PinePhone Keyboard hacks, a nice FSFE interview, and a far to long comment on a video. I blame YouTube.

Commentary in italics.

Software progress

GNOME ecosystem

Plasma/Maui ecosystem

Ubuntu Touch

  • UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 119. We had the video earlier, now transcript and audio-only are available!

Sailfish OS

Distributions

Low level stuff

Worth noting

PinePhone Keyboard tweaks and mods1

Worth reading

SqueakPhone

  • Syndicated Actors: State of the SqueakPhone. _I had not heard of this before and I am not sure I understand all the jargon, but it looks quite neat!

More on GNOME Calls

Free Software Love Europe

Old news

Fluff

  • Purism: Privacy in Depth. Despite the mean headline I picked for this, it may be worth a read. Also: The age of the photo of the Librem 5 camera may surprise you - Evergreen does not look like this!

Not mobile, but important

Worth watching

CRISIS!?

  • Ambro's: Pinephone Pro July '22 Review - Mobile Linux Is Dying. This warrants a longer comment, which I tried to post to YouTube... but... well, the automated moderation system did not approve.
    So let's have that comment here. First of all: I share some concerns: There's less activity and less hype on social media than there was a year ago. But: There are still more updates to existing apps and more new apps all the time, making it impossible for me to test and add them all to LinuxPhoneApps in time, and Purism are very much actively developing software for the Librem 5.
    Further nitpicks: Manjaro don't develop software, they package it (see comment above). Arch Linux ARM is still going strong, Danct12 just did not see the need to create another image since May, which, as long as the distribution does not break on upgrades, is perfectly fine. Mobian and postmarketOS are both quite active, and the same goes for most projects I am aware of.
    On PINE64 investing in software: I would very much like to see that too, especially for everything around hardware enablement and fixing hard to reproduce but common bugs (e.g., suspend issues). But: This would necessarily lead to way higher prices (doubling them, maybe), to make a meaningful difference.
    Regarding PinePhone Pro battery life: I am disappointed with active use battery life too. While especially video playback lifetime should improve when using video playback solutions that offload video decoding from the CPU (meaning: likely not Firefox for a while), and there may be other options to improve power efficiency (e.g., disabling the big A72 cores when they are not specifically needed), these things take time, assuming that they are at all possible. I would have loved for PINE64 to alter the design more for the Pro in order to allow for a bigger battery, but I also understand that that would have been very costly. I just hope that PINE64 or the community will come up with solution for larger batteries (with a different back case), or more elegant (as in smaller) solutions for external batteries to solve this.
    Conclusion: While I don't like the alarmist title too much, it's a good wake up call. If it helps people that expect parity with iOS or Android to not onboard mobile Linux at this point, then that's really good... unhappy non-constructive complainers are not needed. I agree that we need investment in software, if we want mobile Linux to thrive, but we must not wait for someone else to do it, we just need to contribute to key projects in money and time whenever we can.

Plasma Mobile Progress

Nautilus 43

Hardware enablement

Shorts

Something missing?

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PS: In case you are wondering about the title ...

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Thanks to PocketVJ for bringing these cool posts to my attention!