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Loving latest Mobian Update - drh - 08-19-2022
Yesterday I received a Mobian update on PinePhone (one of the community editions) that included the swipe up (access application icons) and swipe down (access shortcuts to various settings) instead of tapping on the screen to access these features. The swipe up and swipe down is working very well for me and I like it a lot.
Overall - Mobian OS has steadily improved over the past 18 months to a very usable state for me. I use the PinePhone as a daily driver phone. The battery life is 8+ hours, which is enough for me.
I hugely appreciate libhandy, which I think adapts non-optimized applications to be usable on the PinePhone. I have a PinePhone Pro with Manjaro on it; however, I don't use it because (a) the original PinePhone is working so well and (b) too many applications installed by default that I don't use and applications that I do like to use don't adapt to the screen (i.e., not very usable).
One day I may try installing Mobian on the PinePhone Pro for a super experience; however, I will do this when the PinePhone hardware becomes usable. When the day comes to switch from the PinePhone I am using as a daily driver and I cannot get Mobian to work acceptably well on the PinePhone Pro, then I may order PinePhone because I like Mobian so much (it just fits me).
Thanks goes out to all of the developers of the entire software(s) stack that brings continued and improvements to Mobian on the PinePhone devices.
Cheers!
RE: Loving latest Mobian Update - fhireman - 08-19-2022
Hi drh,
I've actually had the same update today(apt update & apt upgrade) on Mobian Phosh(and I really love the new swipe up and down features as well) but actually had some other issues after the update.
The 'pinephone-support' package is still held back because 'firmware-realtek-rtl8723cs-bt but is not installable'. I can't seem to find anything on this by either the Mobian team or on the Pinephone forums so it seems I'm an outlier with this bluetooth firmware issue and I don't know how to solve it because the pinephone-support package is depending on that bluetooth
And for some reason the updates uninstalled my gnome-software store and settings. I don't think it's intended but let me know if it did the same for you!
I'll have to reinstall it otherwise
I like how Mobian is becoming a very decent experience, bar the slowness of launching and scrolling in apps, but I've had a fair share of breaking things over the past 18 months which were sometimes fixable by reading blog posts from the Mobian team and sometimes they weren't.
For example, the Gnome software app never adapted to the screen properly for me. Does this work for you?
And sometimes I had to use pkcon repairs because I wasn't getting anymore updates for 7-8 weeks or so. Also the switch from 'bullseye' to 'bookworm' in the apt sources list also took me a while to find.
RE: Loving latest Mobian Update - drh - 08-20-2022
Hi fhireman,
When packages are uninstallable using the normal 'sudo apt upgrade' command, I typically attempt an upgrade the specific uninstallable package. For example, executing the command below in a terminal...
sudo apt install firmware-realtek-rtl8723cs-bt
What happens next is typically a message that gives a clue that explains (at least partially) why the package is not installed. I then enter the important parts of the message into a web search for a possible solution. Sometimes I get lucky and someone else had a similar issue with a fix.
If the above does not help, then you might consider the following command....
sudo apt install firmware-misc-nonfree
Note: Use of the above commands come with no warranty, assurance of success or otherwise. Use at your own risk. :-)
Good luck
RE: Loving latest Mobian Update - dante404 - 08-20-2022
Just have to say: Yes, the new phosh version in mobian is really awesome.
mobian made my PinePhone a daily driver, and it's getting better and better over the time!
(08-19-2022, 02:46 PM)fhireman Wrote: For example, the Gnome software app never adapted to the screen properly for me. Does this work for you?
Same here, the software app doesn't fit on the screen and often crashes. 99% of the time I just use the terminal...
RE: Loving latest Mobian Update - Frexit - 08-20-2022
You lucky. I disabled WiFi, bluetooth, 4G data trafic and geoclue. With only Firefox on startup, and two nodes.js threads for my webapps, consuming very poor CPU time, i got no more than 4 hours battery life !
I don't understand:
- why pinephone continue to search for access points when WiFi is disabled. This is a lot a consumption for absolutely nothing.
- why there are a lot of DBus messages from light sensor, proximity sensor, ... for nothing, especially when the screen is off !
And battery life apart, i don't understand:
- why i can't still disable this f....g lockscreen once for all
- why when i phone to someone, i can hear my peer clearly, but most of the time, my peer tell me he doesn't understand a word of what I say, with callaudio mode activated... Voice record levels are still not mastered, and sadly pulseaudio doesn't show any DBus interfaces to control them ! Annoying...
So ok : there was some good improvements too in the last 2 years - thanks for them.
But for me, the battery is still draining, there are a lot of Gnome apps which are still unusable, especially in Settings, the phone part is not working as it should - and making funny animations is not an improvement. Today, i can't still recommand the pinephone for a non-powered user. With Firefox OS a long time ago, i could...
RE: Loving latest Mobian Update - biketool - 08-20-2022
I was unable to use mobian after the update, crash after a few minutes, ended up having to wipe and install an older weekly image.
The animated swipes look nice for the few seconds to a minute before a lockup and reboot.
I also found out that pika backup is not as easy to use as I had expected, I cant get the borg backup installed and pip compiled, so I have to scramble for phone numbers.
I should have just imaged my /home form the CLI than trust an untried backup app.......
