Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (51/2024): Apps and other Updates
Table of Contents
A Sailfish OS Community News (and videos on updating the Jolla C2 (for VoLTE among other things)), two blog posts by Phone Manufacturers, a MauiKit progress report, Aardvark and other apps, and more! Enjoy and have a great time as the year winds down!
Commentary in italics.
Worth Reading
- fossphones.com: Linux Phone News - December 18, 2024. Nice roundup!
- Purism: PureOS Crimson Development Report: November 2024
- FuriLabs: New Phone Updating Worth reading if you have such a phone.
- Uvoks Blog: PostmarketOS: Some impressions (and solving a QMI Protocol Error)
Worth Watching
- Linux Stuff: Cloud Gaming on Juno Tab 3 (Boosteroid)
- Jolla Devices: Updating the JC2 | Cinematic video - YouTube
- Continuum Gaming: Continuum Gaming E448: Jolla C2 Update (5.0.0.43
- Anino Ni Kugi: Outer Wilds Lockscreen + Media Player | Ubuntu Touch with Lomiri Plus
- CyberPunkEdu: postmarketOS working camera - GNOME Mobile - Google Pixel 3a (2024-12-15)
- Autistic Stoner: Configuring Librem5 Phone With FreePBX
- James Champion: Linux On Phones and Tablets With postmarketOS
- Scientific Perspective: "Calling function on postmarketOS KDE plasma Desktop | SDM845 | POCO F1 (Archive Aug, 2024)"
Worth Noting
- NGIZero: "If you are working on Free and Open Source technologies that improve the digital landscape for everyone, know that NGI0 offers financial & practical support. We offer grants between €5k - €50k, open to everyone. Calls currently open: NGI0 Commons Fund: Reclaim the public internetNGI TALER: Privacy-preserving digital paymentsNGI MobiFree: More ethical mobile softwareNGI Fediversity: Creating the hosting stack of the future Deadline February 1, 2025https://nlnet.nl/news/2024/20241201-call.html#FOSS #NGI #NGI0"
- agx: The folks from @NGIZero are super friendly and helpful people. If you're looking into e.g. improving the #LinuxMobile ecosystem their financial support can be a big enabler to focus on a specific project or task for some time!
- fredldotme: "I've something to share for running Snaps on Halium devices, and it's a gpu-2404 provider for Snaps to take advantage of.https://snapcraft.io/hybris-2404The idea is to ship userspace drivers as snaps to consume by other snaps, and it's providing the same ABI-compatible equivalents to EGL, GLESv2, etc.Fun fact: the gpu-2404 interface provides a way for hybris-2404 to set up the LD_PRELOAD hack that maybe a handful of devices rely on. It fits beautifully in there."
- DrewNaylor: Fun fact: Linux has keycodes it recognizes for camera focus and camera. It would be cool if someone creates a mini keyboard that's just a camera button in a case wired over the I2C bus for the PinePhone that uses these keys.#Linux #PinePhone
Event foreshadowing
- VolkerKrause: "#KDE will be at #38C3 this year again, as part of the Bits & Bäume Habitat and with three talks featuring cross-project collaborations on public transport routing, weather/emergency warnings and combating e-waste - https://volkerkrause.eu/2024/12/22/kde-38c3-preview.html"
- @linmob@fosstodon.org: Look at that: https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/mobile/ #FOSDEM #LinuxMobile Thanks @devrtz and others for all the hard work!Also note: "The schedule is now available (modulo talks for which the speakers haven't yet clicked on the confirmation link)" - so there's even more good stuff coming!
More Software News
Gnome Ecosystem
- This Week in GNOME: #179 Reduced Memory Usage
- alicem: Mobile testing in libadwaita
- Tobias Bernard: Introducing Project Aardvark
- Marcus Lundblad: Christmas / Winter / End-of-the-year Holidays Maps 2024 Yearly Wrap-up
- Planet GNOME: A new issue policy for libinput - closing and reopening issues for fun and profit
- Phoronix: GNOME User Sharing Ported From C To Rust, libadwaita Adds Adaptive Preview Mode
Phosh
- phosh: Dear distro maintainers and "i build my own stuff" people: In case you want to check out 0.44.0 upfront: we've tagged the first releases candidates (0.44~rc1) of #phosh and related components today. 🎉 Release is planned 2024-12-31 (https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/phosh/-/wikis/Releases)There's some rough edges still but we still aim to make the release date.
- phosh: In preparation for the next #phosh release we've released #feedbackd 0.6.0 🎉 :This adds support for a new haptic API to feedbackd that can be used by e.g. games to trigger vibration patterns or by browsers to implement
navigator.vibrate().https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/feedbackd/-/releases/v0.6.0
Plasma Ecosystem
- Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: end-of-year bug fixing
- Carl Schwan et al.: This Week in KDE Apps: Search in Merkuro Mail, Tokodon For Android, LabPlot new documentation and more
- Carl Schwan et al.: This Week in KDE Apps: Gear 24.12.0 is Out
- Volker Krause: KDE @ 38C3
- MauiKit blog: Maui Release Briefing #7
- Qt blog: Qt 6.9 - Android Updates. More 'build with Qt' Android apps can only be good for Mobile Linux, right?
