Summarizing the past week in Linux on Mobile: KDE turns 25 and ships Plasma 5.23, Jolla turns ten and announces a Sailfish X discount, the Maui project reports great improvements, Manjaro release the 17th beta of their Phosh flavour for the PinePhone. Oh, and the PinePhone Pro happened! Commentary in italics.

PinePhone Pro Special

In order to make the news of the past two weeks news more digestible, this weeks weekly update is split into two parts: This first part, that focuses on the PinePhone Pro and is in many ways a follow-up to my Initial thoughts post, and a "regular weekly update", minus the volume of PinePhone Pro content. Read it now or skip to the regular update!

Reddit (r/linux) AMA about the PinePhone Pro

Lukasz Erecinski, PINE64's community manager, did an AMA on r/Linux. Since it's quite long, here's what I found particularily interesting:

  • Regarding the closed source TF-A blob that makes suspend work, Lukasz replied that PINE64 are talking about this and a few other things to RockChip, the SoC vendor.
  • PINE64 don't have plans for 5G (which would be something for a future device) support yet, same for dual SIM. Regarding band support, which may be disadvantageous in some regions, Lukasz explains that the EG25-G (the G is for "global") was chosen in order to only have to make one SKU.
  • They also don't plan for a future RISC V Phone. I guess the first step would be a reasonably powerful RISC V single board computer.
  • Regarding redesigned, external kill switches: Also no plans.
  • PINE64 also does not have pans for a "flagship device". The aim is to provide devices that can run a full Linux stack with open drivers, which is not possible with flagship SoCs.
  • Estimates on battery life are not yet possible, as developer units with the RK3399S are only shipping next week (current pre-production devices are using the non-binned, not voltage locked RK3399). There's also this interesting bit on the regular PinePhone (which is of course staying around):
  • After the Community Editions, PINE64 actually made money on the PinePhone which was funneled into creating the PinePhone Pro. You might also want to search for "Daily Driver", the term I've learned to dread the most.

Real life video of a PinePhone Pro prototype

  • Martijn Braam: The PinePhone Pro This is the one video you must watch. No spoilers! (Also on YT.)

Destination Linux 248: Interview with Lukasz Erecinski

This is a great interview with Lukasz, that explains a lot. Did you know that PINE64 make up 8% of Rockchips' business? Now you know, and there's more - just watch it.

PinePhone Pro podcasting highlight

Video Reflections on the Announcement

Technical details

  • xnux.eu log: Pinephone Pro – A Quick Review. Great post by Megi. Please note that the voltage measurements refer to a pre-production PinePhone Pro with RK3399, not RK3399S.

PinePhone Pro Kernel Progress

Tech Blogs

Standard update

Software releases

  • Manjaro ARM Beta 17 with Phosh for the PinePhone has been released. Notable changes include the addition of an adaptive build of GNOME Calendar, Phosh Antispam and Numberstation. I'll need to check this one out, for GNOME Calendar alone.

Worth noting

Worth reading

PINE64 Community Update

Development progress

  • project insanity: postmarketOS development status 2021. I missed this for last weeks LinBits, but it's interesting, containing progress on a number of postmarketOS ports.
  • This Week in GNOME: #14 Well-Rounded. More movement towards GTK4 and LibAdwaita!
  • Mauikit.org: Maui Report 16. Bug fixes (5x faster app startup) and features... Nice!

Life hacks

Changing the World

Free Software Funding

Jolla's birthday

  • Sami Pienimäki on blog.jolla.com: Happy Birthday Jolla! Congratulations again! Looks like 2022 is going to be a great year for Jolla and SailfishOS!

PinePhone Impressions

Worth listening

Maybe worth watching

  • Jolla: Jolla 10 years celebration Warning: This link goes to Facebook and if you do as much as try to skip to the actual start of the video, it requires you to log in. I became impatient after 4 minutes, therefore I watched this partially in Tor Browser afterwards before running out of time. It's worth it - if you can tolerate Facebook. I hope this is going to be uploaded somewhere else eventually.

Worth watching

PINE64 Community Update

Tutorials

Shorts

Stuff I did

Content

I've written one blog post about my "Initial thoughts" regarding the PinePhone Pro announcement. This required some changes to Minimola I still need to push to GitHub.

Random

  • I've finally played with two QWERTY phones that do run Linux (well, Debian Stretch, but I suppose that still counts). More on that soon, I hope!
  • 3000!

LINMOBapps

Activity has picked up again, I've added one app:

  • LibreLingo Mobile, a language learning application based on LibreLingo. _I added it immidiately as I think that Libre Lingo is an extremely cool project!

Looking at the overall progress of the project, I have to thank hamblinggreen for doing amazing work and adding repology names, which is a tedious task for sure, but is going to be really useful for the LinuxPhoneApps transition and might be nice for other projects like [LINMOBappsBrowser](https://github.com/Speiburger/LINMOBappsBrowser!

Read here what (else) happened on LINMOBapps this week. And please do contribute!

Linux Phone Apps

No visible progress, sorry! I have decided to make sure that the site can run without me pushing buttons - meaning, hosting is supposed to change to sourcehut pages (or if I can't pull that off, GitHub Pages).

Next on the priority list is getting work done that better explains the next steps, getting mailing lists started and cobbling something together that makes it easy to bring the current apps over — I realized that wondering to much about whether the current approach will work just leads to stagnation. Also: If I don't get this done this year, I'll likely never get it done.