LINux on MOBile

It's sunday. I need to stop tinkering and make it Linbits time!

This is some the best stuff that happened in the Linux on Mobile and PinePhone space this week. Commentary in italics.

Software: releases and improvements

• GNUHealth, a social health softwre, is apparently shaping up nicely on the PinePhone.
• mobile-firefox-config. postmarketOS published a set of tweaks for the Firefox browser that make it more usable on the PinePhone. BTW: My favourite browser is Angelfish, unfortunately it is not available everywhere.
• Arch Linux ARM/Huong Tram Linux saw a new release, enabling the Firefox tweaks above, shipping with phosh-renice, a set of scripts that prioritises certain processes originating from the Mobian community, and other improvements. Danct12 also packaged anbox, too.
• Manjaro released a new Plasma Mobile alpha after 4 months, which you can watch in action or download. Also: More Lomiri teasing.
• Maemo Leste have shared that they have made progress porting Qt5 to their distribution.

Hardware fun

• silver has built a folding PinePhone case. I really like this!

Worth reading

• Pine64: August update: getting into a rhythm and not slowing down. Pine64's monthly update is always worth a read, especially when they include a video by yours truly. Kidding aside, it really is.
• mcol.xyz: a full day test-driving ubuntu touch. This is a good write up about using the PinePhone with UBports in a real world scenario.
• AndroidPolice: This smartphone has physical kill switches for its cameras, microphone, data, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. While I get the kill switch excitement with the Librem 5, I haven't used the kill switches on the PinePhone yet, as removing the back plate and the tiny switches ... no. Just no.
• AndroidPolice: The Linux-based PinePhone is the most interesting smartphone I've tried in years. It's rare that mainstream phone news outlets pick up on products like the PinePhone, and it is even rarer that they do so in such a nice way.
• Dino: Setting out for calls and conferences. Dino, which is an XMPP client with excellent support for OMEMO-encryption, have announced that they will add support for calls and conferences. I put this into this segment as Dino is not libhandy-enabled yet and does not run particularily well on the PinePhone, but with support for internet native calls it becomes a lot more interesting — and a lot can happen in a year.

Worth watching

• UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 82. This is an interesting one for people interested in the PinePhone and PineTab. If you lack the time to watch all of it: Around Minute 0:15 VoLTE, after that QtWebEngine; 8:35: PineTab; 13:00: Initial Camera support for the PinePhone (toot); 14:15 also the Bluetooth toggle has been fixed; 20:15: Lomiri on Manjaro.
• matrixdotorg: Open Tech Will Save Us Meetup #5. Starting around minute 32:10, Matthew Petry, a Pine64 volunteer, talks a bit about the running Synapse (Matrix-server) on a RockPro-Cluster, but also about Pine64 in general and thus about the PinePhone, too.
• Дмитрий Куртуков: Look on the PINEPHONE keyboard. We've seen previous iterations of this particular "attach a Nokia N950 keyboard to the PinePhone"-keyboard before. This new video focuses just on the keyboard. Well done!
• PizzaLovingNerd: PinePhone OSes: PureOS. The PureOS port is definitely interesting, and PizzaLovingNerd did a good job with this video.
• Martijn Braam: mobile-config-firefox on the PinePhone. As mentioned above, the postmarketOS community has worked hard to improve desktop Firefox on the PinePhone. Here is Martijn Braam, postmarketOS developer, giving you an idea of these improvements — you'll need to watch carefully to see them, but in real life they do make quite the difference.
• Сергей Чуплыгин: Volume button work on pinephone. Three seconds of Sailfish OS with working volume buttons. Great to see progress on Sailfish OS!
• Leszek Lesner: AirDrop Alternative KDEConnect - Android, Linux, Windows, SailfishOS, Plasma Mobile. This is not about the PinePhone, but with KDE Connect being a really helpful piece of software, I figured to include it.
• Nick Elsmore: Simple Retroarch Test (daveshah port). This is a special treat, as it shows the long-coming DragonBox Pyra handheld running Retroarch.

Stuff I did

• I replaced my old Mobian install with their f2fs-image. While others apparently have run into issues with this image, it has been working fine for me for the past four days. Only difference is that it feels a lot faster. BTW: Make sure to get decent, name brand microSDHC/microSDXC cards. It makes a difference. Also I contributed instructions on using Pantalaimon to the Mobian Wiki, though I went back to using it with out the CPU limiter, as that would not work for me.
• I asked for a topic to make a video on on Fosstodon and Twitter, and just like in the comments to my Qt Apps on Phosh-video, Anbox was hugely popular. Therefore I had to finally wrap my head around it, and published a video and wrote an article.
• I tried Manjaros new Plasma Mobile image on video. It's nice, but certainly not ready for daily use yet. I will have another look at the KDE Neon images next week, to see how well these do work.
• I decided that I will start adding an Application List to this blog, starting from the MGLApps list, adding more information and hopefully even tiny screenshots to the list on an app by app basis. Pull requests welcome!