I’ve looked at it. Pretty much saying use element but how? It isn’t in the repos, it can’t be installed as a flatpak and I definitely do not want to touch snaps.
edit:
Nevermind found how to.
edit 1:
OMEMO works on chatty through Lurch, do you have that installed? I don’t have another suggestion, but wanted to link this in case someone else didnt know about it as well.
How would I go about installing that? Why are they implementing beta software that is incompatible with so much? Are they intentionally trying to reinvent the wheel when the wheel is just fine?
OMEMO with Lurch and Chatty can be finicky, I had a much better OMEMO experience across devices using the libhandy-enabled branch of Dino. I don’t know whether it’s packaged in PureOS yet, however – if the repos only supply regular Dino, that works okay-ish, too, you just need to run scale-to-fit im.dino.Dino (IIRC), to make it fit the screen.
Regarding Matrix: I suggest you to try Nheko or Fluffychat (both from Flathub). I don’t really use Matrix calling (I mostly use Matrix for what I used to use IRC for: group chats), and could not get it to work when I tried it almost a year ago, but lots of development has happened since so it’s worth a try.
Nheko doesn’t work to type in username and fluffy doesn’t have jitsi call function built in. Element I know does with use of jitsi but can’t be installed from my experience. This thing with dino is probably pointless also as I am guessing no call function. I want to install anbox to see if molly (https://molly.im/) works properly but the page:
https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#314-how-are-android-apps-installed-in-the-librem-5
won’t load as source.puri.sm is down for the past few hours.
edit:
Also, I still don’t understand why purism did what they did. Why did they use weird beta garbage that doesn’t work correctly with other XMPP programs with one of the most popular for android being conversations.
edit 1:
turns out fluffy does support but it isn’t working for me I don’t know why.
I have no idea what your sign in problem with Nheko is, just type your username and instance in this form @username:instance.domain and it should work. That said, I just tried voice calling and it does not seem to be compatible with what Element uses for voice calls in my testing.
Also, I still don’t understand why purism did what they did. Why did they use weird beta garbage that doesn’t work correctly with other XMPP programs with one of the most popular for android being conversations.
Well, they had the goal to support many protocols in one app and therefore went ahead and used libpurple for Chatty, which has been around for ages (see Pidgin. At the time Lurch was likely just as bad as it is now, but it could have improved by community contributions in the meantime. It just didn’t, which is unfortunate, but it’s not necessarily Purism’s fault. Also, with XMPP being standards-based, implementations should be about “correct” and not popular (not to blame Conversations, but it’s something to consider).
Regarding your “website is down”-problem, have you tried archive.org?
For daily Signal use I would generally rather recommend something native (Anbox is a RAM eating monster), e.g. https://sr.ht/~nicohman/signal-rs/ – no voice support there, though.
It doesn’t let me type into the first field to type my username in so I cannot use the program. I tried reinstall, relaunch and reboot but same issue. Password field works.
I know of pidgin and I understand purism wants to make a change but because of this, I simply cannot use their XMPP program. I’ve used a few XMPP clients before and have never had an issue like this one.
I tried archive.org and that works but to be able to download the package. It links to another place which doesn’t load with archive.org so I cannot do it.
Voice support is a requirement. I simply need one that has chat and call. A lot of family I interact with do voice calls and are international so a normal phone call usually isn’t an option. I could tell them to launch jitsi for a call and such but that would mean more hassle for me and too lengthy for them. I need a real solution.
The option for making a call on gajim is greyed out. What is your point?
In the thread that @bjm linked, you’ll see that the Linphone app works OK for calls, except for screen adaptation (which can be managed by alternating in and out of landscape mode). Linphone works on all platforms, and also provides a free optional (calling and texting) SIP service not based on phone numbers. Each subscriber gets a username that takes this form:
sip:username@sip.linphone. org
Regular calling with phone numbers is also possible. (SIP to landline or mobile, and vice versa.)
seemed cool. Tested it with someone and it only plays out from loudspeaker and the scaling is incredibly bad.
You may need to try different protocols in the Linphone app to get the sound right (according to that thread).
What? Did you read my message? It only comes out of loudspeaker. The scaling is bad.
So I installed pavucontrol
sudo apt install pavucontrol
Then in pavucontrol, with earbuds with microphone plugged in, I selected that as the input device. Then made the Linphone call and I heard sound in the earbuds and the other party heard me using the microphone.
