When will the mobile shell Phosh complete?

Hardware Librem 5
1

Just a quick question. Last time I checked, Phosh is still some barebone shell where there is a half done app drawer. Since many things have been finalized, I would like to know when could I try out the mobile shell. Can’t wait for April and wants to try out what kind of user experience we getting into.

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Instructions to run the latest development version of the Librem 5 software in an emulator can be found here:

https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Development_Environment/Boards/qemu.html

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I downloaded it today and tried it again. This is much more completed than what I previously tested out. Firefox ESR could be installed and tiled correctly. I am surprised since I don’t think a desktop application would work correctly in the phone without modification. Possibly because firefox uses GTK3 under the hood. Though I think using desktop firefox in Librem 5 would become a power hog. Apart from that, the pop up windows are still not optimized for mobile usage. I would still need to enlarge the window before I could see the button and click it. Also, qt applications do not work correctly. It appears like a pop up windows and cannot be maximum and tile correctly in the screen. And most built in app still need to scroll horizontally to work.

All in all, for testing developing apps, Phosh is pretty feature completed, but still not “completed” in a sense where you could port it to some phone with support of ubuntu touch and use as a daily driver. So my question is about when would Phosh completed in the latter sense.

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4

Well, no one really has an answer to that question.

Hopefully it should be pretty usable by the time the phone is released, but in my opinion I am skeptical about that. Polishing software to be great takes a long time, when gnome3 was released it was really bad and it took them multiple years until it was good in my opinion. Hopefully it won’t take multiple years for phosh (and it probably won’t since it’s a smaller project), but it wouldn’t surprise me if it took them a year to make it good for daily usage.

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You can find the source code here: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/phosh
Feel free to follow development and submit bug reports.

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Software is never complete but gets replaced or abandomed :wink:

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