of devices forward! Would be great to have one more device *well* supported with voice/sms/positioning/camera/sensors and all the BT bells and whistles.

@cas I've been daily driving postmarketOS on my Poco F1 as my only phone since just over a year now and I'm not sharing your pessimism about the userland experience.
In fact, it feels like a *lot* of progress has been achieved there in this time. There are acceptable app solutions for pretty much all my needs (though discord and snapchat are not things I'm using) and the rest can be filled with gnome web apps.

@cas contrary to you, I' more frustrated with the hardware-support progress. I really feel that having a very small number of fully supported devices with working camera, wake on calls & usb-c mode switching would be more valuable than a wide range of very partially supported devices. The op6 & the poco f1 are both very close to becoming such fully supported devices, but they haven't moved much closer (at least not the official images) to this aim so hearing about the camera progress is great :)

@agx i really appreciate all your comments. I absolutely had not considered the potential differences between the L5 and op6 (beyond the scale factor anyway), and of course it makes sense that different people have different priorities. I should have done a better job of expressing that when i wrote this.

The point i want to lament was just the general lack of developers we have working on this stuff, just two contributors in the last Phosh release... I appreciate that it continues to move forward at all

@zerodivision right now it's just a struggle to even keep the kernel up to date :/ unfortunately that doesn't happen for free

@agx @cas Hmmm, I somewhat recently tried Gnome Web again on my Pinephone and it was finally usable performance wise but for whatever reason someone build Libadwaita swipe gestures that make it completely unusable, is that a issue on other devices too or could it be something similar?

@Fosstonaut @cas There was an issue where one would swipe too *easily* between tabs. Do you mean that one? That affects all devices https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/epiphany/-/issues/2217 . Or do you mean s.th. else?

@cas nice read, thanks!
A few questions and comments if you don't mind:

- regarding protonmail, do you know hydroxide? it's a CLI bridge
- why chromium rather than Firefox? I thought the latter has received more work for a mobile-friendly interface (via mobile-config or https://codeberg.org/user0/Mobile-Friendly-Firefox)

@silmathoron I'll definitely give hydroxide a go. I'm wary of running a whole email stack on my phone as it's just not The Way:tm: to do things on mobile...

Chromium has touch gestures for going back in history, and performs better. Otherwise firefox has much nicer UX

@cas @zerodivision

I agree. Apps mostly work for me. What's really frustrating is that phone calls (audio) sometimes work and sometimes don't.
I mean, in the end, these devices are phones in the first place, right ? And situation with phone call audio hasn't progressed at all during last 12 months.

@as400 @cas @zerodivision This is likely a device specific issue. There's devices where phone calls are a no-brainer since a long time.

@silmathoron @cas chromium can be nice for webapps and resource usage is ok.

I'm actually happy how fast we're moving. Sure, it got a bit quiet on the shell side the last couple of (monthly) cycles but we made lots of progress in other components (Wayland compositor, ModemManager, Pipewire, mobile-settings, …). We always appreciate more contributors though, there's so much interesting stuff to fix.

One thing we'd benefit a lot from is early testing and review of merge requests. That would make releases even smoother by catching errors before the actual release.

I'm already building a #phosh with all MRs that are close to getting merged (https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/phosh-next) that would be a good candidate. Would be simple to build packages for more platforms. Same goes for phoc and other packages. There's something interesting for everyone 😃

@agx bart and luca have been working on nightly builds for plasma mobile packages for testing on postmarketOS, I'd suspect that doing Phosh would be a lot easier because of the smaller scope... I think this is something we'd be interested in setting up for you

@cas Thanks for all your work on the Oneplus 6! A while back I bought one second hand and I have been daily driving #postmarketos with #sxmo ever since. Compared to the pinephone, it's a much improved experience!

@proycon @cas

How are the photos? I mean, I'm not looking for flagship Apple / Samsung quality, but are they at least better than those from the #Pinephone / #PinePhonePro currently?

@Blort @proycon no camera support yet, can't get the sensor to work.... but when it does i think we can expect better than the pp

@cas

> But while I’m certain that we’ll improve the hardware suport, enabling the cameras, USB role switching, fingerprint reader, and other nice-to-have features on existing phones, and do the same for new ones; I feel like I lack the same confidence in userspace.

That is very interesting. I would say the exact opposite. I feels like the userspace works well, but the hardware and driver side sucks. Maybe this is just caused by our field of view, depending on if we are more a kernel or an userspace developer o_O

@stacyharper i suspect so. fwiw I'm also mostly referring to Phosh here, and my general approach to a phone:

I want the learning curve to be as small as possible, because I need my phone to just be there for me.

Whereas this is certainly not how everyone feels, and I can definitely see how SXMO set up the way you want would be a pretty nice experience.

@cas Hey Caleb o/ so can you already recommend a mobile tweaked Discord client, available for aarch64?

@stacyharper I've been using gtkcord4 it's been pretty nice