Phosh (developed by Purism for Librem 5) is the most popular UI in PinePhone community poll Jan 2022

Hardware Librem 5
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PinePhone community poll results, published yesterday, with about 3000 people having answered the poll:

Phosh is by far the most popular UI among those who daily drive their PinePhones with a presence on nearly 40% of all installations.

This shows not only that Purism developers did a good job, but it also illustrates free/libre software (FLOSS) principles working in practice: Purism put lots of effort into development of Phosh for the Librem 5 and because Phosh is FLOSS it can be used by anyone, for any purpose. For example people can use it on their PinePhones. This also works the other way around: Phosh improves even more thanks to feedback and contributions from PinePhone users and anyone else who chooses to use Phosh.

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Phosh is my clear choice as best UI and I’ve tried most… except Plasma Mobile (just not a fan of KDE).

I’ve been biding my time with Phosh as the incremental improvements roll out, albeit slower on Mobian than PureOS. I was rewarded again tonight with Chatty 0.60 — MMS!

What is strange though is the attitude of the hosts of the Pine64 podcast… It’s informative, but the hosts seem to be real Phosh haters, unlike most Pinephone users.

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My guess is that they are Purism haters, it’s not about Phosh specifically. They want to (still me guessing) be loyal to what they view as “the real FLOSS movement” or something, they then view it as their duty to undermine Purism because Purism is a “corporate-shill” kind of company saying they are shipping when they are really not, and so on. They fail to see that from a perspective of software freedom principles, Purism is actually a very good actor. Or maybe they do see it, but their will to punish Purism for various wrongdoings is stronger.

I think it’s one of several examples where FLOSS folks fall into traps of hate and group-think. Another example is the attacks against RMS, where people apparently feel it is their duty to attack a certain person.

Less hate would be good, generally.

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I also own a Pinephone, I have done the multiboot stuff off an SD card on it, the KDE Plasmamobile I think is the OS Pine64 is pushing as the “official” Pinephone OS. UBPorts had a big head start with Ubuntu Touch, but their community doesn’t seem to prioritize the Pinephone at all, I mean an old Nexus 5 runs UT a lot better than the more modern Pinephone.

Many of the OS’s you can flash to Pinephone are novelties and really hardly work at all like Lune OS. Its tough to get basically an all volunteer unaffiliated group of Linux hobbyists and tinkerers to get a viable OS for Pinephone as Pine 64 just seems to focus on the hardware end and you are sort of on your own when it comes to the OS. Phosh is probably the most functional OS right now on Pinephone, although KDE Plasmamobile is not far off. Very disappointed UBPorts hasn’t shown more luv towards Pinephone though.

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The irony, Purism develops very best software UI and releases it as Open Source software. PinePhone adopts it and it is voted as best UI to use on PinePhone polls AND people who paid for getting the Librem 5 are still waiting for their order to be shipped.

This Purism forum is full with stories of how PinePhone is benefiting with Purism’s software et al. And yet my Librem 5 is no where to be seen, found.

There is a lot to ponder on everything about everything on Librem 5 :thinking:

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I bought 2 Pinephones and 1 Librem 5 off ebay over a year ago. My first Pinephone had the UBPorts branding and has 16gigs of storage, I was soooooo disappointed in the lack of functionality in Ubuntu Touch on the Pinephone, I would just play with the multiboot distro off a SD Card. I tended to play with Phosh the most, it seemed the most functional which was a low bar when I first got the Pinephone. I then bought a non-branded 32gig Pinephone that came with KDE Plasma mobile. Some good work and improvements to KDE Plasma mobile over time, it did take awhile to get used to the default apps as their names don’t really make it obvious what they actually do.

When I bought my Librem 5 I have just stuck with the default Phosh OS the entire time, its improved a lot in the last year. My biggest gripes are MMS and terrible battery life and battery charging taking forever, but overall, Librem 5 is almost there for me.

I think both Purism and Pine64 could do better in mass producing and selling their products, but it is what it is. I am hoping in the near future LInux phones can be more readily avaliable and Phosh is looking the most promising as the default mobile OS IMO. UBPorts had the advantage, but the community seems too focused on older repurposed Android phones.

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I’ve found that the battery gets to 80% or 90+% reasonably quickly (at least, sooner than 100%), but if you’re waiting for the red LED to turn off, then you’ll be waiting much longer.

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What’s “forever”? This night it took about 4 hours to go from 0 to 100 here, which sounds about right.

batchar
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Glad to see that we finally have a more comprehensive poll to settle the question of what is the most popular distro and interface on the PinePhone.

I conducted two polls on PINE64’s PinePhone forum. The first one found that 70% reported using Phosh, and the second one found that 41% reported that Mobian was their favorite distro and 70% reported that Phosh was their favorite interface. Only 37 people participated in the first poll and 56 participated in the second poll, so I didn’t know how much I could trust those two polls.

I think we now have a more accurate picture with PINE64’s poll. Although PINE64 says that we shouldn’t read too much into the results, I think we can be pretty sure at this point that Mobian is the first or second most popular distro and Phosh is the most popular interface by a wide margin among PinePhone users. The “Mobian on PinePhone” subforum has three times more posts than the other distro subforums. This is partly due to the fact that Mobian doesn’t have its own separate forum like most of the other distros where people can ask questions, but it is also due to the fact that the Debian family represents roughly 50% of desktop Linux users (according to the page hits at distrowatch.org) and GTK-based interfaces are used by roughly 2/3 of desktop Linux uses, so it makes sense that Mobian and Phosh are becoming very popular distro and interface on Linux mobile phones, because they are closest to what most Linux users are already accustomed to using.

