Stripping my device down to the bare essentials

[3x5co]

I wasn't able to use my phone as an actual phone, because my service provider will only register it as a hotspot, and not a phone. I don't know why. Anyway, I use this device for very little. Honestly, the main reason I got it was so that I could use gMusicBrowser on my phone, and keep my music synced with my computer.

The functions I think are essential for my 'phone':

1. Play my music with gmusicbrowser
   
2. Sync my music with nextcloud
   

Other, 'nice to have' features:

• A browser, proxied through tor so I can look stuff up and have privacy.
  

That's literally all I use my device for. I have these features working, but the device is still pretty slow and it runs down the battery, fast. I had set it to only sleep when there isn't music playing, but it never worked so I gave up on that. Now, it just takes 45 minutes before it goes to sleep. Anyway, I go through 2 batteries a day.

Also, it feels like the phone's modem gets hot, even though the modem is physically switched off using the breakers on the board. I've also disabled the camera, and the microphone.

I don't think I can purge the phone software without losing Phosh, so my question is this: what can I do to disable any and all services or programs not related to the very few functions listed above?

[bcnaz]

@3x5co
Have you tried other carriers ?
I have encountered serious problems with AT&T prepaid,  but Pure Talk works great,  even though they are an MVNO (Reseller) of AT&T....
so any place att works, Pure talk should also work,
  PLUS :   Pure Talk is half the price or less.

[3x5co]

I don't know that I'm prepared to switch carriers. Like I said, at this point I want to use my Pinephone as an MP3 player. I assumed Mobian was the right disto because my music manager is GTK. What can I do to strip this down? I'm thinking it must be running too many processes all the time, which is why it runs down the battery and is so slow.

[kqlnut]

I don't know that I'm prepared to switch carriers. Like I said, at this point I want to use my Pinephone as an MP3 player. I assumed Mobian was the right disto because my music manager is GTK. What can I do to strip this down? I'm thinking it must be running too many processes all the time, which is why it runs down the battery and is so slow.

You can list all systemd services and filter them for enabled ones with

Code:

systemd list-unit-files | grep enabled

and then check what you could disable.

You can check your running processes with top to see if there are any you don't need that consume a good amount of CPU power and go about killing/disabling them from there.

And maybe also try disabling wireless devices with rfkill. I'm not sure how the system works, but maybe it makes a difference on top of disabling the devices physically.

But I'm afraid you won't get too much out of all this, having the device not suspended and play audio with Phosh just drains the battery much faster. Maybe it's better with a light weight distro like SXMO (running a GTK app on there shouldn't be a problem, it would probably just be a bunch of dependencies added; could also make sense to go for a light weight music player, maybe even something terminal based).

[3x5co]

Thanks for the reply. I disabled a bunch of services, and it might have made things a little faster.

The only thing I wouldn't budge on is the use of gmusicbrowser. This uses either GTK 2 or 3, depending on the version. I'm used to the deb package, but it looks like it's available for suse, arch, fedora and gentoo.

Honestly, I'm so used to Ubuntu / Debian that it would be really hard for me to move away from it. But I suppose I could drop Phosh and keep debian. It looks like SXMO is designed for Alpine/Arch, but maybe that's wrong. I see one attempt to script SXMO over Debian, but it appears to me mostly proof-of-concept, and mostly doesn't work.

The last deal-breaker is of SXMO doesn't have screen rotate. All the screenshots I've seen are in portrait mode, and my player will only work well in landscape.

[kqlnut]

According to the user guide screen rotation is possible in SXMO. I don't know about the current status of SXMO on Arch, but if all is good on that side, I would try it out on an SD card and see how you like it. Apart from getting used to pacman instead of apt (pacman is really nice), there shouldn't be much bothering you coming from Debian/Mobian on the PinePhone. Alpine/PostmarketOS might be different in that regard although I've never tried it. gmusicbrowser is in the AUR, so you can easily build it from source on Arch (although it doesn't seem to be maintained anymore; might be not too hard to update it yourself though).