It should be. With zram, I can use similar software even on a 2 GB RAM device somewhat comfortably, unless I open too many tabs in Firefox.

It’s somewhat SoC dependent, but the actual feature support depends on auxiliary chips. Of the well-supported phones, only the Shift6mq supports it in hardware - software support on mainline is not there yet though. The Fairphones 4 and 5 also have the feature. I have the 5, and display out works with postmarketOS, but audio support is still lacking, and USB peripherals (e.g., keyboard, mouse) are not supported.

Here’s a list of more devices: https://www.uperfectmonitor.com/pages/list-of-smartphones-with-displayport-alt-mode

That said, there are other ways like DisplayLink and or GUD that may enable you to connect a display to a OnePlus 6 or PocoF1 anyway, some people have done it (and left video evidence on social media or YouTube. It definitely requires a customized kernel, and unfortunately, AFAIK the efforts have not been documented/shared (kernel config and necessary packages).

I don’t think reporting the USB ID thing to Plasma is useful and will go far - for 99% of users (that use some kind of Android/AOSP) the modus operandi is fine and helpful. With many Android devices and OSes requiring you to do something on the device after plugging it in, testing does not seem to be feasible to me.

There’s no need to add the edge repo, as the latest release of mobile-config-firefox should be in v23.12 by now (it’s been updated there since my last post). The command I posted does not add the repo, but only uses it for the one package without adding the repo permanently.

I recommend trying to use KDE Connect (or scp, rsync … another network based way) to send the screenshot from the phone to your other computer instead.

MTP/other file transfer protocols do not (yet?) work with mobile Linux, so this failure is to be expected. It only shows up for connection, because if your device ran Android, it would be an option — AFAIK, Plasma acts this way because of the USB ID of the device.

Also, regarding your main issue: While you can report this to Mozilla, please be aware that Firefox is being “patched” to better work on mobile by https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/mobile-config-firefox. I suggest you to install the latest, not yet in postmarketOS 23.12 mobile-config-firefox package from edge first by running:

sudo apk del mobile-config-firefox
sudo apk add mobile-config-firefox --repository http://mirror.postmarketos.org/postmarketos/master

While it may not fix every issue possible, it should improve the experience.

Generally yes, but I am just a dumb tech blogger, so what do I know 😀 . I checked the issue tracker, and this issue seems related - I also see that crash, and it might extend beyond upgrades and thus be the source of what you are seeing. If you also see that crash of that service, maybe just upvote the existing issue first or if you can chime in/help out, do that before opening a potential duplicate :-)

As flatpak apps show (correct?) your situation is not different from what I would expect. I installed 23.12 on one of my devices and see a similar behavior. Generally, assuming you did start with a Phosh image or used pmbootstrap and chose phosh as UI (and did not, say, start out with Plasma Mobile and then switched over to Phosh, which can cause weirdness), I think we can safely say that this not just an issue on your end. This is very likely a general issue on 23.12 and edge currently.

Why isn’t it fixed already? It sure seems to be difficult, and most “long termers” (extrapolating from my own behavior) likely have given up on using front-ends like GNOME Software or KDE Discover and have become fluent enough with apk and flatpak on the terminal and thus don’t contribute to a solution.

deleted by creator

It did work on edge at the time of that post (March 2023), and IIRC it may have worked in stable 23.06 (the release right after that post) - I don’t have a device still running that to confirm. It since broke again, and it’s currently broken in stable and testing (it’s definitely broken for me in edge in both Plasma Mobile (KDE Discover) and Phosh/GNOME Mobile (GNOME Software). So don’t go to edge because of this, especially not right now.

Nice!

While we‘re at it: do you know if there is any way to get alpine apk visible in gnome software? Its driving me nuts that flatpak is visible and apk which is a lot of stuff can only be installed through cli.

It’s a long standing issue, for context I recommend reading https://blogs.gnome.org/pabloyoyoista/2023/03/05/gs-and-pmos-a-bumpy-road/

Without any further configuration, might as well as add that to your edited paraphrased quote.

Please correct me, but AFAIK, necessary configuration of flatpak (e.g., configuring remotes) depends more on the distribution than the architecture (as long as the architecture is supported at all, that is - so x86_64 or aarch64 AFAIK).

Your lengthy explanation of flatpak doesn’t seem to be postmarketos related.

Sure? https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/merge_requests/4820 And does it hurt to mention differences in software support between x86_64 and aarch64? I would see your point if I had talked at length about Snaps. ;-)

I was referring to “Flatpak […] is currently only working as expected on x86_64” is … if not false, then far too easy to misunderstand. Flatpak works just as well on aarch64 for (at least) hundreds of apps. The software that’s not available on, e.g., flathub for aarch64 (but is available for x86_64) in most cases is not available (in compiled form) for aarch64 at all — because it is proprietary with vendors not caring about aarch64, or … just is electron-based ;-}.

It’s not Flatpak, it’s the entire aarch64 software ecosystem that’s lacking here. Stating “Linux on aarch64 has less available software than x86_64, which is especially so for proprietary software” would have been a far better statement.

Alpine edge testing apps are in postmarketOS edge. So yeah, not all of them make it to stable, but quite a few do:

For software listed on https://linuxphoneapps.org/ the count is as follows: Alpine 3.19: 160 Alpine edge: 198

(Source: https://linuxphoneapps.org/packaged-in/)

The difference should be mostly the apps that have not made it beyond testing, yet.

