Yeah I’ve seen that one. I saw mention of Phosh 0.20 getting released along with a touchpad/virtual mouse mode called Phom. Got me thinking about the Razer project Linda.
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I have a nexdock waiting for the PPP to be a daily with convergence to use as a phone/laptop combo.
I use my pi4 with it at the moment with 2 cables (hdmi & type c) and the battery lasts a fair while with that
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Blame Google and the rest of the OEMs for that. Pixel 3A doesn’t have the hardware to do DP-Alt mode.
The only alternatives would be to do some convoluted solution with USB-to-HDMI (usb on the phone side…) if the device support OTG (be a usb host).
I really enjoy my OG PinePhone but hardware wise both my LG G7 ThinQ and LG Velvet are far ahead for various reasons. Still, they are older devices but they do have all the hardware enabled unlike many of the… newer offerings (cough, Google, cough).
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postmarketOS developer has some hot takes on Pine64.
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That is all unfortunate to hear, but it is important to know. Manjaro has been my go to, but I will take the time to really look at the alternatives. I’m mad at Manjaro for ditching Lomiri to top it off anyway.
I didn’t realize Manjaro was such a freeloader. What a shame. I’d verify this stuff, but I’ve noticed things slowed down, and I very much notice the PPP being more locked down, and what he says makes plenty of sense.
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Pine has actually issued a statement about this, so here’s their side, too.
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Thank you.
I don’t know what to think of Pine’s response, it seems fairly vague compared to Martijn’s pretty detailed post, but nonetheless from what I’ve gathered it seems like a lack of communication as usual for any project or business.
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I’m waiting for the 4GB version with AIO, Noctua fans and unicorn vomit RGB.
(Yes, I’m joking…)
Sad to see the squabbling going on at present.
The development has also slowed a bit on the PPP which is a tad sad.
With Android devices at the mercy of their respective manufacturers and device support spotty at best, there needs to be a cheap, reliable open phone such as the pinephone that can push the development of Linux on mobile further. The other alternatives are far too expensive and have their own issues. This may be a bit of a wake up call for pine.
However,
I have to say that the current status of roms such as mobian is fairly good. There are a few tweaks that I personally do, but it’s getting better and with some more performance/battery use tweaking it’s not far off being something you can use daily (I need to try sim use also tbf). With the keyboard case it’s kinda cool as a pda type device and interestingly I am seeing screen coverage of apps to be quite good at 150% display instead of 200
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Mobile distros expecting Towboot is a good thing. Mobian was first.
You can install it to LUKS via the Calamares installer and unlock with a responsive full keyboard.
It’s surprising to me how long it took for that basic feature to end up in default ROMs.
Mobian
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I just got asked on my Linux phone video to compare battery life on my phones. I guess I can do that. The only one I’ve used enough to ware out the battery on would be my Pixel 3a, and OG UB PinePhone, and I have multiples of those that haven’t been used much. Guess I’ll see about setting up a place for that
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August update, not a whole lot in terms of phone development, but some good news.
- Megi’s patches for sound properly start audio on PPP before apps that use audio are launched.
- Spare parts for the PPP are back in stock on the Pine store.
- PPP has had a minor hardware recision - now supports nanoSIM.
- Qi charging is now supported in OpenSUSE.
- Workaround for known bug in Mobian installer not expanding root filesystem property on first boot.
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i probably will switch to either pmOS or mobian on my og pinephone. Does anyone have an argument for one over the other?
What ever happened to firefoxOS? That was one I was hoping for
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FirefoxOS got cancelled by a new Mozilla VP in 2015 because the income vs expenditure chart was headed in the wrong direction. Easy to kill projects you don’t have a history or vested interest in.
The code lives on in various “smart” TVs and in countries where simpler and cheaper phones are more popular (e.g. India).
From a technical point of view, I think it was the fact that most FirefoxOS applications were basically just bookmarks for online websites or PWA-like bundles. Due to security concerns, web-apps needed to be sandboxed from each other, and that made sharing data (e.g. photos, clipboard) problematic, which resulted in data siloing and “a poor user experience”.
Put another way: Web-apps were (and still are) unable to compete with native apps. Mozilla tried to make it work, but wasn’t able to, so they tossed in the towel, gave away the source code, and walked away.
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I haven’t tried either, but I do plan to try pmOS next.
It was forked to become kaiOS: KaiOS - Wikipedia
Used in a bunch of newer feature phones like the new Nokia ones.
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I like both of them.
I found mobian to be more familiar being an Ubuntu user for years.
I found pmos to be quite fast on my PPP but the support isn’t as good as on mobian for now.
I would say probably jump on pmos for the original unless you area typical Ubuntu user
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thanks. yeah i have the og pinephone. i have mostly debian and ubuntu experience on desktop, but have dabbled with manjaro and fedora.
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If you’ve got Debian experience, go Mobian. They contribute changes upstream, have towboot integration, calamares mobile installer, and LUKS encryption. It is Debian, just not yet part of a stable release.
pmOS works on both the pinebook and the og pinephone, but their LUKS unlocking was painfully slow. Pinebook (strangely) also unlocked using that same slow keyboard.
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