One big barrier to use for me is display scale on the Liberty Phone. If at 200%, many UI elements are difficult to use or unusable. If at 150%, though small, they are more usable; however, the keyboard (already small for large fingers) is 25% smaller also (BUG, the keyboard should not scale down below screen width).
How do you all navigate this?
I created my own keyboard layout. It is probably to small for you, too, but here you find a tutorial if you want to build your own.
On PureOS Dawn it is no issue any longer. Scaling is fixed. However, in Dawn Squeekboard will be broken entirely, Phosh dropped the support in favor of Stevia. There is a chance Purism will pick support of Squeekboard, otherwise Stevia has no such issue with scaling.
How is Squeekboard broken in Dawn? Phosh or GTK API issue or ???
I’m either going to have to learn how to make Stevia work for my command line/vim usage or get Squeekboard working.
Idk what’s exactly broken. Probably the installation doesn’t work correctly. Last time it worked I used Mobian, then flashed PureOS Crimson to test it, then flashed Mobian Trixie/Forky again and while installation worked in theory, Squeekboard did not load. I needed to plugin an external keyboard to switch the alternative back to Stevia. I have the feeling that Squeekboard probably continues to work if not uninstalled. Squeekboard has no maintainer currently.
Once I also tried Squeekboard on Debian (for nested test), same issue.
Yesterday I played around with flashing my device, installed Mobian at the end and was looking deeper what’s the issue. Plain install is not enough. But the Phosh article helped me to bring Squeekboard back to work. I renamed the Squeekboard desktop file to the one Stevia is using and so it is working.
Of course, that is no proper solution since I cannot switch between Stevia and Squeekboard this way, which is bad for testing. But at this point I don’t care anymore. The pain points are over.
I tried to relearn my skills for Stevia some weeks ago. I programmed a python app with it … or at least just the mobile part to make it convergent and test things. There were a lot of additional steps required to do the same. It is no lie to tell, the I required at least twice the amount of time (even after I knew where to find the buttons) compared to my Squeekboard custom layout. That is just not acceptable in any way.
But I don’t want to blame Stevia. It is a chat keyboard in first place (and probably does the job well for that purpose), while I require a desktop-keyboard (which is also efficient enough for chatting).