Sxmo
Sailfish OS
- Community News - Sailfish OS Forum: Sailfish Community News, 19th December 2024 - Xmas Greetings!
- #sailfishOS: I'm incredibly excited to be presenting on "Mobile Browsers: the Best of Times, the Worst of Times" in the FOSS on Mobile devroom at FOSDEM in February!https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6411-mobile-browsers-the-best-of-times-the-worst-of-times/I'll talk about the different embedded web browsers and how they fit into the Linux on Mobile landscape.#FOSDEM #FOSDEM25 #FOSDEM2025 #FOSSonMobile #browser #gecko #WebKit #Blink #Servo #SailfishOS #LinuxOnMobile #Linux #Mobile
Ubuntu Touch
- UBports - Development - Issues: [mkCal]: birthday dates are not shown in calendar-app
- UBports - Development - Issues: battery health
- UBports - Development - Issues: Unit test failures
- UBports - Development - Issues: Mulltiple SIM UX
- UBports - Development - Issues: [devel-noble] task: fingerprint
- fredldotme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VndmhS8Oaig I don't know how far Snaps are in that regard but it is about time something like that starts to happen.Yes, I want to get paid for my software in an ethical way. Something like that would be heaven for a project like Tide, if the audience finds it.
Distributions
- Mobian mobian-recipes Merge Requests: Add configs for sargo and bonito
- postmarketOS Wiki New Pages: SpacemiT Key Stone K1/OpenOCD configuration
- postmarketOS Wiki New Pages: Huawei Ascend D1 Quad XL (huawei-u9510e)
- Phoronix: OpenSUSE Announces New "YQPkg" Package Management Tool
Apps
- Tuba: "#Tuba v0.9.0 is now available, with many new features and bug fixes!✨ Highlights:- Audio Visualizer- Accent Colors and other GNOME 47 changes- Focus Picker- Account Suggestions for new accounts- Scheduled & Draft Posts- Hashtag extraction from posts- Full emoji reaction support for supported backends- FediWrapped- Thread Muting🧵As always, there are too many changes to list here, if you're more interested, check out the full release changelog:https://github.com/GeopJr/Tuba/releases/tag/v0.9.0#GNOME #GTK"
- anderslund: "How about a nice #sudoku game for #plasmamobile, nice with #kirigami ui, using your plasma theme? It is of course very much in prototyping stage, everything is qml - no backend - but it is actually possible to play it even if there is no checking - let alone fanphares - if you finsh a game ... :-)Next step is adding support for pencilmarks, which is likey tricky. I'm fully focused on mobile behavior, but it can of course be made to work nicely in desktop as well ...#postmarketos #kde #linuxphone #fossphone"
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Geoclue Stumbler
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Supersonik
- adampigg: Have made a first tagged releses of Supersonik, my @kde #Kirigami #subsonic player. Would love to see it packaged on #mobilelinux outside of #SailfishOS. https://github.com/piggz/supersonik/releases/tag/0.1.0
- semiprime: I've just released version 0.3.5 of Pygenda - my WIP #Psion Agenda-like app targetting #GeminiPDA & #CosmoCommunicator running Linux. (Similar keyboard #PDA type devices running #LinuxMobile should work too, e.g. #PinePhone + keyboard, F(x)tec #Pro1x, #PocketReform)The main change this release is that todo-items with a due date are (optionally) shown in Week & Year Views. This has been a useful improvement for me as I now see todos in my "home" views, rather than having to switch to Todo View.
- sohrab: i have now updated the #postmarketos wiki with the #carburetor 5 screenshots https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Tor #linuxmobile #tor
- Nitrux: Introducing: Nitrux SB Manager. This does not fully belong here - my excuse is that x86_64 tablets are a thing - having secure boot stuff done by GUI is really nice.
Kernel
- phone-devel: [PATCH v6 00/13] media: i2c: imx214: Miscellaneous cleanups and improvements
- phone-devel: [PATCH] nvmem: qcom-spmi-sdam: Set size in struct nvmem_config
- Phoronix: Raspberry Pi HEVC Decoder Driver Posted For Linux Kernel Review
- Phoronix: Linux 6.13-rc4 To Fix A Nasty USB Problem Plaguing The Kernel For A Few Weeks
- Phoronix: Liquorix vs. Linux 6.12 Upstream Kernel Performance Across Many Workloads
Stack
- Planet GNOME: Announcing systemd v257
- Phoronix: Wayland Protocols 1.39 Released With Data Control & Workspace Additions
- Phoronix: Fish Shell 4.0 Beta Released With C++ Code Ported To Rust
Matrix
- Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2024-12-20
- Matrix.org: First report from the Matrix Governing Board
- Matrix.org: Matrix v1.13 release
Thanks
Huge thanks to Plata for the nifty set of Python scripts that speed 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! Since I am collecting many things there, this get's you early access if you will ;-) If you just stumble on a thing, please put it in there too - all help is appreciated!