Considering the fact that Purism has hired one of the two principal Mobian developers and is developing the most popular interface on the PinePhone, Purism is helping PinePhone users quite a bit. I do get annoyed by the fanbois who say “PINE64 rocks and Purism sucks”. I’ve seen quite a few of these types of comments on r/Purism), but I think that there is a sizeable percentage of PinePhone users who realize the importance of Purism’s software dev work, because I rarely see this kind of comment at forum.pine64.org or r/PINE64official.

Considering the mess that PINE64 had with its Twitter poll, which may have been manipulated, I’m glad that PINE64 decided to do a better poll. Other comments here:
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=12961&pid=105998#pid105998

The reason why Ubuntu Touch runs so poorly on the PinePhone is because Ubuntu Touch was designed to use Android drivers and the Android kernel through libhybris, but UBports decided to change UT’s code for the PinePhone and PineTab to use Linux drivers and a Linux kernel. This was also the reason why UBports put the Librem 5 port on hold. UBports doesn’t have many developers and it has taken a lot longer than expected to make all the necessary changes for UT to run well on Linux.

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Which app is that producing this graph?

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BTW - if anyone wants to give it a shot, running UBports on Librem 5 is generally pretty easy; however, there’s one major issue that needs to be resolved before it becomes usable - their compositor needs to be fixed to support GPUs where graphic buffers shared without explicit modifiers aren’t linear (which is the case with etnaviv), otherwise all you get on screen is scrambled mess.

gnome-power-statistics, although you’ll need a small patch to produce good looking graphs:

diff --git a/src/gpm-statistics.c b/src/gpm-statistics.c
index 59b56be..e5179ed 100644
--- a/src/gpm-statistics.c
+++ b/src/gpm-statistics.c
@@ -756,7 +756,7 @@ gpm_stats_update_info_page_history (UpDevice *device)
        }
 
        widget = GTK_WIDGET (gtk_builder_get_object (builder, "label_history_nodata"));
-       array = up_device_get_history_sync (device, history_type, history_time, 150, NULL, NULL);
+       array = up_device_get_history_sync (device, history_type, history_time, 1500, NULL, NULL);
        if (array == NULL) {
                /* show no data label and hide graph */
                gtk_widget_hide (graph_history);
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Yeah, I didn’t mean to come off too harsh on UBPorts as they do good work with limited resources, just pointing out that older Android phones repurposed to run Ubuntu Touch appears to be the bigger priority than focusing on the actual Linux based phones like Pinephone and Librem 5. I still find it amazing how well UT runs on a Nexus 5, a phone a decade old getting new life.

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I haven’t timed it lately, but even if what the graph is showing for the Librem 5 is accurate, I lose about 8% of the charge an hour when the phone sits idle not charging. Point being, it feels like I always have it plugged in like its a laptop. I am not expecting Android/iOS battery efficiency anytime soon, but 8% an hour idle power loss, is a lot and if I am using it unplugged, that battery drains like a Ferrari going through gas.

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Currently, Evergreen should be able to reach about 12-16 hours of idle uptime depending on kill switch state, signal coverage and connected WiFi network, so 8% an hour sounds about right. If “charging takes forever”, make sure you’re using a proper PD adapter that provides enough current at 5V (like the one shipped with the phone, which does 3A). Non-PD sources are currently limited to 500mA unless manually overridden, which will make it charge very slowly or even slowly discharge when in use.

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I do not have enough Gnome dev environment to compile this from source :frowning:

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There is no suspend yet, but Purism is working on it:

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Sure you do!

You have a Librem 5 with PureOS, which is Debian-based a.k.a. awesome. You can do whatever you want. :slight_smile:

# Get the source code
apt-get source gnome-power-manager
cd gnome-power-manager-3.32.0/
# Install build dependencies
sudo apt-get build-dep .
# Make the changes you want using your favorive text editor
vi src/gpm-statistics.c 
# Build deb files
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -b
cd ..
# Install deb files
sudo dpkg --install gnome-power-manager*.deb
# Enjoy running your modified gnome-power-statistics program!
gnome-power-statistics

The above is basically the same procedure as in Tweaking difficulty level of Chess to make it easier, via minor source code change

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The flip side of that is … if a customer thinks this might be the problem then monitor the charging current.

cat /sys/class/power_supply/max170xx_battery/current_now

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I expect that running Posh on Librem 5 with external monitor is not a priority yet.

But I would like to have some button, gesture option when application list popup by bottom tab, which allows to select some options for each application. There should be option to select put it back on Librem 5 with full screen geometry. Move it fully to attached monitor but do not expand ii and the put it onto monitor and ask application for window maximize.

This would be great for typical connection to TV set and moving slideshow or vlc on the monitor.

When used as a full desktop, I would like to have option to switch on and off some panel with application list and some other stuff to be stick on top or bottom side of the screen.

Are there some experience to combine posh with some such bar and application launcher?

Anyway, Phosh is nice and with suggested virtual mouse it is really interesting as convergence device when you need to present something. With full USB-C laptop dock and USB keyboard and mouse it great setup as well… Not for my FPGA and education video works but for regular text files sources etc it is just standard GNU/Linux, which is great.

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…or check the negotiated PD state:

cat /sys/class/power_supply/tps6598x-source-psy-0-003f/uevent
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