Mobian: A look back in the mirror and a glimpse of the future | Hacker News Reader

Mobian: A look back in the mirror and a glimpse of the future

blog.mobian.org

78 pointspantalaimon15 comments

Personally I think the biggest thing that it lacks is plasma. Gnome is just not as good yet.

There is an experimental repository you can use now :-) [1]

I'm mixed there. I like the Plasma mobile UI better, I don't like Gnome on Desktop and have been using Plasma on the Desktop for years.

On Mobian, on my Pinephone Pro, I tried experimental plasma packaging.

- The keyboard lacks function and arrow keys. Agreed, it should not be an issue on mobile, but mobile Linux are not ready yet and have a lot of desktop-ism, or bugs that prevent them from being smooth with the touchscreen. It's quite annoying

- The phone seems to be slower, heat more and to be less stable

- there general bugs making it almost impractical to use.

For now, I reverted to Phosh, which I find clunky with its always visible top and bottom bars eating up screen space especially in landscape mode (though I must say, phosh has made incredible progress since 2020 and seems to work generally well now)

Maybe many of those quirks will be solved when proper Mobian packaging is done, and I might go back to Plasma and contribute some fixes. I'm sure Plasma can be as light, or lighter than Gnome technology, and also more stable. It feels like it on desktop.

About Mobian: Mobian is fantastic. It's reliable, improving and they are doing the right things the right way as shown in this post: contributing and upstreaming work to the different projects including Debian.

[1] https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php?id=desktopenvironme...

It seems that Plasma Mobile would be integrated for the next Debian Trixie

GNOME Contacts still lacks the option to import/export contacts as VCard files because it uses a dead library written in Vala which nobody has the permission/guts to either rewrite or delete, and frankly I don't want to have more than one app to manage my contacts on a smartphone, especially if the third party one is not well integrated into the system.

It's a shame that these mobile developments still haven't really pushed the default apps out of their rut.

GNOME Contacts 43 can import .vcf, so that one is partially solved. :-)

Linux phones needs a Steve Jobs. iPhone 1 was a true MVP and shocked the world.

Every pine phone distro I tried had lag without being discoverable (no spinning wheel). I don't mind waiting for things but darn it, don't make me question if the thing froze again or is just running some background task before updating the GUI.

Linux phones need money. You're not going to get away with a MVP today any more, the typical customer not only requires basic functionality, but also the ability to run Android apps they are locked into.

If you solve slowness by limiting features, only very few hard core fans will buy it. If you want to solve slowness by rewriting, you need loads of cash for great programmers. If you want to solve slowness by throwing hardware at it, you need loads of money to convince big players to even talk to you, give you hardware documentation, and then write all the open drivers.

While Sailfish, Nemo Mobile and Sxmo manage to feel somewhat smooth, slow storage and meager AllWinner A64 memory bandwith are what make the PinePhone feel like that.

I found postmarketOS and DanctNIX Sxmo and Phosh good enough to be bearable (it helps that I am used to slow systems thanks to being exposed to terribly slow business software at my day job).

Linux phones don't need it. Linux itself needs it.

Red Hat is the closest we've got, but while they've sponsored great work at unifying the lower-levels of Linux via systemd, the desktop level is still severely lacking, not to mention the lack of a good, corporate-supported "reference" distro putting all those ideas in a coherent package. Sadly it doesn't seem to be a priority for them as they have the funding, manpower and influence to pull it off if they wanted to.

Once we get good and usable Linux on desktops for the masses, phones can catch up (and I'd argue they'd have an advantage here as they'd be able to reuse all that desktop-focused work and run Linux apps out-of-the-box).

What's holding Linux back is the lack of a coherent vision - everyone does their little thing in their own corner with their own vision and ideologies (which are sometimes contradictory), leading to a lot of wasted work and yields a subpar user experience since all those various components don't integrate 100%.

If only it made sense economically, I bet someone would do it. As desktop OSes are perceived to be free (comes at no extra cost with the hardware, including updates for multiple years), there's not nearly the same Return On Investment as in B2B cloud and server markets. RedHat realized this aeons ago, Canonical followed in 2017.

At the same time, commercial products are being downgraded in usability by nagging users to subscribe to paid add-on services, telemetry and ads. And you can't even pay to 'get back to sanity'.

Surely that vision is exactly what (vanilla) Gnome is? On Desktop and on Mobile (with LibAdwaita). Incidentally they also seem to get a lot of criticism for having a strong vision.

> Linux phones needs a Steve Jobs.

How about Todd Weaver? https://www.crunchbase.com/person/todd-weaver

I was going to make this comment - jokingly.

If there's a person that might be self-identifying with 'Steve Jobs of Linux Phones', Todd is the most likely candidate :-D

Linux phones need developers, not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field jerks.

> We hope you’re as excited as we are about the current state and foreseeable evolutions of the mobile Linux ecosystem, and wish you all a happy year 2023!

The only problem is that we might get too excited :-)

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