RE: Loving latest Mobian Update - dante404 - 08-20-2022
@Frexit: I would agree to some things you said (and some not), but we're NOT talking just about "funny animations" here - It was annoying in Phosh that one would often(!) accidentally open the bottom menu when instead only wanted to open the keyboard... That problem was the biggest usability(!) quirk in Phosh imho, which is gone now and thats sooooo good...
BTW the Phosh developers work not for Pine64 and not for the mobian project, Phosh was started by Purism for Librem 5, so at whom exactly is your critique directed? Why and how should developers of a GUI(!) fix your calls problem?
(08-20-2022, 12:05 PM)biketool Wrote: I was unable to use mobian after the update, crash after a few minutes, ended up having to wipe and install an older weekly image.
The animated swipes look nice for the few seconds to a minute before a lockup and reboot.
I also found out that pika backup is not as easy to use as I had expected, I cant get the borg backup installed and pip compiled, so I have to scramble for phone numbers.
I should have just imaged my /home form the CLI than trust an untried backup app.......
Too late of course
, but the reinstall was not really necessary: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=17156
RE: Loving latest Mobian Update - biketool - 08-21-2022
(08-20-2022, 02:53 PM)dante404 Wrote: @Frexit: I would agree to some things you said (and some not), but we're NOT talking just about "funny animations" here - It was annoying in Phosh that one would often(!) accidentally open the bottom menu when instead only wanted to open the keyboard... That problem was the biggest usability(!) quirk in Phosh imho, which is gone now and thats sooooo good...
BTW the Phosh developers work not for Pine64 and not for the mobian project, Phosh was started by Purism for Librem 5, so at whom exactly is your critique directed? Why and how should developers of a GUI(!) fix your calls problem?
(08-20-2022, 12:05 PM)biketool Wrote: I was unable to use mobian after the update, crash after a few minutes, ended up having to wipe and install an older weekly image.
The animated swipes look nice for the few seconds to a minute before a lockup and reboot.
I also found out that pika backup is not as easy to use as I had expected, I cant get the borg backup installed and pip compiled, so I have to scramble for phone numbers.
I should have just imaged my /home form the CLI than trust an untried backup app.......
Too late of course
That did it. My PP is my daily driver so I had to get back phone function and couldn't enable this fix after the upgrade, I verified turning on animation on my mid July install and now have the up-to-date upgrades running.
RE: Loving latest Mobian Update - Frexit - 08-21-2022
Ok : sometimes i surely opened accidentally the bottom menu too. But as you understood : for me, it is not the current priority. A phone which drains its battery in 4 hours and don't assume voice calls quality is simply unusable. I don't blame Pine for that : the hardware is not in fault to my point of view. As i told, there are a lot of processes which should be turn off to improve battery duration, and currently, they are not.
For the GUI, a long time ago (15 years ?), some people decides in the Gnome project to make a tactile GUI - ok. I was never convinced that it was a great idea for desktops and laptops, (i'm still using Mate / Gnome2), but i can understand that some people would more animations. No problems with that.
The fact is simply that today Gnome interfaces are still not optimized for small devices, and for a phone GUI, it's a failure... I thought that the pinephone commercial output will wake up Gnome devs, and push them to rewrite their apps. Two years passed - and when i go to the Settings in Phosh, some menus are still unusable, even with rotation. I even notice more crashs os Settings with the current version. So what's wrong ?
I know as a developper that when you make this kind of mistake, it can take a long time to refactoring all of your applications. Sometimes it's even faster to restart the app from zero. But two years...
That was precisely the great advantage of writing webapps for Firefox OS : rotating and resizing apps was very easy using HTML/JS. And i don't remember to had communication problems with my Mozilla phones. The GUI was very smooth, with very little ressources. So why with a lot more ressources, we still don't have a working phone ?
And ok : convergence is funny, but it's not the main goal of a phone device too... Currently, the pinephone is a funny GNU/Linux tablet. But it's still not a phone !
And don't blame me to not solve the problems i encounter : developing webapps for the phone took me long days, and solving Gnome bugs is not my job...
I just hope like many that Phosh will finally become stable.
RE: Loving latest Mobian Update - biketool - 08-21-2022
(08-21-2022, 08:05 AM)Frexit Wrote: Ok : sometimes i surely opened accidentally the bottom menu too. (snip)
I just hope like many that Phosh will finally become stable.
As I understand it Phosh started over at Liberm as a Meamo/Meego UI fork before restarting clean.
I still do stuff at talk.maemo.org; they are working hard on Maemo7-Leste. I have not tried it yet as I am trying to stick with Mobian for now to get a stable everyday driver phone. I still think the Maemo5 experience on the N900 was the high water mark for mobile phone experience and UI.
Maemo Leste is built on Deuvian so no systemd and they have a good catalog of Maemo5 apps upgraded to the new OS.
Given that one of the hardware targets is the OG Nokia N900 as well as pinephone and a few androids.
I like to think that if it will run on an old N900 single core 600mhz cortex A8 processor they might have something that could bring us up to 24 hours or more battery even if we use the phone to listen to music or audio books much less use the screen. I feel like much of the loss is that the hardware audio and video acceleration is not used by the OS just apps like Clapper so we have to brute force with CPU.
I love the old maemo UI and I hope that their diversity brings us all strength and options.