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Phosh 0.56.0

phosh.mobi

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Re: Phosh 0.56.0

#61

Post by belowavgiq »

impure-aqua wrote: post #60
belowavgiq wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust me, you wouldn't be saying this if you had actually tried modern Android on low powered devices. low-mid range phones drop frames more often in 2026 than they did in 2015 with Android 5-7's much simpler UI. edit: oops, the topic was RAM usage. in 2026. of course everyone, it's definitely the 200MB usage surplus that makes your phone feel heavy. let's add 1TB of RAM to a C2D and it will be ready to be paired wit…

> of course everyone, it's definitely the 200MB usage surplus that makes your phone feel heavy. It actually is though? My Pixel 9a has a perfectly serviceable CPU but I am often frustrated by its 8GB of RAM. Switching to the Revolut app to generate a disposable card number consistently evicts my browser tab from RAM. ~100% of the time this happens and I get extremely frustrated by it losing my state in the checkout f…

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Re: Phosh 0.56.0

#62

Post by chainingsolid »

thastings wrote: post #52
not_your_vase wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as every phone distro is just a desktop distro shoehorned on a small screen, that's not gonna happen. IMO it's not a matter of tap to pay and camera quality, rather a matter of whole system paradigm. Having millions of disconnected services in the "do one thing and do it right" spirit and using text based communication and hundreds of python and shell scripts is relatively maintainable and relatively easy to…

From personal experience, many apps work suprisingly well on Phosh. The thing keeping me from using a Droidian phone with Phosh was a seemingly device-specific issue with answering regular phone calls. Kind of ironic that the linux phone could do many apps from FlatHub flawlessly with touch and everything, but not regular phone stuff. Nevertheless, the smartphone part is handled quite well with the Settings app, the…

Better open hardware would help a ton. Phosh itself was made for the Librem 5. The mobile specific Linuix apps are getting made in response to hardware, not to make a market for it!

Re: Phosh 0.56.0

#63

Post by chainingsolid »

realusername wrote: post #51
gf000 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what? I mean, I can also just run Linux on a raspberry pi and connect a screen to it. That in itself will have zero relevant features, it's a Linux with a screen that you can toy around with, not a phone.

I don't see how it's relevant if you want something that works on said device? In terms of resources I think it's roughly going like this, from lighter to heavier: SXMO I could also add XFCE but they officially don't support mobile. Android isn't the lightest mobile environment by any conceivable means, maybe it's the most featured but certainly not the most optimized for low-end devices, the days of Android 11 are o…

In my experience (Pinephone) Plasma mobile was slower then Phosh by a very noticeable amount. And I remember a poll on Pine64 forum on mobile DE was like 50% Phosh...

Re: Phosh 0.56.0

#64

Post by belowavgiq »

gf000 wrote: post #57
belowavgiq wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust me, you wouldn't be saying this if you had actually tried modern Android on low powered devices. low-mid range phones drop frames more often in 2026 than they did in 2015 with Android 5-7's much simpler UI. edit: oops, the topic was RAM usage. in 2026. of course everyone, it's definitely the 200MB usage surplus that makes your phone feel heavy. let's add 1TB of RAM to a C2D and it will be ready to be paired wit…

Well, the market has consistently raised the low end of what constitutes "decent" hardware for a smartphone, and it really is not expensive today to have good enough hardware. Why should software not adapt to reality? As another data point, take a look at what "embedded" development means today. It is increasingly common to just simply have a device running full Linux, as it is getting cheap enough to do so.

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Re: Phosh 0.56.0

#65

Post by jarbus »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #55
jarbus wrote: post #11

Linux has long been the most practical laptop OS for me, but I can't see it ever being competitive with mobile OSes, and that's coming from someone who wants it to succeed (I've installed postmarketOS on a OP6T). I just don't see how it will overcome the various issues (app support, tap-to-pay, camera quality, etc).

I've been using GNU/Linux on my phones for the last 18 years, initially as a portable hacking platform back when I was a teenager and now as the most practical mobile OS for me. I often see people mentioning these areas as something they "can't see becoming competitive", but this doesn't really match my experience. It feels very much like what running GNU/Linux on a PC without having Windows around felt like 10-15 ye…

Thanks for sharing your experience, I'm glad to hear that mobile linux is practical for some people. What do you do for GPS? And in day-to-day use, doesn't WayDroid drain the battery?

Re: Phosh 0.56.0

#66

Post by seba_dos1 »

jarbus wrote: post #65
seba_dos1 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using GNU/Linux on my phones for the last 18 years, initially as a portable hacking platform back when I was a teenager and now as the most practical mobile OS for me. I often see people mentioning these areas as something they "can't see becoming competitive", but this doesn't really match my experience. It feels very much like what running GNU/Linux on a PC without having Windows around felt like 10-15 ye…

Thanks for sharing your experience, I'm glad to hear that mobile linux is practical for some people. What do you do for GPS? And in day-to-day use, doesn't WayDroid drain the battery?

I usually use Pure Maps [0]. Note that various phones handle GNSS differently and for fast fixes, depending on the phone and distro, you may have to configure or trigger retrieval of assistance data from the Internet ([1] is an example for Librem 5's Teseo LIV3) - the module will be able to download all this stuff from the sky as well, but it may take several minutes or even fail under poor conditions, while getting fresh data online and acquiring a fix based on it takes seconds.

When it comes to Waydroid, I boot it up very rarely and usually just to do something specific and stop the container afterwards, so it's not a concern. But if you wanted to keep it loaded for fast access (booting it up takes about half a minute) you can either freeze the container or just suspend the entire phone and it shouldn't influence anything other than keeping RAM occupied.

[0] https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.rinigus.PureMaps

[1] https://source.puri.sm/-/snippets/1207

Re: Phosh 0.56.0

#67

Post by wink »

afavour wrote: post #48
vzaliva wrote: post #41

This is a good example of a poor web site design. If you, like me, do not know what Phosh is and go to their website, it will tell you not much beyond "A user interface for your mobile phone," which could mean pretty much anything. Is it a UI level on top of Android? Is it an idependent mobile OS? How it is better that competition? What are key features and design goals?

I think it’s more a failing of a link aggregator site like this one dropping you into a release announcement page without context. If you don’t already know what Phosh is, why would you read their 0.56.0 announcement? Normally you wouldn’t. But here we are. Putting “The Phosh project aims to provide a daily-usable, robust and easy to use graphical user environment for mobile devices running mainline Linux” on every r…

See, you went the extra mile.

Like the person you replied to (I assume), I clicked on the home page, pondered why one would not describe the app's purpose on the home page, failed to scroll horizontally with a mouse and closed the page before noticing the about section.

They didn't even lose me with the original link I couldn't make sense of.

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