LINux on MOBile

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

Megapixels gets a lot better, postmarketOS releases another service pack, Mobian runs on Snapdragon devices, and more! Commentary in italics.

Software development and releases

• Megapixels has been ported to GTK4 and released in 1.0, with version 1.0.1 quickly following. It's so much better, do give it a try!
• postmarketOS: v21.03 service pack 1 release. They are bringing some new software to their beta channel, so that it does not feel too stale.

Worth noting

• Librem 5 takes photos now!
• Caleb: Mobian is now running the OnePlus 6/6t, Pocofone F1.

Worth reading

• Purism: Librem 5 News Summary: April 2021. Good news with regards to software development, but on the hardware side? I quote "we are pausing Librem 5 production until October". Because of the component shortage you may have heard of. This is really bad, and it also affects my original October 23rd, 2017 order.
• TuxPhones: postmarketOS is finally coming to wearables. This is really cool. I won't try it though, I already have more smartwatches than I can wear.

Software corner

• Mobile NixOS: March and April 2021 round-up. A nice update by the NixOS people.
• Linux Smartphones: Megapixels 1.0 released, bringing hardware accelerated graphics to the camera app for Linux phones. A post on the release mentioned above.
• Linux Smartphones: Ubuntu Touch OTA-17 brings initial support for NFC and other improvements (coming May 12, available for testing now). Great write up of OTA-17 features. Remember, the PinePhone is not on the OTA cycle.
• Julian's Code Code: The Internals of Fractal-Next. A nice post discussing the future of Fractal. Give it a read if you are interested in GTK4, Rust or Matrix!
• Foss Adventures: Trying out Phosh shell on PinePhone and openSUSE Tumbleweed. Fun read.

Hardware corner

• DEV.to/pcvonz: I²C on the Pinephone. For those who like to tinker!

Worth listening

• PineTalk 008: After √64 (O'Clock). This was fun to record, even though it was past 1 am on my end. Ezra and I talk about many topics that have been in past LinBits or are in this one, and share our first impressions of the PineTime smartwatch.

Worth watching

• Niccolò Ve: Kirigami Application for Recording, Alarms and Timers, RSS and Much More!. If you still don't know what Kirigami is and why it is great, maybe this video is going to help you!
• Pako St: PinePhone FluffyChat demo. Now you could use that Flathub build, but this is more fun!
• Sk4zZi0uS: PinePhone Challenge Continued - One Phone Many Distros with P-Boot. It really saddens me that the p-boot-demo has not been updated since November, and thus really can't be recommended to getting an idea of the current state of most projects.
• Pear Crew: How to Install postmarketOS on a Poco F1. Well, they use Windows to do that, but other than that it's a nice video!
• Martijn Braam: From 0 to Phosh on the LG K10. Nice video by Martijn! Fun fact: I was planning to do a similar video with a different device this week, but gladly did not get to it.
• UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 100. This time, the community answers questions. They also discuss future challenges they expect to happen.

PinePhone Beta Impressions

• Geotechland: PinePhone BETA Edition Review. _Great
• HyperVegan: First Impressions of Pinephone with Manjaro KDE Plasma. Nice video!

Stuff I did

Content

I wrote one blog post, that I should have split up in hindsight, as it discusses the apps added to LINMOBapps in the past months and the future.

LINMOBapps

I did a lot of work on LINMOBapps this week (but promoted none of it on Social Media. I added links to AppStream metadata files and fixed the appstream:// links, so if you're lucky, you can now open GNOME Software or Discover from your web browser. I also added the following apps this week:

• Keepassk, a WIP Kirigami KeePass client written in Rust,
• FluffyChat, a Matrix client that uses Flutter,
• Kasts, a Kirigami Podcast client that saves where you paused playback and thus is the best PinePhone podcast app already,
• Amazfish, a smartwatch client I believed to have added a long time ago,
• Tinge, a GTK Hue lamp client,
• Hermes Messenger, for those who want to use (Facebook) Messenger,
• Stream, a nice GTK based YouTube client, developed by Purism's CEO, and
• Wike (a Wikipedia browser).

A lot else here what (else) happened. Please do contribute! One task that would be important is checking whether all these License identifiers in about the first half of the list are actually correct.