Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (08/2025): Cameras and Project Updates
Table of Contents
Mobian gives an update on present and future changes, an interesting Ubuntu Touch Q&A, another collection of Sailfish Community News, some Flathub news and more! Enjoy!
Commentary in italics.
Worth Reading
- Mobian Blog: 2025: off to a flying start!
- Lemmy - linuxphones: 2025: off to a flying start! // Mobian's Blog
- Nico's blog: Blocking phone numbers from CLI in Sailfish OS
- Flathub blog: Flathub Safety: A Layered Approach from Source to User
- alatiera: The Fedora Project Leader is willfully ignorant about Flathub
Worth Watching
- veggero: Solving Burnout via Flathub Paid Apps
- UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 159 Qt6, VoLTE, hardware ... a lot of cool new stuff in this, make sure to watch!
- 1337 Sheets: Unboxing The PinePhone Pro First Look. Woah, that pre-installed software is ancient!
- Nicholas LaBonte: Cyberdeck Handheld. Nice build!
- The Unboxing Gadget: uConsole by Clockwork: I Waited 1 Year for This … Was It Worth It?
- Romactu: How to use Touchscreen on Ubuntu 24.10, How to use #touchscreen on Ubuntu 24.10
- Taylor Hay: Blackberry Pi - Portable Handheld Kali Linux Hacking Computer / Cyberdeck
Worth Noting
- dcz: "Woohoo, #libobscura returned an image from the #librem5 !
Buffer size: 823296, seq: 0, timestamp: 18178.362439 [s]Writing to frame.GRBGNow I'm scared to look at the data. It's probably garbage.But the proof of concept is there: you can treat the Media Controller API as a database and query it for valid image pipeline configurations.I wonder if the debayering #shader still works.But first, clean up and publish.#images #camera #linuxmobile #linux #rust" - NekoCWD: :patcat: 🎉 Now there are driver for camera focus https://gitlab.com/NekoCWD/845-linux/-/commits/nekocwd/enchilada/6.13 #LinuxOnMobile #mobilelinux #photography
- Luigi311: In case anyone is wondering those eSIM adapters really do work. It lets you add eSIM to any phone including #mobilelinux devices. I tried out the jmp.chat one on my #flx1 and it now has service through a jmp.chat eSIM. Programming them isn't as easy as it is on android though where you just download an app and install the eSIM. You instead need to get some details from the provider such as a QR code and what equates to a one time password.
Mainline vs. Halium debate
- cas: "on Halium/droidian/linux mobilereally need to write a blog post about this but summarising my thoughts for now:* Droidian and other Halium based projects are not "Linux mobile", they do not embody the tenets implied by that category since they use a proprietary userspace.* They shouldn't be carelessly compared with #postmarketOS/Mobian, they are much closer to Android in terms of tech stack/complexity/longevity* Basically the WSL of #LinuxMobileBut, still good, still valuable for making your device more-free, and for the growing app ecosystem. but i am slowly losing my mind every time i see someone describe a mediatek phone running a proprietary BSP as "real linux mobile" you are warping what little "brand recognition" this community has and it will reflect poorly on all of us when more light is shed on the underlying software stacks and long-term unmaintainable downstream hacks"
- fredldotme: "@cas I had to let this one sink for a day. I'm going to explain my PoV with an analogy.Suppose you're building a house, you'll have multiple options of materials for the outer walls, inner walls, etc.Mainline is a house made of regular plain old bricks, hand crafted, with more effort put in.Halium is similar to a house made of pre-done pieces, just stuck together.Both are houses, really. Both are "Linux". One is just more regular and used to than the other." My stance remains (not on this thread, but a similar one).
Hardware support
- 9lore: "Finally found time to work on a @postmarketOS port. I have refactored the oneplus-kebab (8T) #postmarketos port to use the sm8250 mainline kernel. It booted fine, but apparently i was missing firmware blobs for, among other things, WiFi and touchscreen. I’ve already got the firmware and will package it in the next few days."
