LinBits 59: Weekly Linux Phone news / media roundup (week 33/34)
Table of Contents
It's Wednesday again! Now what happened since last Thursday?
GTK 4.4, GSoC reports, Cutie Shell, Maemo Leste phone calls and more! Commentary in italics.
Software releases
- GTK 4.4.0 is out!. Read the blog post linked below!
- Biktorgj released 0.3.1 of the open source PinePhone modem firmware, adding persistent USB audio support among other things. No, I can't explain that feature.
- Manjaro have released Phosh Beta 13 for PinePhone.
Worth noting
- MMS progress in Chatty is happening!
- Linux turned thirty today!} Happy birthday!
- Maemo Leste is making progress with regards to phone calls!
Worth reading
Software progress
- GTK Development Blog: GTK 4.4. Having run 4.3.2 for a few weeks, I can confidentally attest that 4.4.0 is quite the improvment over 4.2.*.
- This Week in GNOME: #6 Sharing, Caring. _The audiobook player Cozy now supports phones properly, GNOME Podcasts gets important improvements and progress on the messenger front with Telegrand and Fractal Next!
- Janet Blackquill: Way More Than A Week In Tok. Impressive!
GSoC progress reports
- Claudio Cambria: Say hello to your new todo app! – Kalendar week 11 (GSoC 2021).
- Swapnil's Blog: GSOC: Second Phase. Kasts is going to get chapter marker support. Awesome!
- Manuel Genovés: Wrapping up GSoC 2021. Manuel worked on libadwaita.
- Alejandro Domínguez: Multi-account support in Fractal-next: GSoC final report.
Pure(OS) Propaganda
- Purism: Librem 5 Getting Faster With Age. Do read this, despite the headline I put above this, and watch the video, also linked below. BTW: The same is true for the PinePhone, and I have had the idea to do a similar video in February – for August (which is now, but I might actually do this in September). The Year Over Year improvement is quite impressive. But: What does this mean? Is it just, that the devices and their mainline kernels and user-space software just weren't ready way back when? Or is it an actual improvement that can continue, and the hardware is going to feel faster (in a way that's benchmarkable) in a year from now? How does this compare to vendor-kernel land, where a kernel is cobbled together and then it's mostly security patches, if anything? I can't quite say, but I am glad that there's progress, and I generally hope we'll achieve longer device lifetimes with Linux Phones.
Yet another Phone Shell
- Linux Smartphones: Cutie Shell is a mobile phone UI inspired by Sailfish OS. Cutie Shell looks quite nice, Danct12 since managed to get it to run on Arch Linux ARM, so I might get first hand experience with this soon!
Software landscaping
- Emacsen's Blog: The Search for a FLOSS Mobile OS (Aug 2021). Interesting read! Obviously, I am on the "to not Android"-side, but still.
Developer relations
- PINE64: DevZone rollout. _Initially, this is for the PineNote eInk tablet only, but it will be for
How to
- Spaetzblog: Flashing the FOSS modem firmware on the Pinephone. Great tutorial!
Worth listening
- DLN Xtend: 70: Pining about Pine64 | DLN Xtend.
Worth Watching
Byzantium awesomeness
- Purism: Librem 5 Getting Faster With Age. My favourite bit is the part where it turns out that Firefox is way faster than GNOME Web.
Various PinePHne videos
- Jozef Mlich: Nemomobile sounds settings prototype. Nice!
- Niccolò Ve: PineBook and PinePhone: Why I LOVE Them!.
- NOT A FBI Honey pot: pinephone users after they find out they can RUN CMATRIX.
- NOT A FBI Honey pot: hello postmarketOS #pine64.
- PizzaLovingNerd: YouTube on the #PinePhone. Ironically I am linking to a PeerTube instance here ;-).
GPL enforcement fun
- @RealSexyCyborg: It’s all fun and games until Naomi Wu shows up at your office to get GPLv2 compliance. Remember: Umidigi is who likely make the hardware of that so-called "Freedom Phone".
JingOS
- JingOS: JingPad A1 Improved Virtual Keyboard Interacting with Terminal | JingPad A1虚拟键盘与终端交互体验 | JingOS
3D printed PDA fun
Stuff I did
Random
- LinuxPhoneApps.org has made a little bit of progress (one more app, one issue closed). Also, let me thank you for this contribution, Serranya!
- I also did go did something Firefox related. The change is not just visual, I am also changing the User Agent here. There's one particularily annoying bug: When Squeekboard is activated, the tab switcher shows up below Squeekboard – I don't know how whether/how this could be fixed with more CSS or JS, but then I don't quite know what I am doing anyway ;-)
LINMOBapps
The following app was added in the past week, pushing the App count to 311:
- Gtkeddit, a GTK4 Reddit client written in C++.
It's also listed at the new place.
Read here what (else) happened, as I did some maintenance on other app listings. As with LinuxPhoneApps.org, progress with LINMOBapps will likely be even slower in the coming week, but I will happily accept Merge Requests! So please do contribute!