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[I love how the average "just a simple flashlight" app on Google Play is like 200 MiB and the average "This contains the entire knowledge of the universe, requires Android 4.0 or newer" app on F-Droid is like 20 KiB. XD
Folks were telling me about GrayJay (client for YT and others), but it's like hecka hundred megabytes, and I'm thinking, "WHY!??"
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A virtual Android environment itself would be quite the resource hog, methink.
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:D
Wonder if the #postmarketos people have any guides for FOSS Android developers who wish to migrate to Linux, now that Google's going full policestate with their OS.
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Reminds me, I've got a Pixel 3a collecting dust puppies in my home office closet, I really need to flash it with #pmOS. ;)
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The 3a is the best-supported phone for pmOS outside of the PinePhone (original, not Pro), if memory serves me.
This goes back to my one infamous comment, "I'd rather deal with a heat-belching x86 phone with two minutes of battery life than an ARM-based laptop." 😂
Hardware support on that architecture seems to be a real bugbear. I celebrate the accomplishments of teams like the Asahi guys, yet mourn that their heroic work essentially obfuscates the fact that "Apple Silicon" computers are absolute bricks without herculean reverse-engineering efforts.
This is a sad state of affairs.
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@rl_dane @nowster @moses_izumi @hi
I haven't had great luck with my 3a with pmOS. I haven't even been able to get it to establish a cellular connection using physical sims from multiple providers. Combine that with a (now) badly declining battery and I've never even come close to being able to test it as a daily driver. (This is over multiple attempts through the last couple of years.)
I hope this doesn't read like a criticism of the pmOS folks; they've done incredible work and I appreciate the hell out of it (although I wish they'd have stuck with OpenRC instead of SloppyD).
Hopefully y'alls will have better luck than I, but I figured I should at least share my experience to date. Despite the ongoing issues, it has certainly gotten better every time I've pushed a new image to the phone.
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@be0ba @nowster @moses_izumi @hi
Ah, that's a bummer to hear. :/
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@rl_dane @nowster @moses_izumi @hi
I just built a new image using plasma-mobile and packages from edge; I'll take it with me tomorrow and see if I can get the modem working. I don't have cell service at home.
Like I said, things have always seemed to be better every time I try. Not necessarily huge leaps, but improvements all the time.
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@rl_dane @nowster @moses_izumi @hi
Okay, so it boots but plasma-mobile is still somewhat unhappy at times. When you switch the active SIM slot (for me, the eSIM is the default and I must run `sudo mmcli -m 0 --set-primary-sim-slot 1'), the settings app invariably crashes. The Crash Reporter also tends to crash regardless of whether or not anything else has crashed.
5GHz WiFi is still a no-go; for some reason it can't manage the encryption, but 2.4GHz works perfectly fine.
Overall interactivity is... okay. Sluggish in comparison to literally any Android phone I've ever used. For comparison, I fired up my Motorola Droid RAZR (circa 2011) with Android 4 and there is literally no comparison in terms of responsiveness. (Also, holy crap, this old Android 4 feels so incredibly dated...) The ancient Motorola just screams through UI animations and apps opening where the Pixel 3a just... limps along. There are other options for the UI, but plasma-mobile has well proven to be the least glitchy of them for me.
I got Firefox installed which seems to come from Flathub (clocking in at 271.2MiB). It works well enough, Reddit loaded, videos played with working sound. Waterfox doesn't seem to be available, but I've just found that Librewolf (393.7MiB [no idea why it's so much bigger; pre-installed extensions?]) is so I'll test it since it's not #slopware. This too works perfectly on the perfunctory Reddit test.
The last time I tested this, the screen would get stuck in orientation, and vertical was always upside down. This hasn't happened at all yet, which is a wonderful improvement in my book.
The modem is picking up at least some network signals with an active sim selected, which is also great news. Only tomorrow will tell if it can actually manage to connect to the network.
If I manage to get it to connect to the cellular network tomorrow I'll report back. If I don't, you can assume that it didn't. Or that I forgot to post about it, or forgot to test and am too embarrassed to mention it.
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@be0ba @nowster @moses_izumi @hi
Man, I gotta say, that does not sound like fun. :/
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@rl_dane @nowster @moses_izumi @hi
It's not really the phone's fault though, or even postmarketOS. It was also really unfair for me to compare responsiveness to Android even though it's the direct competitor. Android is stupid optimised to run on these things, and older Android apps had to run on really limited hardware and make the most of it.
What's running on this now 7 year old hardware is an entirely modern software stack that struggles on modern hardware. Firefox/Librewolf actually responded a LOT better than I expected. They were actually more responsive than the WM. KDE Plasma isn't exactly lightweight, even as a mobile WM. The limited amount of RAM in a Pixel 3a is also limiting in terms of modern stuff, having only 4GB. I think I'll try using swap-in-zram along with some sysctl tuning to help alleviate that. Perhaps bpftune and adaptivemm can help make a difference as well.
I think using a lighter UI would help a lot, but all of those options seem to say to use a stylus because they're not really mobile UIs and I don't have a stylus. I also think carrying a stylus around to use a phone not designed for one would make an even worse experience.
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@be0ba @nowster @moses_izumi @hi
Have you tried #SXMo?
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@rl_dane @nowster @moses_izumi @hi
I have not, but I will just as soon as the new image finishes building and I push it to the phone. I wish I had something else ARM based around here to build it ..... wait. My 7 Pro has that new-ish Linux-in-a-VM terminal.
Now I have to try to build a postmarketOS image on a VM on a phone....
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@rl_dane @nowster @moses_izumi @hi
Okay, this is will take some getting used to, but I think I like it. It is also snappy AF. This feels so much nicer to work with; no lag at all.
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@rl_dane @nowster @moses_izumi @hi
One thing I note is that using sxmo-de-sway on pmOS doesn't seem to ask for a user pin/password on startup. You just go straight to the desktop which is not necessarily amazing. It's still cool though. Trying to figure out how to set up the APN for the cellular connection now. Also, how to tell networkmanager about the cellular connection...
EDIT: Apparently the autologin is an intended feature, according to the sxmo documentation. I'll try to figure out how to turn that off as well.
EDIT EDIT: No, you can't turn that off. The recommended action is to enable full disk encryption and use that for access control which is exactly not how that is supposed to work. So, SXMO explicitly does not support any kind of access control at any point in the usage experience which is.... not great.
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@rl_dane @nowster @moses_izumi @hi
ModemManager is not happy with swapping SIM slots now. FML. I can get a nice, super responsive UI or I can get a possibility of connecting to a cellular network. Accursed thing.
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@rl_dane @nowster @moses_izumi @hi
I'm also definitely running into https://gitlab.com/sdm670-mainline/linux/-/issues/6 which is a bug where the touchscreen stops responding. I can ssh in and kill sway and restart tinydm and everything will come back up but that doesn't exactly help in the real world... Interesting that I wasn't having any issues with that under plasma.
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@hi just a little reminder that the original Doom only required ~2MB of disk-space while Doom II took ~15MB of disk-space.
For the additional disk-space used, are those mobile apps really providing you that much more value than just playing Doom or Doom II? 😆
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i'm looking at uxn roms and asking myself why do we allow more than tens of kilobytes for an app?