I tried
gsettings set sm.puri.phoc.application:/sm/puri/phoc/application/gnome-power-manager/ scale-to-fit true
with no visible effects. Perhaps the packagename is not what I thought.
Phosh (developed by Purism for Librem 5) is the most popular UI in PinePhone community poll Jan 2022
If “scale-to-fit true” for the specific app does not work, another option might be to change scaling for everything via Settings --> Displays --> Scale (change from the default 200% to 100%, then tap the Apply button).
I sometimes have to turn the phone 90 degrees then back to vertical to get the change to kick in.
You might need to do it with the statistics graph on screen.
If I leave the Pinephone on overnight and try to press the power button from suspend, it usually doesn’t work and this is true on KDE plasmamobile and on Phosh. To get it going I plug it into a power source or hold the power button for a full restart. But I will say the battery life doesn’t drain anywhere near as fast as the Librem 5. But LIbrem 5 works a lot better overall.
For this app, the app ID is org.gnome.PowerStats, so this should work:
gsettings set sm.puri.phoc.application:/sm/puri/phoc/application/org-gnome-powerstats/ scale-to-fit true
The app-id for any given window can be checked with /usr/lib/wlroots/foreign-toplevel from libwlroots-examples package.
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@odh , while i feel diagnosing PP problems are off-topic here, i can report having good results using suspend with Mobian. PP reliably wakes up on power button and calls but not on WLAN, yet. Battery life with light use is greater than one and a half day, which is acceptable for me. I expect likely times for the L5 once suspend becomes available for it, and indeed, these were (very preliminarily) confirmed:
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The battery in the Librem 5 may be significantly higher capacity (mAh) than that in the PinePhone. However there are many other variables.
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Well I didn’t mean to go off topic with Pinephone, but these things are sort of related at the thread was about the most popular OS’s used on Pinephone. I have never used Pinephone or L5 as a daily driver (yet), L5 my main gripes are battery life/charging and MMS (although I am being told beta chatty updates do support MMS?). Pinephone I own two and mostly just play around with them, one I have been keeping KDE plasma mobile, it has potential but is nowhere near ready. My other Pinephone is UBPorts branded, but I replaced Ubuntu Touch on it with Phosh as its internal OS. Phosh on PP vs L5, L5 runs it a lot better and clearly has a lot more work put into it, but the PP Phosh shows potential and might be the best OS on it right now (IMO) and this poll showed it was the most popular with users.
I’m curious which phosh is better? PureOS, Mobian, or Manjaro?
In my opinion if Pine64 were fair they would have done a phosh edition of pinephones, and give $10 to purism for every sold phone of this edition. I suggested that to Pine64 but they obviously did not do such a nice and appropriate thing.
Unlinke most pinephone users Pine64 seems to not like a competitor, but to be honest I can imagine that Purism is not pleased by Pine either. Both would be a shame because the mission is a foss linux smartphone.
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PureOS on the PinePhone is currently not being maintained, so it isn’t recommended. I really like the modifications that Mobian made to Firefox so it works well on a small screen and I wish that PureOS would copy Mobian’s Firefox configuration, because Epiphany has too many problem for me in PureOS.
The big problem with Mobian is that you either have to go with an outdated stable version or an unstable weekly version. If you run the latest weekly, you get the latest versions of the apps, so the Megapixels camera works better and you get decent scrolling in Kings Cross terminal, etc., but I see weird bugs in weekly that I don’t see in stable, like sometimes not being able to login because the keyboard won’t appear in the login screen or having to do more reboots to get things working, plus worse CPU performance, which I assume is a kernel config problem.
PureOS Byzantium on the L5 is generally better maintained than the latest weekly Mobian on the PP in my opinion. One of the two principal Mobian maintainers is also a Purism employee, so I suspect that most things that PureOS does will make it to Mobian and vice versa.
As for Phosh on Arch, Manjaro, postmarketOS, Fedora, openSUSE, Gentoo, etc, I haven’t tried them, but I suspect that it largely comes down to whether you like the toolsets that those distros use vs the Debian toolset. I found the Alpine tools in postmarketOS hard to use, but I didn’t take the time to really learn them. Dnf in Fedora has some functions that apt in Debian lacks, but I generally prefer Debian-based distros because I am more familiar with the tools and I generally trust the decisions of a community like Debian more than a corporation like IBM/Red Hat, which was validated by what recently happened with CentOS.
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Both companies are careful to not say anything about the other company, which is the proper way to handle the situation. I suspect that the Purism devs like the PinePhone because it has provided the vast majority of users, so Phosh gets more bug testers, volunteer devs, distro packagers and development of apps like Megapixels. It would not surprise me if 50k PinePhones have now been shipped.
