💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~visiblink › phlog › 20200413 captured on 2022-04-29 at 11:44:54.
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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Logout recently wrote a great phlog that discussed a number of alternative mobile OSes.[1] Back in November, I ordered a Pinephone (which arrived some time in February), so I've been following the development of operating systems for that device ever since. There is a list of OSes currently in development for the Pinephone at their Wiki.[2] Among those that stand out that were not mentioned in Logout's phlog are PureOS, which was developed for the Librem5 smartphone (and a port is available for the Pinephone); nemo mobile (which combines the open source parts of Sailfish with a libre GUI); and a number of GNU/Linux distributions that run natively on the phone. For me, the most exciting of those distributions is a Debian-on-ARM image that makes use of the Phosh desktop environment from PureOS. Calling, texting, and data already work. A lot of Debian applications also work, though many need their GUIs resized. Some, of course, have not been ported to ARM (yet). Hats off to the developer, a-wai.[3] It's truly amazing what one person can accomplish! I am really looking forward to the day that I can run Debian on my phone, especially since a clamshell keyboard is in the works, and the device can output USB-C to HDMI. Convergence is almost here! The main drawback at this point -- which affects all of the OS candidates -- is power consumption. Very few power-saving features have been implemented. At present, the most you can hope for is about 9 hours of battery life on standby. ---- For those of you who make use of the circumlunar.space XMPP server, I have a new VPS provider and am in the process of restoring from backups. It should be running again soon. I'll post an update as soon as it's working. If I can't get it running from the backup, I'll be emailing you a new password. [1] gopher://i-logout.cz/0/phlog/posts/2020-04-07_alternative_operating_systems_for_smartphones.txt [2] https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone_Software_Release [3] https://gitlab.com/a-wai