Purpuseful usage limits for Librem Phone?

Hardware Librem 5
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Hi. New here and making a transition to privacy-respecting hardware/software in my life.

I currently use Android and Windows, and have software like FocusMe and (OFFTIME) to help me focus on my work. These are apps that limit which apps I can use on my phone, for a set period of time.

Would the Librem 5 phone have similar apps available?

Thanks.

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I am one of the maintainers of the open-source application ActivityWatch.

I have considered adding the feature similar to what you describe, to send a notification if you spend more than X seconds in an selected app to not lose track of time when in an application you don’t want to spend much time in (but have not started implementing anything yet).

However, because of the design of Wayland outside applications cannot fetch information about the currently focused application because of security reasons. I have suggested to add such an API to xdg-desktop-portal but they seemed to think that this use-case sounded exotic so they did not sound not very enthusiastic about the idea.

Since the display compositor and window manager for the Librem 5 (phosh) only supports Wayland, unless it has built-in support for such a feature this would be impossible to implement as long as no API for this exists.

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Also, for those interested in having apps like this on Wayland, please add a “Thumbs up” emoji as an reaction on the github issue so the xdg-desktop-portal developers see that people care about this issue!

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Hi Johan,

I’m somewhat limited in technical computer knowledge.
If I’m understanding correctly, you once suggested the addition of an app for Linux or Librem phone OS that can help/force people to focus on their work?
If you’d like me to support whatever project, please clarify where I’m supposed to add a “like”. Just give me the link. I’ve been on Github before to browse other people’s projects, but don’t currently have an account…

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Close, but not quite. If you google ActivityWatch you can see the application I am developing. It currently displays how much time you spent in different applications, websites and more but we have been considering adding the feature of notifying you if you spend too much time in a specific application or website. While that is not identical to how FocusMe works, it should be good enough for many users use-cases.

The issue is that the program in the PureOS operating system which is responsible for letting applications display their windows on the screen keeps it private from every other program what windows are being shown so it is currently impossible for other applications to track that (which is good from a security perspective, but for us who use applications which need this data it is problematic).

So I have been pitching for a standard way for applications to fetch such information and that proposal can be found on this link where it’s possible to add a vote if you have an account on GitHub.

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Isn’t there a way to use a notification to do so?

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Thanks johan-bjareholt for working on this. I added a comment in Github supporting your request for this feature be added to xdg-desktop.

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Thanks for clarifying.
I see how the security feature is quite desirable. Wish you the best in your project!

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(although I guess the Wayland issue still exists)

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Actually, things are progressing thanks to this phosh change

We now have a standard way to fetch the currently focused windows title and appid! I will probably be experimenting soon with implementing a client which actually uses this and reports it to the activitywatch server.

One issue still persists though, knowing if the user is AFK or not. We previously used keyboard and mouse activity to know this but that’s still not available. Hopefully there will be a way to know whether the screen on the Librem 5 is on or not.

Will contact the workflow developer and see what he thinks!

1 Like