However, Purism’s management had to know that the PinePhone 2 would cut out the mass market appeal of the Librem 5, which I suspect is partly the reason why Purism decided to focus on the high-priced security market and convergent phone-PC market.
I am annoyed at PINE64 for undercutting Purism’s market with the PinePhone Pro, but PINE64 is mostly following its own logic of trying to create common platforms based on a single processor with many form factors so hardware tinkers will invest their time in making mods for the platform.
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In the latest blog entry Pine64 writes:
https://www.pine64.org/2022/01/31/pinephone-community-poll-results/
A total of 3079 respondents took part in the poll – which amounts to less than 5% of all PinePhone owners.
Which is over 60k units.
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Just a nitpick, the upstream for the package that makes the mods to Firefox is PostmarketOS:
We pulled the debian packaging that mobian made of it, but it seems that we need to update it. I think @dos is the one that updated it in Pureos.
That does happen for several reasons. They are both based on Debian. PureOS and mobian developers do work together with other Debian developers in the Debian on Mobile group, upstreaming packages to Debian:
Mobian devs and some other distros like PostmarketOS also send merge requests to phosh.
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That question can be subjective. Manjaro has sometimes taken code that was still un-merged features that were still Work In progress branches, formatted it as patches put them on top of master, and shipped it to users. This might make it more “bleeding edge” but sometimes “has issues”.
This as sometimes resulted in broken features in their version of the phosh stack (phosh, and some default userspace applications).
The deb packaging of phosh for mobian and pureos basically the upstream package.
Ok, I compiled it from sources. But now, every day PureOS Store offers an update to download and install with reboot(!), and it comes the next day again offering update for gnome~power-manader. What should I do to get out of this loop?
One way to get out of it is to install the usual (unmodified) package from the repo again:
sudo apt install gnome-power-manager
After that it should stop offering to update it, but you have then also lost your changes, you are back to using the default version of the package.
If you want to keep your changes and not getting asked to update, it should be possible to instruct apt to skip updating that particular package. Unfortunately, right now I don’t know how to do that. Tried “apt-mark hold” but that does not seem to work. (If others here know how to do that, please show.) The best I can do is to install the default package to avoid being asked to update, but keep the modified deb file so that I can temporarily install my modified version again if/when I want it.
Yes, it’s annoying. I think that is a bug in PureOS Store, it seems to always want to reboot after any kind of update, I think it should not be like that.
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Append something to your patched package’s version number.
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I like that idea of a loose partnership between Pine64 and Purism to develop PureOS on Pinephone, where maybe we also get Purism branded Pinephones with a developed PureOS for it while Pine64 gives part of the proceeeds of every Pinephone sale to Purism. The obvious issue with that is Pinephones are like $200 where a new Librem 5 is like $1200 now. So if Purism did this, they might also make their own phone less relevant? But unless there is some organized committment with money behind it, not sure Pinephone will ever have a viable OS?
I would like to see that, but I doubt it will happen, considering PINE64’s partnership with Manjaro, and its promotion of volunteer-based development.
With Mobian, you basically get PureOS for all practical purposes, and if PureOS introduces something important that Mobian doesn’t support, then it is likely that someone will start working on PureOS on the PinePhone again.
Manjaro GmbH & Co is a company that provides professional services for Manjaro. Presumably Manjaro GmbH & Co will be providing tech support for the PinePhone Retail Edition, when it eventually goes on sale for $100 more than the standard PinePhone. PINE64 is not equipped to provide support services to users, whereas Manjaro GmbH & Co is. It also wouldn’t surprise me if PINE64 is currently making a donation to Manjaro for each PinePhone Beta that it sells, like it did with the Community Editions. However, I don’t know whether Manjaro GmbH & Co will do much driver and software dev work. For example, somebody needs to add Bluetooth profiles that support microphones to ModemManager (for Phosh) and to oFono (for Plasma Mobile, Lomiri and Sailfish OS), and I doubt that Manjaro will do that kind of work.
I made a random comment on the PINE64 forum that PINE64 should raise its prices, so that it could hire some people to work on driver and software development. The response was very negative among the few responses that I got. I saw a similar reaction at r/pine64Official to a guy who posted an article a couple weeks ago saying that PINE64 should pay for driver and software development rather than giving donations to distros. I don’t know whether that is representative of what most PINE64 customers believe, but it isn’t encouraging, because mobile Linux needs paid developers if it is ever going to become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly.
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