LinBits 61: Weekly Linux Phone news / media roundup (week 35/36)

It's Wednesday again! Now what happened since last Wednesday?

Experimental MMS support landing in Manjaro, libhandy 1.4.0, NemoMobile needs translators and more! Commentary in italics.

libhandy 1.4.0 has been released. To get a better idea of the new features, read this file and read the section about 1.3.90, too.
Biktorgj has released yet another testing release of his modem firmware, hopefully finally fixing the wakeup issue(s)!
If you've been desperately waiting for MMS support to land, but compiling stuff from source is not your thing, check out Manjaro Phosh Dev, which now has MMS support in Chatty - you can even configure it easily! This is essentially based on this WIP branch by kop316, although the PKGBUILD takes Purism's git master and applies a bunch of patches taken from MR's and pre-MR material. kop 316 points out "that MMS support in Chatty is very much experimental and many things do not work yet". So please, adjust your expectations accordingly and don't flood Purism's repo with issues on features that they have not even merged yet!
Manjaro have also released another Plasma Mobile beta release (No. 7). Now with Plasma Mobile Gear 21.08!
pineroot, the buildroot environment for PinePhone, has seen another stable release (2021.08).

Follow up: The Nitrokey NitroPhone is just a Google Pixel 4a with Graphene OS pre-installed with optional microphone removal.
If you like Nemo Mobile and know more than one language well enough, please help them out with translations!
If you are using postmarketOS edge on your PinePhone, be careful while updating!

Qt Dev Loop: Qt 6.2 vs. Qt 5.15 – The Feature Parity Comparison. Qt 6.2 is certainly interesting.
Nate Graham: This week in KDE: gazillions of bugfixes. Search for Kirigami to find out why I included this :-)
This Week in GNOME: #8 Fresh Sketches.
xnux.eu log: Pinephone HDMI hot-plug-detection HW bug. I have been reading about people having HDMI issues lately, this should help!
Claudio Cambria: Killing the dreaded hamburger menu — Kalendar devlog 13. It gets better and better!

dot.kde.org: Announcing the Winner of the Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition Wallpaper Contest. The next wallpaper of Plasma Desktop and Mobile... maybe it'll grow on me.
Federico: GNOME themes, an incomplete status report, and how you can help. Theming is not my cup of tea, but it might be interesting for some of you.

Daily Linux Mobile: How I use Linux Mobile as a daily driver. Great first blog post! I still have not tried NixOS, maybe I should do so.
Hackaday: Pining For A De-Googled Smartphone. Great to see a bigger outlet write something in depth on PinePhone!

Dylan van Assche: PinePhone modem myths. Dylan is the guy that made instant wake-up from sleep on incoming calls happen. I am pretty sure he knows what he's talking about.

TuxPhones: The singular niche of luxury Linux smartphones. Wow, Necunos... Totally forget about that. If you, dear reader, have such a device, please get in touch!

andy gaal: Arch barebone image brought to become a desktop Plasma-Pinephone. I don't know why you would want to do this (except for convergence), but on the other hand: Why not?
jesica: Mobian on PinePhone. The Mobian software you know and love.
Blue Square: Pixel to PinePhone - Reverse Shell.

kldk.de: tech: PinePhone Essentials: turn off haptic keyboard feedback - feedbackd - turn off vibration. This might be a more precise approach, but what's demoed in this video definitely works too.

NOT A FBI Honey pot: pinephone user gonna run OpenSUSE or however you say it....... I guess I should play with OpenSUSE again, too.
Maxjoker98: PinePhone UI mockup. Ambitious project!
Scientific Perspective: Ubuntu Touch GNU/Linux on POCO F1 #shorts.

I have been working on my Minimola theme, which now has a search feature on the Archive and the 404 page and also should be slightly better in terms of documentation.
Speaking of search features: This is a major issue with LinuxPhoneApps: Due to the current design of the app pages (which only consist of front matter, rendered by a page template, the search (as it currently works) does not find any apps. This is a blocking issue: Either we'll find a way to search the front matter properly, or we are going to have to find a different approach for the individual pages, as proper search is a must. I've outlined my current ideas, but if you have better or different ideas please comment on the issue or send an email.
That aside, I have been working on more informative taxonomy overview pages, see the one for Kirigami as an example. The (still terrible) "app cards" (that list the apps) are one of the next things I am going to work on.

I've been building Chatty (for Matrix and MMS, more on that next week) and Calls (for VoIP, it works!) from git to see what's coming soon,
signed up to a proprietary service to test the GTK4/libadwaita release of Spot (it works great!),
I've been creating one more MR on a PinePhone software project this week.

The following app was added in the past week, pushing the app count to 312:

It's also listed at the new place.