Please note that you can also try installing testing apps on stable by apk add PKGNAME --repository=http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing, or, maybe as more safe way of doing this, use distrobox, install alpine:latest in it, and changing /etc/apk/repositories/ to make it edge instead of 3.19.

You can also try to build some software that’s not packaged by coming up with your own APKBUILDs, I did so a while ago on https://framagit.org/linmobapps/apkbuilds, maybe the notes I left there can be helpful to you.

Regarding Wikis: They always get stale, so clarifications and additions are surely welcome!

This is … a bit false. Flatpaks do show in GNOME Software on other distributions, and while not every app on Flathub supports aarch64, many do. I somehow managed to not have a with postmarketOS stable and Phosh here right now (I misplaced my PinePhone that runs that combination), so I can’t say if it would work for me. It definitely works on other distributions, though; but there’s always the added difficulty of imperfect app metadata making it a game of luck to recognise a mobile friendly app as such.

That said, you can always install packages from the terminal, flatpak (flatpak install …) or apk (apk add …) or otherwise. To find apps to look at, maybe LinuxPhoneApps.org can be useful.

This sounds more like a network problem, maybe something on your end or that one of the repos was temporarily unreachable (usually it’s the postmarketOS repo for me in such situations). I recommend running sudo apk update in situations like this and reading through the output. Depending on which repo is unreachable (= if it’s one of the alpine repos) it may be a better idea to delay upgrading.

It definitely has nothing to do with the device being dropped from main to community — both categories mean that the device is served by stable.

Hope this helps!

The easy route is to just wait for the merge request that adds the device to be merged.

You can also try using the pmaports branch that is going to be merged to build and install it - but I am not aware of a guide that explains how to do that and have no expertise with this, sadly.

The Shift6mq is a great phone, no doubt about that. Glad you like it! It’s a pretty main-stream design hardware-wise though, compared to how the Librem 5 is built, see https://lemmy.ml/comment/2645546 - that does not make it worse device though.

My only point was that I don’t see how people arrive at “Purism is a cultist org” when some rando writes a stupid email to a YouTuber who is not part of that organization.

Regarding the investment in software: It’s not just Phosh, it’s libhandy (and libhandy-4/libadwaita), the initial work on adaptiveness in GNOME apps (which makes GNOME Shell on Mobile such a slam dunk), the modem manager based telephony stack (instead of dealing with weirdly patched forks of ofono, a project originating from Nokia/Intel’s Meego), and more. So even if you are not a fan of Phosh, which is perfectly fine, you may still benefit from Purism’s effort and most certainly the community efforts that took this work and build upon it/brought it to other UIs and hardware.

I maybe an old fool, but I still credit Purism for starting the Librem 5 effort in a time shortly after Canonical had announced it would no longer develop Unity 8/Ubuntu Touch, Jolla were struggling, and other efforts had long been dead.

Edit: One thing I forgot: The people that Purism payed/pays for Librem 5 software work are usually community members, BTW.

So you’re blaming a company for a person not on its payroll writing a weird and dumb email? Ok.

They did do a “slap a logo on things”-thing with FOSS Android apps for their librem.one service. On the other hand, they do actually pay for software development for the Librem 5 in a way that helps the entire #linuxMobile ecosystem - a PinePhone or a Snapdragon 845-powered Android phone running postmarketOS would be way less useful without Purism’s investment. It’s all quite grey.

Yes, the Librem 5 is expensive and Purism treat consumers poorly.

But, the comparison and the focus on pure specs make it seem that you don’t understand the appeal of the product, which is to run a GNU/Linux stack on a phone with a very-close-to-mainline kernel. Among the devices you compared the Librem 5 too, the only one that’s comparable is the PinePhone Pro (yes, the others support Ubuntu Touch, but they are essentially standard Android hardware featuring a Mediatek or Qualcomm SoC. The vendor kernel is then being used with a compatibility layer to run Ubuntu Touch on it.

The PinePhone Pro (as the only other mainline smartphone in your comparison) is significantly cheaper, but that’s in large part due to PINE64’s modus operandi: They supply hardware, and the community makes that hardware usable by supplying the software. This model has worked okay for the OG PinePhone, may be due to the Community Editions, where PINE64 partnered with distributions/software projects, but it has not worked so well for the PinePhone Pro. The PinePhone Pro also has - depending on how you want to spin it - a too power hungry SoC or a undersized battery. Thanks to standby, it can last a day, but you can’t really use it for much during that day then - e.g., browsing the web rapidly drains the battery. Also, without Purism’s efforts, there would be way less user space software to make use of the device.

The Librem 5 is not without flaws, it’s a really complicated hardware device (they were aiming for some FSF stamp of approval) - while the (socketed) 4G modem has GPS support, Purism also added a dedicated chip for that so that you can navigate while the LTE unit is “killswitched off”. The NXP i.MX8M only has Cortex A53 cores, and the GPU is not amazing, either (at the time when design decisions were made, it was the only GPU with decent blobless mainline driver support though), but at least the battery is large enough to make the Librem 5 a phone I can reasonably use as a daily driver these days.

Regarding the Liberty Phone: I hate the name, but given that this is just the Librem 5 USA with as much RAM as the SoC supports and a larger eMMC, there’s no technical excuse to delay that product, as these hardware changes are very, very minor.