Hi @l5newbie, I made a new topic of your post top better be able to respond.
Those are good observations, e.g. with the sliding inconsistency. Only thing I could think of is that it’s on purpose that a tap is not sufficient on the lock screen. So that it doesn’t unlock to easily. But the dock could/should slide maybe?
Most of your comments seem to be related to keyboard things, so @dcz might be interested to respond.
Also, have a look at this post (or the whole topic):
I’m also interested in the German keyboard, although not the Austrian
The lock screen requires that I swipe the upwards arrow, tapping doesn’t work.
On the PinePhone using distros that have Phosh this also drove me crazy - after getting used to tapping arrows when the device is unlocked to bring down/up menus the switch in behavior on the lockscreen took some getting used to.
I agree with a few others that it’s probably to keep things more secure when the phone is in a pocket or the like but still was something that bothered me initially.
Thanks for the writeup, enjoyed hearing your thoughts!
On Android I get e.g. ö by long press o and thought this is normal behaviour?
(Observations based on my Samsung Android phone, there are other keyboards I guess.) That’s normal behavior for, e.g. an English keyboard. It also works on a German keyboard, but the German keyboard also has a separate Ö key.
Is that different from the umlaut menu on the Librem 5 you mentioned?
Yes. The German Librem 5 keyboard has a separate button labeled “äÄ” which you must tap to open a separate “keyboard” with all kinds of special characters. There you can tap one (and this separate keyboard then closes and you get back to the main one). The Librem 5 keyboard has no “long press” behavior like Android or “pull down” behavior like iOS.
That’s the thing: You need to open a merge request to add keyboard definitions. The German one for example is at https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/squeekboard/-/blob/master/data/keyboards/de.yaml. BUT a superior definition (lots of them, actually) is also already present on the Librem 5, in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/de. These files must be where all the keyboard names are taken from. But then I claim that the actual keyboard layout data should also come from these files, rather than slowly duplicating individual ones one by one and in an incompatible way.
In some cases it just reflects the fact that there is more work to be done.
I didn’t have a problem with the mail client however. It seemed to work normally and intuitively for me (and I haven’t ever used it before).
A fair point. It’s not at all a helpful name. However that is the name and Purism is not the author so for a variety of reasons it might not be appropriate to change the name.
The icon is an envelope (or stack of envelopes in an in-tray). Seems fair to me??? Maybe the edges of the envelope need to be harsher?
This is the offending icon:
(converted from svg to png - seems this forum doesn’t allow svg???)
You’ll be able to - the only reason it reacts to taps instead of swipes at the moment is that swiping there isn’t implemented yet as it’s much more complicated to implement there than on the lockscreen. It was always supposed to react to swipes in the designs, tapping is just a stop gap.
The “German (Austria)” keyboard has no umlaut keys at all.
We don’t have an Austrian layout in Squeekboard. It will fall back to German instead of US in v1.12.
it seems to import some information from the XKB symbols database, since I can select an “English (intl, with AltGr dead keys)
The keyboard imports layout names, but no layouts. What you’re setting is the global keyboard and what you’re seeing is a fallback. https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/squeekboard/-/issues/261 This will not change, xkb layouts are incompatible with phone screen sizes.
xkb layouts are incompatible with phone screen sizes
I’m not saying that the layouts should be imported 1:1, but the locations of the letter keys (including umlauts etc.) could be used for the main keyboard view. xkb layouts for typical Latin/Cyrillic/Greek have about 9-11 letters per row. Up to 11 letters per row is a common number for Android phone keyboards (e.g., the Samsung German keyboard) and absolutely usable. The Librem 5 Russian keyboard has 11 letters in one row as well. Would 12 be too much? Maybe, but (a) that’s not an argument against using the xkb layout for German (11 letters in the home row), and (b) the Sailfish OS Russian keyboard has 12 letters in a row and looks usable.
I see what you mean. I guess that could be a good starting point, but it would produce broken layouts: Cyrillic phonetic has letters in weird places, including the number row, and actually 13 keys in the top row:
ю1234567890-ч
явертыуиопшщэ
so that would need some dedicated work. Once we’re past that, we’d need to figure out a way to deal with dead keys. That’s a matter of more work of course. Once we have that, we only have to deal with managing levels (like AltGr). That’s nothing that can’t be done with work.
In comparison, the work needed to even parse the layouts is insignificant.
But it all adds up, and that’s a problem.
I’m going to be happy if someone writes a layout converter though, even not working for some layouts. Those could provide a starting point for layout makers.
Setting that to Silent does disable they keyboard vibration. But it also disables all other sound and vibration on notifications, e.g., when I set a timer in the Clocks app.
No modem, this is about wifi. Another 2.4 GHz wifi network (tethering from one of my other phones) works without any issues. I haven’t installed a SIM yet, so no experience with how mobile networks work.
OK. Honestly, I didn’t even think about this. My Librem 5 connected to the WiFi out-of-the-box. However it is using the 5 GHz band (which in turn has defaulted on the access point to 40 MHz channel width).
Is 5 GHz an option for you to try?
Otherwise I suppose you are waiting for that merge request to see whether it makes a difference.
