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Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

Phosh gets way too much attention on the pinephone, it's not a good DE and it's very slow. You can run normal Linux X11 DEs with no compositing and they are very fast. I use FVWM and most things open very quickly, Firefox takes a couple seconds.

All people like me want is something that lets us run tmux and the rest of the apps we run on our thinkpads and the Pinephone does that very well.

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It's not the DE that makes things fast or slow (although disabling composition may indeed help with making GTK3 apps run faster on the PinePhone, but that's mostly because GTK3 renders in software and it bottlenecks on PinePhone's RAM bandwidth).

How can you use a smartphone mini screen with tmux? Is it usable?

It works reasonably well, as long as you don’t “over-split” your screen.

Out of curiousity, what distro are you running?

I guess it's SXMo.

That was my guess too. I've tried SXMO a couple of times but ended up going back to Phosh. Its probably me, but I could not figure out the UI of it.

I actually like SXMo very much and I wish I could choose it sometimes during the booting. I don't use it daily only because it relies on postmarketOS and not Debian.

I understand that.

I've tried pmOS a few times. I really like pmOS and they have a great community (I'm more active in the pmOS Matrix channel vs the Mobian channel), but unfortunately relying on muslc vs glibc can be a bit of a pain (mmsd has some sort of incompatibility due to this), and muslc precludes a lot of packages mobian has without manual patching.

PMOS (the same install the phone came with) you can just replace the session file and use a different WM.

Okay!

If I may ask, I tried using SXMO a couple of times, but I never got used to it. Do I just need to stick with it for a little bit and it gets better, or what are your thoughts?

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