benjamin brandall's website
22 Sep 2020 - benjamin
When I ordered my PinePhone - the postmarketOS edition - I owned a functional yet frustrating Android phone and planned to make the switch gradually. As if by magic, one day after the PinePhone arrived in the post, my long-suffering Samsung A10 packed in for good 🪄
I’ve read the warnings (Not usable as a daily driver!! Core functionality missing!!) but feel compelled to get it as close as possible to being a replacement for my dead A10.
Here are my notes on doing that:
The pre-installed version of postmarketOS + Phosh is way laggier than one built with pmbootstrap and flashed to an SD card. Typing was painful, apps crashed regularly. I recommend flashing the latest release before making any judgements!
Mobile data works out of the box, browsing the web is pretty smooth, and Telegram, via the telegram-desktop package, works almost as well as it does on Android once you find the UI scale value that looks best (telegram-desktop -scale 90 looks good and seems to persist even when opened from the icon next time).
Notifications, which are key to the usefulness of a mobile phone, don’t work very reliably though. SMS via Chat (Purism’s chatty which uses libpurple from Pidgin) always fires obvious notifications with sound and an on-screen prompt but XMPP messages, also via chatty, can trigger at random times or silently appear in the notifications drawer instead of appearing with an obvious on-screen prompt.
The camera doesn’t work without some fiddling and while I personally haven’t been successful yet, Martijn Braam shares a python script using ffmpeg and imagemagic which apparently does the trick here.
Despite the missing camera and patchy notifications, Phosh feels closest to the Android user experience.
For those who use tiling window managers on desktop Linux (i3, herbstluftwm, dwm, and so on), sxmo is a great choice. It uses a patched version of dwm which uses the volume up/down and lock buttons as the main way to control everything, plus screen swipe gestures.
The userspace tools are mostly based on suckless software and bash scripts, making it very hackable.
Mobile data is harder to setup than with Phosh, but some solutions are available:
First, unlocking the SIM is necessary but not very intuitive. It’s possible with mmcli as explained here
For mobile data, janw on the Pine64 forum recommends copying the NetworkManager config over from a working Phosh installation.
There’s also a method using mmcli and nmcli explained here.
Notifications trigger on-screen prompts via Dunst, but although there are bash scripts in /usr/bin/ for a notification center, I couldn’t get them to work.
As a user of dwm, herbstluftwm, st, dunst, etc, sxmo is the UI I’d most like to adopt as a daily driver. The button combinations are very intuitive once learned, and, like dwm, feel like a more productive way of doing things than tapping/clicking. Also, the lack of animations and a compositor makes the UI feel very snappy.
Still to test: Manjaro, UBports…
(this post describes a bunch of issues I’m experiencing as of Sep 22 2020; development around the PinePhone and its OSs/UIs happens fast, and hopefully they’ll not be issues for long! as well as detailing them here, I’ll open formal reports in the relevant repos and update this accordingly)