- tyalie: IT'S ALIIIVEEEEE. OMG JOOOO. <48h till mainline device init with graphic acceleration :D
More Software News
Gnome Ecosystem
- This Week in GNOME: #188 Software Fixes
- Sam Thursfield: Status update, 19/02/2025
Phosh
- agx: While #phosh handles centered notches and rounded corners out of the box (as long as there's device info in gmobile) we didn't handle notches on the right or left display corners at all yet.. A merge request from Eugene Lepshy to add support for the #nothingphone 1 made that very obvious so I cooked some inital MR to fix this (screen shot is from a nested phosh session as I don't have such a device):
- phosh: "As there's often the question how to move the cursor when using phosh-osk-stub as OSK: Here's a short demo. If you really want additional cursor keys one can add them as keys to the terminal layout's shortcut bar via gsettings set sm.puri.phosh.osk.Terminal shortcuts "[
, 'Up', 'Down', 'Left', 'Right']"too.#Phosh #LinuxMobile"
Plasma Ecosystem
- Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: Refinements All Around
- Carl Schwan et al.: This Week in KDE Apps
- KDE Announcements: KDE Plasma 6.3.1, Bugfix Release for February
- Volker Krause: OSM Hack Weekend February 2025
- Phoronix: KDE Plasma 6.4 Preps Improvement To Help KWin Reduce Frame Drops
Sxmo
Sailfish OS
- Community News - Sailfish OS Forum: Sailfish Community News, 20th February 2025 - Sailfish 5.0 for all
- Jolla Devices: The Early 2025 J-D bulletin: on the project itself
- #sailfishOS: Just going to say it, Sailfish OS needs to be on more devices. Personally, I wish it were available in Southeast Asia. Even on a PinePhone, missing port functionality and meager hardware, it is evidently a very good OS. It is (mostly) open-source, stewarded by a company based in Europe, has a rather slick UI, and has comparable security with the major mobile OSes.#sailfishos #sailfish
- #sailfishOS: A new post is out after a while!"The Early 2025 J-D bulletin: on the project itself"#bulletin #tech #SailfishOS #VollaOS https://jolla-devices.com/news/the-early-2025-j-d-bulletin/
- piggz: "For the last few weeks ive been working on the viefinder code for my @libcamera based #linux camera app to use opengl, and it was totally worth it when running on something like the @PINE64 #pinephone"
- piggz: Working on the @PINE64 #PinephonePro camera using @libcamera. Progress is slow but steady!
Ubuntu Touch
- UBports News: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 158
- UBports News: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 157
- UBports News: Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 Call for Testing
- Ubuntu Touch Forums News: OTA-8 Call for Testing
- Ubuntu Touch Forums News: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 159 call for questions
- #UbuntuTouch: Das Volla Tablet mit Ubuntu Touch im Test
- #UbuntuTouch: Ubuntu Touch Alpha für 24.04 Noble
Nemo Mobile
- Nemo Mobile UX team: Nemomobile in February 2025
Distributions
- Mobian Blog: 2025: off to a flying start!
- Mobian mobian-recipes Merge Requests: include: use
phrogas our default greeter - rmader: For those running #postmarketos with #systemd: you may want to run
systemctl preset-allfrom time atm. until the MR below lands. Right now most updates adding more service files don't apply presets and thus don't enable the services by default - they only get enabled in new image builds. https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/merge_requests/6120#mobilelinux - DanctNIX (Mastodon): Perhaps we should give F2FS a try again on the new images.
- Phoronix: Gentoo Linux Announces Official QCOW2 Images For Cloud VMs
- kiwix: After a 3 years-long hiatus #ArchLinux wiki and documentation is again available offline ✌️ https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=&q=arch+linux
Apps
- sonny: Eloquent proofreading assistant 1.1 is out with improved language detection and support for running LanguageTool server in the background 👻This allows 3rd parties such as LibreOffice and Firefox to connect to a local and offline instance of the LanguageTool server. :libreoffice: :firefox: :thunderbird: :vim: https://flathub.org/apps/re.sonny.Eloquent#GNOME #grammar #Flatpak #Flathub #privacy #offline #Linux
- fredldotme: "- DeltaTouch- Lomiri- On a Laptop What's different though? Both are Snaps, including the desktop!"
- David Heidelberg: Luanti (formerly Minetest) 5.11.0 is out and brings some improvements regarding to mobile/tablet gameplay!
Kernel
- phone-devel: [PATCH 0/4] Add display support for Fairphone 3 smartphone
- phone-devel: [PATCH 0/4] Some cleanups for Fairphone 3, set firmware-name, enable modem
- phone-devel: [PATCH v5 01/13] dt-bindings: remoteproc: qcom,msm8916-mss-pil: Support platforms with one power domain
- Phoronix: Linus Torvalds Clearly Lays Out Linux Maintainer Roles - Or Not - Around Rust Code
- Phoronix: Linux Finally Introducing A Standardized Way Of Informing User-Space Over Hung GPUs
Stack
- LWN: Mesa 25.0.0 released
- Phoronix: Mesa's Venus Now Exposes Vulkan 1.4 Support
- Phoronix: Mesa's Zink Driver Enables cl_khr_gl_sharing, Working On DaVinci Resolve Support
- Phoronix: SVT-AV1 3.0 Released With Faster CPU-Based AV1 Encoding
- Phoronix: Niri 25.02 & Labwc 0.8.3 Wayland Compositors Released
- Phoronix: System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 6 Desktop Environment
- Phoronix: Chromium Ozone Support For Wayland Continues Progressing In 2025
- Phoronix: Firefox 137 To Support HEVC/H.265 Video Playback On Linux With VA-API
- servo: This month in Servo…🕸️🪟 new webview API🕵️🌲 :host and
🌈🎨 relative CSS colors🖌️🗜️ canvas to JPEG/WebP/blob🛜💨 more efficient networkinghttps://servo.org/blog/2025/02/19/this-month-in-servo/
Matrix
- Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2025-02-21
- Matrix.org: We're at a crossroads
- Matrix.org: Switching to Curated Room Directories
Thanks
Huge thanks to Plata for the nifty set of Python scripts that speed up collecting links from feeds by a lot.
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