How independent is Phosh?
I like Phosh very much, and I dislike GNOME in equal measure.
Can Phosh defend itself from bad decisions from downstream GNOME, or it has to go along with most things GNOME do as forking all their stupid decisions would be too much work?
I need to decide what I invest my time and resources in. Sure, Phosh is good now, but so was GNOME at one point.
I didn’t like GNOME when it first came out (too counter intuitive for me) and from my POV it has kept getting worse (removing options and hardwiring the wrong choice for me).
I think it depends. Phosh follows the GNOME design philosophy of making good standards and therefor minimal settings (whatever that means - I’m more aligned with KDE-philosophy). But I think beside of that fact, Phosh is pretty independent right now. Nobody can tell what this tells about the future (5-10 years), but for now I would not much worry about.
Having used Phosh (on Byzantium, so notably an out of date version) for 2 years as my daily driver, I have found it to be quite functional – but I was more interested in escaping Android than in making best use of Phosh. I have run old Desktop apps I wrote in the past as Phosh apps, but didn’t go out of my way to edit Phosh code or do anything too Phosh-centric in terms of my hobby software activities.
Something for me that was a wakeup call with Phosh, GNOME, and other “modern” desktop environments was when I tried to track my internet activity on my devices to aspire to be a little more minimalist. Where possible, I want the computer to use the internet when I say, rather than all the time silently even when sitting at a desktop wallpaper screen with no apps open.
That led me to learn more about geoclue. Geoclue is bundled with PureOS both on the GNOME desktop configuration and on Phosh. I found that in some cases, it seemed to frequently be pinging a Google-cloud IP as frequently as every 5 seconds, sometimes but not always, seemingly at its discretion (I’m sure the source code is available somewhere but I didn’t bother to go read it). Based on help here on Purism forums we found that this frequent periodic pinging comes from the Location Services, which submits the names of all nearby WiFi access points and possibly modem access points on the L5 Phosh, the L14 GNOME, and other such “modern” desktop environments. It was mentioned here on Purism forums by @irvinewade that if your threat model includes trying to evade government or large corporate entities, these periodic submissions of information essentially negate the use of a VPN and will mean that even if your device is behind a VPN it may send sufficiently unique, identifying information to the Location Services so that your VPN’s IP address and all activity you do through it can trace back to your identity.
After we discussed this on Purism forums and how it is a “bad default” if users want to be private about their location, the folks over at Mozilla foundation who were running the service for geoclue shut it down. I don’t know if that means their motivation was surveillance in nature and discussing it openly on this forum eliminated the usefulness of their program – or perhaps, more likely as I’m sure they would tell you, Mozilla probably got tired of running it and felt that it was not worth their time hosting a server that collected the locations of nearly all Linux devices to report back better-than-GPS location info to users to save from “how incorrect” the actual GPS system can be. I believe more recently now after the loss of the Mozilla endpoint that was hosted on Google Cloud, now instead the default Purism conf file on PureOS last time I did a system upgrade contains notes about how you can use Google as your location services provider instead, although this might not currently be enabled by default (yet?).
But it’s an interesting problem because I have not been using my phone as a GPS navigator. And for me personally if I actually was going to do that, I would want to configure the software to use inward-only GPS triangulation so that the act of me determining my location on a map does not report that location to anyone else. To me that’s what I would want as my device default, even if it is inaccurate, because I want my mapping computation to be a discussion between me and my hardware and not a service based system (other than relying on the GPS satellites as a oneway system from them to me, like listening to music on the radio). All of that said, I’ve read reports of folks on these forums who found how to actually use GPS and get that working on Librem 5 and Phosh, but allegedly it would sometimes take up to a minute to triangulate. I recall maybe hearing it bounces off of large buildings and can be horribly inaccurate in major cities, but I might be misremembering.
But for me the inclusion of that same software stack on my Librem 14 by default hit me as odd. It’s not reasonable to me that my laptop would need to be always aware of its location.
But is that an oversight of GNOME and modern “work on anything” technology? Debian and its forks aren’t Gentoo. It’s not a user decision whether to compile GNOME or KDE with or without geoclue “USE flags.” I tried app remove libgeoclue at one point or something similar and the system informed me that this would remove the desktop environments themselves.
