As an obligatory thing, tried Doom The flatpak ChocolateDoom to be precise.
Graphics and game work great. Controls… swipes simultaneously move and shoot, which is bad for ammo. The default/US layout of touchkeyboard maps s forwards, v and u to turn and x back. Some other keys on other layouts do other stuff. An added difficulty level, “insanity”
Your opinion. But in fact: there is no other matrix client yet (that I have viewed) that has as much functionality as the original Element and except that little problem everything works fine. And I got an idea what’s the problem. I’m already trying to find a solution and will share my results.
By the way: using “Bubble” design gives a bit more horizontal space. Scaling resolution also helps (just don’t make it too little, scaling back seems not to work with Squeekboard yet - also looking for solution).
The high RAM usage is okay so far, since it is a glossy client (and L5 has still enough space to do a lot of other tasks). Firefox also eats RAM and also had some (even worse) issues before manual fixes are applied. There are some other projects like Fractal or NeoChat that will fit even better on mobile, but they’re not stable and they’re with less functionality (yet) as far as I see.
I already created mine for Gnome 2024. Huge arrow keys. That game works much better with key-input than with touch input (even if you can play with touch). I also want to layer it for different games as soon as there are new requirements. If you want, we could work together (in a new thread) to make a community gaming layout (with multiple layers for different usage).
If I’m not wrong, I should have used the official way. On Git there is also a way to build it by your own. But that looks a bit more complicated than just download things via apt in terminal.
Last days I tried to fix that problem with horizontal space issue of desktop Element. Now I’m sure what’s going on and it is more a PureOS “fault” then from Element (even if they could fix this). To drag and drop the inner window size you need the left click hold down. PureOS interprets the finger touch as left click and the “hold down” as right click hold down. This way Element doesn’t know what you want to do.
The room-list on the left always will always fill 50% of the space if there is not enough horizontal space, as long as it’s size would be >=50% of horizontal space. That means, that the default size is just above 50% screenspace and will be fixed as soon as we’re able to resize it with mouse or simulated left click hold down. But it works perfectly with little screens and every other touch input.
I tried to fix it via setting files and found the file where this setting is stored. Usually I would be happy and able to fix this. Unfortunately not in this case. It is a file where also other account datas are stored - half encrypted (few sings can be read, others not). As soon as I change something, everything will be replaced. It has to do with account security (you also have to log in and verify device again). I don’t see any way to manipulate this.
Now we have 2 choices:
Report it back to Element on Git (I may do later) that they alternatively allow resizing with right click hold down like on other sliders.
To find a way to simulate left click on Squeekboard. I already was looking for a keysym to do so. On one change I broke my keyboard totally (a keysym broke it). An app appeared that said “something got broken and cannot be fixed” with a button to restart phosh. I also found a way to fix this with touch input only, but I stopped looking further for now.
As I said above, you can downscale the resolution. With terminal keyboard Ctrl + - you can do it inside the app. So this app is also usable with default 200% OS resolution scale. In Options you can upscale letters ab to 20px (15 is default, for me 18 fits perfect). Because you can’t upscale, but you can downscale to unreadable size, you can get problems to reset the size.
For that I found a solution: delete the file ~/.config/Element/Preferences (will be created again automatically) or edit the entry of {"vector":-1.5}. -1.5 is the value that fits perfectly for me and my OS 150% screen scale. You should edit it while app is closed (check task manager!).
While I was writing this post I realized that I got what I tried and I don’t know how I solved it. Could be a shortcut or something while I was playing with files. I wish I could tell you how I fixed this, but I don’t want to mess it up. However, here are the screenshots how it fits for me right now:
Bubble view (has more space on half horizontal screen space; letters had 15px size, that’s why they’re a bit smaller)
Sorry for double posting, but this is brand new information:
Okay, a lot of study and so much work and now I think I got the solution very very very easy. Enable auto rotation and rotate to landscape and back. I don’t know why it didn’t work before (maybe because of that Element scaling I wrote above), but there is no issue anymore. Every time I close the app completely it gets default 50/50 layout again, but rotating fixes it for me.
If someone test that app, please give a feedback if Ctrl + - and rotating also works for you.
This application seems to be nice, its just… undeveloped since 2021? Not sure how i (like) to use it.
I stay with my Terminal and yt-dlp and my scripts, even i have no live stream.
Edit: I do not trust Matrix Chat @Ick so i’ll stay with gpg or omemo xmpp or direct connection and text files through ssh connections between internet connected devices.
Could you clarify whether this does or does not “fit” and “function” well on the L5? I’d rather not read through all that text and attempt to understand it.
Cheers!
It fit and function well, in general. But it has no right click support yet to drag the slider between rooms panel and chat panel to shrink it (and give more space to chat). I tried some workarounds and wrote it to the long post (that people understand the whole problem). At the end I could fix it for me, but I’m not 100% sure if it got fixed in the way I described at the very end:
Scale down up app resolution by using shortcut Ctrl + - (not too much, else you need a work around to reset I also described) and rotate screen to landscape view and back to normal view. That should shrink the rooms panel as you can see on screenshots above.
I already reported it to Element repository that they should add that key bind to solve the issue for touchscreen inputs.
Some time is gone and want to update the rest of Element app that’s interesting for now.
I could connect L5 to my mouse and it is as I said - sliders can be used with left click and drag. Hopefully right click option will be implemented soon.
VoIP works just fine. But Element doesn’t find the quite speakers (as for usual calls) and always uses loud speakers. With headphone everything works.
Videochat is another topic. Element doesn’t find the cameras (!). But it can display any stream in any possible way (including full sized). Phone gets hot while doing so, but it’s also an issue of Element calls (beta - high CPU usage is on their “to do”-list). Screen streaming crashes Element, but that’s also an Element bug which happens on diverse Linux-systems and no L5 specific issue.
So the cameras and quite speaker are the only problems I don’t know how to fix. Anyone ideas? It says “no web cams found” so it may only looks on USB-ports … can I simulate this?
SpeechNote for note taking takes speech to text and makes text to speech in multiple languages and safely offline (which has an effect on quality). Flatpak from flathub. Fits well and works although L5 isn’t the fastest to run the larger language models. Test to see which combo works for you. Translation to english is interesting feature but not that good yet.
(I’d add a screenshot but the L5 only takes it to clipboard and that can’t be pasted on the webapp apparently).
Thank you @Ick for all the tests with Element. I will try ASAP. Element is very useful for me because it is the only client (I think) that supports math through TeX notation. And I need this feature.
I wonder if Element consumes a lot of energy though…
YES!! it works great and mathematics work great too. You just have to rotate the screen once (but every time you open element). It would be very nice if the home bar and rooms bar would hide and appear when you sweep from the left.
Please, just to know: is gnome calendar not optimised yet (can’t see reminders name/title (just the beginning of the hour I created it) neither landscape and portrait) or is it just me?
Of course, before post it here I used search into the page but no answer found.
Thank you