It's sunday. Now what happened since last sunday?

Plenty distro releases, a new PinePhone accessory, Phosh 0.8.0 and more. Commentary in italics.

Software development and releases

  • Phosh 0.8.0 has been released. Go read the full release notes. The scaling feature in Settings > Display is really nice. I hope that we'll see fractional scaling there next.
  • Squeekboard 1.12.0 "Convolution" has been released, check out the changelog for which new layouts have been added.
  • postmarketOS have released a Service Pack for their stable v20.05 release. This is going to help everybody who decided to stick with stable and is going to improve the experience a lot. Still: You're using not the latest software on a nascent platform. Why?
  • openSUSE have released new images — read the mailing list post Quite interesting, they are going to publish Plasma Mobile images soon (or I just did not find them yet)!
  • Manjaro have pushed out three releases this week:
  • DanctNIX/Arch Linux ARM have released new images. If you already have it installed, upgrading packages it enough.

Worth reading

Worth listening

Worth watching

Stuff I did

Content

I made one new video: "Getting started with the KDE Community Edition Smartphone"

I also published a matching blog post, that tries to cover the parts that I did not cover in the video. I have also tried to use Plasma Mobile in the past two days for all my PinePhone needs, and while it has made a lot of progress (text input in GTK apps works reliably now), I would not recommend it for daily driving yet — not only was I unable to get mobile data to work, but receiving and placing calls hasn't exactly been seemless either and Firefox still flickers. I start to think that now that Plasma Mobile made the PinePhone their primary device and dropped libhybris devices, it might be time to drop Ofono in favour of Modem Manager to get more reliable phone calls and more the easy way by following upstream.

Random

I also played with USB-C hardware. I will try to add my findings to the Pine64 Wiki and finally publish my long drafted blog post on convergence.

LINMOBapps

Poll results: I count a total of 20 votes and got overwhelming acceptance for every proposal. This means that further integration of blog and app list are going to happen as soon as I get to it — my schedule is packed, so more than links in the navigation are unlikely to happen for now. Also, I'll likely add ways to donate cryptocurrencies by simply setting up wallets and providing addresses to donate to. I'll also need to read up on mirroring Git repos properly in order to increase visibility of the list and maybe obtaining drive-by contributions, especially on GitHub. Stay tuned and remember that your ideas are always very welcome!

That aside, a few additions and some maintenance happened. Thanks to The3DmaN for his awesome mail-in contribution of 4 apps! Please do contribute!