But if you make something new, eventually one of the users is going to want to use their phone as their guide while driving, and they will want the better-than-GPS location information, and now that Mozilla is down presumably only Google is available as a service provider for this service. Since it requires building the list of nearby WiFis and their distances to each machine in order to build sort of like one unified server that knows where everybody is all the time in order to even provide the accurate locations back to the people requesting it, it seems unlikely that the navigation of your handset will be useful unless it has this (perceived by some to be creepy) feature. And then eventually, like GNOME, and like KDE, you would probably end up with these types of periodic automatic location services on your new desktop environment that you picked while trying to avoid GNOME, if that is the direction that you choose to go.
So, do you actually have a specific technical feature in mind that you want to ask if GNOME [Phosh*] does or does not contain?
EDIT’:
I went back and read your link about GNOME3 and why it sucks. I had never heard about most of that stuff, but I use MATE desktop on my laptop because it gives me a subconscious feeling that I’m going to actually get work done. Once I realized it’s easy to change on PureOS, yeah I knew I wanted the change. I have wished that when I plug in my Librem 5 to a mouse, keyboard, and monitor that it would switch to MATE, but I am unsure how to achieve that.
Thank you for the very insightful reply Dlonk.
If accurate and fast geolocation requires a database, like Google has, I don’t mind creating a FOSS version of that. But, the devil is in the details, the database has to be publicly owned, the information submission and retrieval has to be done in a way that does not dox the user and there must by a easy way to switch this off and rely purely on your own hardware for geolocation.
I’ve used PureOS’s Phosh for a year and a bit but recently switched to PostmarketOS for up to date software, it has Phosh 0.47.0. It looks very pretty.
I have installed neovim for work in the terminal, but that switched the default text editor to neovim; so now when I open a text document it starts a terminal and opens it in neovim. The settings app does not have an option to change the default text editor, you can change the default Mail app, SMS app, etc, but not the default text app.
Looking online I see other people had this problem and they got a typical GNOME response, “you can’t, you are using our software wrong, if you must, use this workaround“, the workaround does not work on the phone. I don’t want to fight the software I use.
I might install PostmarketOS with Plasma Mobile and see how that goes.
Is it using the “alternatives” mechanism? If so, update-alternatives may be your friend.
Up to date software is Phosh 0.49 btw, which is used by Mobian. However, I think 2 versions behind is still fine, so no need to switch just for that reason.
update-alternatives did not work for me, or at least I’m not smart enough to make it work. But thank you.
Mobian 
? Interesting. I might switch, but for now I like PostmarketOS they seam cool to me.
Really?. We have @dos here PureOS Mobile, dos, is equivalent to 10 postmarket programmers. 
OK if you get bugs on L5 please report it to postmarket-wrapper.
OK. Example from a desktop (abridged output):
$ update-alternatives --display vi
vi - auto mode
link best version is /usr/bin/vim.basic
link currently points to /usr/bin/vim.basic
link vi is /usr/bin/vi
/usr/bin/vim.basic - priority 30
/usr/bin/vim.tiny - priority 15
$ which vi
/usr/bin/vi
$ ls -l /usr/bin/vi
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 Jun 30 2020 /usr/bin/vi -> /etc/alternatives/vi
$ ls -l /etc/alternatives/vi
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Jun 30 2020 /etc/alternatives/vi -> /usr/bin/vim.basic
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that you actually update any alternatives at this stage, only that you check whether that mechanism is in use - so that you would potentially know what command to use if you did decide to update an alternative.
Note that I am showing you above two different ways of exploring this, one using the
update-alternatives command and one just using the ls command.
I do agree, dos is amazing, I see his handiwork wherever good things are happening.
Thank you irvinewade. update-alternatives –display vi gives error: no alternatives for vi. The folder /etc/alternatives/ only has one symbolic link that I think I put there. So it must not use the update-alternatives mechanism.
I did find out how to do it in the end:
→File Explorer
→select the file
→Open With
→elect the text edditor
→Toggle switch “Always use for this file type“
Still odd, that this is not available in the Default Apps in Settings. But I am happy now.