Yes, the scaling is Linphone is bad. That is why you have to switch back and forth between portrait and landscape mode. If you want a polished experience, well the Librem 5 isn’t there yet.
I don’t want to have to carry earbuds because a program doesn’t know how to select the smaller speaker on this computer. Pretty nice work around to get it to work but I will not use it that way. This whole librem 5 life is far more painful than I thought it would be. I thought they would at the very least have XMPP working properly and matrix be native as advertised and as matrix is a part of the librem one service thing.
@user1 I wonder if we could reboot this conversation and agree upon a single well-defined goal - something akin to what you’ve been driving at: an L5-focused app for voice/chat/files via XMPP.
I don’t know enough about the space to suggest a starting point from other FOSS projects, however I do know that I enjoy using Conversations from an android mobile, and that Dino seems to work from my PureOS box.
It also seems to me that this conversation should be continued somewhere in the that forum what requests apps for the L5.
What do you all think?
This whole librem 5 life is far more painful than I thought it would be
I cannot disagree with you there. I have basically given up on the whole VoLTE thing at this point, which is why I got a jmp.chat account. Had issues using that with any XMPP client, which is why I am using SIP (you can configure jmp.chat to use SIP).
However, to even consider having the Librem 5 as my one and only phone I have to have Anbox because there are some apps that are only available on Android (or iphone). For example, some banks require the phone app as two-factor authentication (at least periodically) for the bank web site authentication. I don’t even know if the Anbox will work properly with these apps because some of these apps are very particular. That is, there are some that if installed on unlocked bootloader Android phone will not work. That is why, if you want a deGoogled Android phone you should go with something like Calyx OS where you can lock the bootloader.
I found a project that gave scripts for running Anbox on the Librem 5, but it was done for Amber. I changed the script to use Byzantium instead of Amber but Anbox fails to start, probably because of a newer kernel. Assuming I can get Anbox working at some point, then I will need to find out if the few Android apps I would need will even work properly.
Next I would want the Maps application to work, but to get that working you have to apparently jump through hoops to get the GPS working properly.
Then if you want you want to use the camera, adjust the settings each time, manually etc.
I certainly underestimated how difficult the phone would be to use. I have been using Linux almost exclusively for 20+ years and I am a developer (have been a DevOps too) but it is hard for me to believe how slow progress is on the phone. I have had the phone in my hands for over 6 months now and still there is the VoLTE issue, the MMS issue (not an issue if I use jmp.chat fortunately) plus some of the other issues I mentioned.
I think maybe Purism overestimated how quickly things would improve, possibly because they expected more help from the community (possibly even from people with skills/experience like me). But for example, there were instructions months ago about how to get MMS working such that if you recompiled and installed a bunch of projects, it would work. I went through all those steps (compiling all those projects on the phone) and it did work, but then it takes months and months and months for those fixes to get pushed upstream such that the capability is available for everyone. I understand Purism can’t hire a lot of developers. I certainly don’ t have an answer. It is frustrating though to see these short videos (I would call them teasers) where they show things like SIP calls working, Anbox working etc., but then they don’t provide instructions for how someone else can get those things working. At the end of the video they of course encourage you to buy the phone (for the potential I guess?).
I was one of the people who bought the phone during the crowdfunding campaign so I guess I should be happy I got anything at all since with crowdfunding there is no guarantee of that. I at least had an idea of what a Linux phone might be like. I suspect others didn’t and they bought in because of the security/privacy promise, which admittedly they have done a good job with. But if you are not willing to go through a lot of steps, including command line etc., just to make it minimally usable, then wow.
I would like to be able to tell you that the Librem 5 will be much more usable in the near future, but I have no confidence in that. That is why I am planning to get some type of Pixel phone and put Calyx OS on it. That will give me a lot of privacy/security if I use it properly, although not the privacy I can get with the physical switches on the Librem 5. I noticed someone else mentioned the other day they were going to do the same thing, and put their Librem 5 in a drawer for a while. I will have to decide whether I want to do that under the assumption that it will be much more usable in the future, or sell it on ebay or something.
If your own personal requirements aren’t too extensive, maybe you can find the phone usable in the near future. I hope that is the case.
Dino works pretty good after setting phone to zoom out a lot. No problem with messaging and receiving and viewing files all with OMEMO which is pretty friggin’ awesome. It doesn’t let me do things like voice calling but at least I have a messaging program that actually works unlike the one the phone comes with.
Does that include singing telegrams?
I’m not sure I understand the joke