linmob

It did not get far in market share, sure, but it never stopped going like Big Screen did and made the transition to 6 at the same time as Plasma Desktop.

Here are some recent developments:

1. https://plasma-mobile.org/2025/07/08/releases-25-07/ (also explaining that most software is part of 'Plasma Gear', which makes sense as it is software for both mobile and desktop, but has the downside of making Mobile less visible)

2. https://blogs.kde.org/2025/07/05/this-week-in-plasma-chuggin... and look for Plasma Keyboard in this post. (Personally I am a bit sad that they are seemingly abandoning Maliit, which is also used in Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch and is IMHO fine, but hey, at least it shows that Mobile is not dead.)

Yet, there are a select few non-gui flatpaks. One I use frequently is Zola [0], a static site generator that I use because it's significantly faster in building my site with 'zola serve' than the native Alpine Linux package. All I had to do to make it convenient was aliasing flatpak run org.getzola.zola to zola.

[0]: https://flathub.org/apps/org.getzola.zola

Yes.

(For "social reasons": If you have any feedback channel on your static site, people won't stop breaking your balls until you add https.)

To me, looking at Ibis as a piece of software, it seems way more attractive as an alternative to wikia/fandom, niche wikis about a topic.

It seems to be selfhostable without massive resources and more modern, than, e.g., MediaWiki. (Also, say about Lemmy what you want, but using it feels lean and quick.)

It's especially attractive if the topic you are targetting also has some fediverse presence.

Not true for the Poco F1 (although AFAIK you still need to build your own kernel on postmarketOS to enjoy this): https://fosstodon.org/@joelselvaraj/112621744555315631

Shift6mq is supposedly close, with OnePlus6(T) its more difficult due to I think the way the sensor is connected.

Currently, the Pixel 3a is the most promising device in terms of Camera Support on a Qualcomm device with mainline kernel from what I can gather.

The FLX1 hardware does not support this, sadly (as very many phones do).

While my experience with PinePhone has been significantly better (sounds like you may have had a faulty unit), we have working close-to-mainline ports for a few Qualcomm-powered phones (e.g., Xiaomi Poco F1, OnePlus 6(t), Google Pixel 3a, ...) in OSes like postmarketOS or Mobian. Turns out these work a lot better - having phones build with components for phones makes a significant difference.

This. I try to collect all that happens weekly in the space at https://linmob.net

I am quite happy with mine. I installed LineageOS (GSI image without Google stuff) on my Rabbit R1 - the goal is to have a less addictive mobile device that can do offline maps with GPS and otherwise be a modern iPod (listening to podcasts and music) - and it's quite good for that. Using the wheel to zoom in Organic Maps is fun :-)

I hope to find the time to blog about this soon.

I mean, on Windows with the official Teams, I see "Person is visibly talking, but there's no audio (and did not mute themselves accidentally)" multiple times a week. So, yeah, going from that baseline, that's surely "supported".

postmarketOS provides tooling, documentation and a helpful community ... at some point, you'll need to put in the work, or sell your used devices and buy other, better supported used devices to work around this.

Is it really unfortunate that there's no (known) mainline/close to mainline touchscreen driver for the Pixel 4a? Absolutely. But it won't magically appear without somebody putting in the necessary effort.

This is unsurprising - of course it runs AOSP, what else would you run on a MediaTek MT6765? Windows CE? Defintely not mainline Linux, thanks to PowerVR graphics[1] - the demo looked to smooth for 'no GPU driver'.

Ever since I saw that hardware, I've been wondering if it could be repurposed as a tiny phone with smart features, or as a 'connected' MP3 player. Pity it does not have a headphone jack.

[1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/MediaTek_MT6765

Which release? Ubuntu has had a bad habit of not setting the proper environment variables for Firefox in the past - for X (not setting MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1) and wayland (MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1), massively degrading the user experience in Firefox, e.g., for touchscreen users. With Firefox 121 and forward, the latter variable does not need to be set anymore.

To sum it up: Your subpar experience wasn't the fault of Wayland or Mozilla, your distribution is to blame for this (as making the combination of software shipped work well together for the user is the job a good distribution does).

That said, even without setting the environment up correctly, I never had a keyboard input issue - so it could be snap... Canonical to blame, again - maybe.

(Need I say I no longer use Ubuntu, despite it being my main distro since 4.10. My parents are still on the LTS train, I will move them to a different distribution once I find the time.)

Which release? Ubuntu has had a bad habit of not setting the proper environment variables for Firefox in the past - for X (not setting MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1) and wayland (MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1), massively degrading the user experience in Firefox, e.g., for touchscreen users. With Firefox 121 and forward, the latter variable does not need to be set anymore.

To sum it up: Your subpar experience wasn't the fault of Wayland or Mozilla, your distribution is to blame for this (as making the combination of software shipped work well together for the user is the job a good distribution does).

That said, even without setting the environment up correctly, I never had a keyboard input issue - so it could be snap... Canonical to blame, again - maybe.

(Need I say I no longer use Ubuntu and will move my parents to a different distribution once I find the time?)

So, that's 22.04 with Plasma 5.24? Yes, I also had bad experiences when I using Plasma 5.24 and earlier with kwin's Wayland session (so much so that I used kwinft for a bit, as this was not a Wayland, but a kwin problem - wlroots and Mutter/GNOME allowed for good experiences earlier than the 22.04 timeframe).

Fortunately, with Plasma 6, it's night and day from that, and even with 5.27 which Kubuntu 24.04 will ship, things are a lot more solid already.

