Sailfish OS approaching daily-drivability on PinePhone, gtk-file-chooser memes coming to an end and more.

Commentary in italics.

Hardware

PINE64 pre-announced the PineTab 2, powered by the Rockchip RK3566 known from the Quartz64, PineNote and other devices. To get it from the horses mouth, read the Community Update

Pricing and details (e.g., display resolution, the wireless chipset or whether it will have SPI for solid booting - on prototypes SPI is not populated) are not finalized yet, it will be out some time after Chinese New Year (January 21st to 27th, 2023) - so some time in February or March. Personally, my enthusiasm is slightly tempered by the fact that PINE64 went with a custom mainboard for the device - I would loved to see them use the SoQuartz for this, in order to allow for future upgradability. Especially with all of PINE64's plans for RISC-V, it would have allowed for an easy road towards a RISC-y tablet.

If you're reading this and are not familiar with PINE64 or the RK3566, make sure to read Counter Pillow's excellent post now, and best before you pull the trigger in March, so that you know what you're getting into:

Software progress

GNOME ecosystem

Plasma ecosystem

Nemo Mobile

Sailfish OS

Ubuntu Touch

Distributions

  • postmarketOS Blog: v22.12: The One With Napali Calling Yes, stable may be boring, but less breakage is always nice - and postmarketOS do the best they can to make their stable releases actually stable. If you've been longing for performance, the improvements to call audio for Snapdragon 845 devices (SHIFT6mq, OnePlus 6(T), Xiaomi Poco F1) offer a whole new league of options for all those, that actually want to (or have to) do phone calls on their pocketable computers. Also: The Fairphone 4 is supported by 22.12, so it must be coming along!
  • Breaking updates in pmOS edge: libtiff related breakage in Alpine edge
  • Manjaro PinePhone Plasma Mobile: Beta 14 RC 2
  • Manjaro PinePhone Plasma Mobile: Beta 14 RC 1

Stack

Linux

Matrix

Worth noting

Worth reading

Worth watching

Thanks

Huge thanks again to Plata for a nifty set of Python scripts that speeds up collecting links from feeds by a lot.

Something missing? Want to contribute?

If your project's cool story (or your awesome video or nifty blog post or ...) is missing and you don't want that to happen again, please just put it into the hedgedoc pad for the next one! If you just stumble on a thing, please put it in there too - all help is appreciated!

PS: I'm looking for feedback - what do you think?

1

The article by TuxPhones.com was added after initial publication.