LINux on MOBile

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

Anbox improvements, a ton of Purism news, an incrementally better Fairphone, App Lists and much more. Commentary in italics.

Software: releases and improvements

• Huong Tram Linux/Arch Linux ARM have updated their anbox and anbox-image package, enabling networking, preinstalled F-Droid and a visible Android keyboard. This makes Android apps a lot more usable. Also, ADB has been fixed on Arch, which helps with installing apps and other things.
• Mobian debugged ModemManager issues and can run continuous integration now.

Worth reading

• Purism: 3D Gaming on the Librem 5. This is actually looking surprisingly good.
• Purism: The design behind a modular and secure mobile phone. I was not sure whether I should include this, as it feels like an ad.
• Plasma Mobile: Plasma Mobile update: May-August 2020. Great progress at Plasma Mobile.
• eighty-twenty: Squeak Smalltalk on a PostmarketOS cellphone. This is not on a PinePhone, but a Samsung Galaxy S7, but it's quite interesting still.
• SailfishOS Forums: OBS shut down and next steps. The saga continues. All these changes by Jolla have not been received well by the SFOS porters community – just see the next item. It really looks like we might see less community involvement with Jollas OS in the future. This shutdown of services may have an upside though, as a switch to openSUSE Build Service is likely to help projects like NemoMobile with swtiching to newer versions of Qt (Sailfish OS is staying on Qt 5.6 forever for licensing reasons, as they remain unwilling to open source the proprietary components of their UI).
• Dylan van Assche: End of an era. Dylan is not the only one leaving the Sailfish OS community.
• Amos B. Batto: Comparing specs of Linux phones. Nice list, although it lacks some of the better supported postmarketOS devices (by limiting to devices that are sold with Linux OS on them) and old, but still community-supported devices like the Nokia N900.
• Purism: Librem 5 Evergreen Update: Mold and Milestones. Purism sharing another progress report. I am really curious if I am going to receive my Librem 5 this year.

Worth watching

• nas: Mainstream Apps on the Pinephone. That's not Anbox, it's the current GloDroid release.
• debconf20, Guido Günther: My phone runs debian — and it does phone calls. It's an interesting talk. Slides.
• LinuxPlumbersConf: Bushan Shah: Plasma on Mobile devices. If you care about Plasma Mobile, but are not yet too familiar with the project, you may find this talk quite informative. Slides.
• dos: Vivante GC7000Lite vs. Mali-400 MP2 (Mesa 20.1.5, Linux 5.7). What's better than benchmarks? Real gaming performance.
• TuxPhones: Experiment: GNOME Shell on the Nexus 5 (postmarketOS + mainline Linux). I would have loved to see the graphical glitches here, editing them out kind of defeats the purpose of the video for me.
• UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 83. This time it's all about OTA-13, which will bring many more ARM64 devices up.
• DanctNIX: PinePhone and Redmi 4X - Boot Time Test. Yes, the PinePhone is quite fast at booting.
• Howto: Privacy and Infosec: Howto: Tshark Sniffer Analyzer: Pinephone: PureOS (Linux).

Something completely different

• The Verge: You can buy Fairphone’s new handset or just its cameras as an upgrade. I know, the Fairphone 3+ does not run any of our favourite GNU/Linux based operating systems yet, neither is it super affordable. But the fact that it is ethically sourced and Fairphone just iterated on the cameras, and makes the new cameras available to everybody who has the Fairphone 3 is just great in my book. Also, the Fairphone 2 still gets software updates (and is supported by LineageOS and UBports), which is exceptional for a 2015 phone running a rare chipset.

Stuff I did

• I set up a fork of the MGLapps list, then had second thoughts about forking and have started work with cahfofpai, author/maintainer of the MGLapps on a new thing called app directory around Hugo and other components, enabling ways to contribute for users too. Stay tuned for the announcement, due hopefully soon.