It depends. Old Outlook keeps failing me, in ways the new, dumb web app has not (yet):

- Not sending e-mail unless I am restarting it (I added Outbox to Favorites to catch this before hours have gone by)

- Crashing when I try to add an attachment, and loosing my drafted email

- Claiming it's out of memory and hence can't add my signature.

Now, granted, all this maybe due to incompentence at my workplace, or me having "too much email or calendars", but boy does Outlook get in the way of me getting work done. I've run into all of this over the last week, BTW.

My OnePlus 6 running Kupfer (Arch Linux ARM) [0] and my Shift6mq running Mobian [1] (Debian blend) in dual boot from microSDXC card [2] would like to have a word. Droidian (Halium-based Debian) also supports the enchilada.[3]

And then, there's also NixOS mobile [4]. They all have had systemd before this.

[0] https://kupfer.gitlab.io/, setting up kupferbootstrap can be hard though, especially if you don't have docker set up on that system already.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/OnePlus/OnePlus6 To be frank though, I failed at installing Mobian on sdm845 hardware earlier myself, too.

[2] https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/SHIFT/SHIFT6mq#In...

[3] https://devices.droidian.org/#/devices/enchilada

[4] https://mobile.nixos.org/devices/oneplus-enchilada.html

On which Desktop Environment/wayland compositor? I am pretty sure Firefox Picture in picture works as intented (tiny window, stays on top of things) on GNOME's wayland session, and on Plasma 5.27.x I was able to make it work with a few KWin rules set by GUI (I would love to share the details, but I don't have my Plasma machine with me currently).

My solve for this is proper Emacs on a mobile monstrosity (a PinePhone Pro with the keyboard accessory). See [0] for more on that.

[0]: https://linmob.net/using-the-pinephone-pro-daily-despite-hav...

For everyone interested in the whole "Linux on Phones" thing attending FOSDEM, make sure to check out the dev room schedule [0] and relevant stands [1].

[0]: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/foss-on-mobile-device...

[1]: https://fosdem.org/2024/stands/

For everyone interested in the whole "Linux on Phones" thing attending FOSDEM, make sure to check out the dev room schedule [0] and relevant stands [1].

[0]: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/foss-on-mobile-device...

[1]: https://fosdem.org/2024/stands/

At least for the Kirigami apps [1] that are hosted on invent.kde.org (and not just personal projects), a lot of porting has to KF6 has happened.

[1]: https://linuxphoneapps.org/frameworks/kirigami/

I think it's that software is not all bad. ;-)

The eMMC issue sounds like really bad luck - mine is still fine after more than three years (although I have moved on to other mobile Linux devices a year ago, since they are faster).

I was going to add an caveat about that, but it turns out, that for the iMac 5,1 (the model discussed in the article) RAM upgrades are easy [1] (SSD not so much, but it should still be better than some of its aluminum successors [2]).

That said, I definitely agree and advise: Before you order parts to upgrade things, check whether you feel up for the install procedure.

[1] https://de.ifixit.com/Anleitung/iMac+Intel+17-Inch+RAM+Repla...

[2] https://de.ifixit.com/Anleitung/iMac+Intel+17-Inch+Hard+Driv...

If one wants to put these old machines to good use, it's worth remembering (after checking that they still work), that these older machines (the iMac and the MacBook) are still user-upgradable.

The iMac should allow for 4GB of RAM (of which only 3 will be usable), the MacBook unofficially supports 8GB. Add in a cheap S-ATA SSD, and for some not too high, two digit amount of EUR or USD, these machines will be actually useful for someone.

I have a similar 5.7" 32 GB eMMC device that runs a debian-ish distro with Phosh GUI, where I have been installing flatpaks left and right (without caring which runtimes they use) for a reason ([0]) since early 2022.

I am now at 107 total flatpaks, 18 of which are platform packages (= 89 apps+locales). If I were to remove five outdated apps, that are archived or inactive upstream, I would be able to get rid of four platform packages (I really should, but I don't want to for sentimental reasons).

I have found things to scale similarily across devices: The more flatpak apps you use, the better the ratio gets. If you just use one app, you may end up with 3 Platform packages for it if you are unlucky, making that one app an incredible disk space eating monster. When you have 50 flatpak apps, things will look way better.

Now, would I like to have all these as native deb, rpm, tar.xz (arch), apk? Yes.

But I would also like to use the latest version, making that pretty much a pipedream - and in some cases the distro packages (mostly on Alpine and the AUR) aren't always as functional.

I am really glad flatpak and flathub are a thing.

OT, regarding alternatives discussed in other threads:

AppImages aren't really a thing on aarch64 (also, I use Wayland, which probonopd does not seem to be a fan of [1]).

Snaps: I had 'wrong arch' failures when attempting to run what was promoted as arm64 on Snapcraft.

[0]: https://linuxphoneapps.org

[1]: https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d...

Doubt it. As a German, I am pretty sure most government PCs run Windows, a few cities and certain state ministries have dabbled with Linux, but that's just a small fraction.

As far as I understand, GNOME being funded is all about doing a good job at applying for a grant with the Sovereign Tech Fund.

True, since as long as it's a Raspberry Pi, not a Raspberry Pro. ;-)

Sorry to ask, but are you sure about the exact specs? I wasn't aware of a 16" MacBook Pro M1(Pro|Max) with 8GB of RAM and Wikipedia [0] seems to confirm this.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro_(Apple_silicon)