What's stopping you from daily driving the PPP?

[teekay]

For those who have a PPP gathering dust in a drawer somewhere, what's stopping you from daily driving it? When I got mine earlier this year, I tried it out and made a list of things that stopped me from ditching my Android for it, which was:

• Need physical protection (cover). I looked around for other phone covers that could work for the PPP, but eventually got the PPP TPU cover. I wish it had the corner bumpers as well as extending over the front screen for better protection, so I'll keep looking for alternative covers.
  
• The biggest issue was battery life. Using Mobian, suspend worked, which helped, but I could barely browse the web for 1 hour before the battery meter dropped from 100% to less than 30%. YouTube went from 100% to 5% in under 30 mins! Luckily I discovered this is a software problem rather than hardware, hence my efforts to patch the kernel to fix the battery meter (see other threads), which is now working quite reasonably for me.
  
• A semi-working camera so I can document things or scan QR codes (not worried too much about quality). This is working now.
  
• Less of an issue: an offline GPS app for my camping/hiking trips. There are some options now (not all mobile optimized yet) like Organic Maps.
  

After the battery fix (still WIP), I've been able to daily drive the PPP for more than 2 weeks now without once reaching for my Android. I am surprised at how many things I use that works great:

• Calls and SMS
  
• Bluetooth audio playback
  
• Bluetooth keyboard for some terminal usage
  
• Software updates (and some great apps on Flathub like Foliate, Cozy, Papers, Telegram, Delta Chat)
  
• Web browsing with Firefox + uBlock Origin
  
• Media playback (videos, audiobooks, podcasts)
  
• Reading e-books
  
• Contacts/Calendar sync with my Nextcloud
  
• Alarms work even when the phone is suspended
  
• General reliability, i.e. phone doesn't randomly reboot or heat up in my pocket, etc.
  

There are still a few bugs I'm logging and hoping to either file an issue or fix myself, but nothing too serious. So the PPP might be discontinued, but I feel like it's just come alive for me! I ordered a USB-C dock so I can try out the convergence feature (there's a YouTube video of a guy doing web dev on this PPP like this and it has me excited!)

So if you've got a PPP and you aren't using it, what's stopping you?

[biketool]

re: the cover I have a Otterbox super heavy duty TPU/ABS cover that works great for floor drops to stone tile/concrete and requires trimming about 5mm TPU by the wake switch and filling the camera hole with acetone/ABS plastic filler and drilling out the camera and speaker holes. I dont remember which phone it is for but the info is on this forum somewhere.

what OS are you running?
Pure Maps works pretty good when you point it at your OSM Scout Server for your offline stored area(by country/region) map updates.
Battery still needs work though I recall last week seeing someone who hacked the kernel battery drivers to Mobian getting 300% more battery when awake.

[teekay]

Battery still needs work though I recall last week seeing someone who hacked the kernel battery drivers to Mobian getting 300% more battery when awake.

Yes that was me, I'm still working on the driver to iron out the battery meter issues related to suspend.

[Jite]

Hi, 

I agree with you as personally I have been daily driving the ppp from 2022 and it is only getting better. 

What app/programme are you using for the alarm clock that works from suspend?

In terms of mapping I tend to use either osmin or mepo. 

I can see you are on mobian. Have you tried danctnix arch linux arm? I have found that the most consistent and best for me and I have tried all the major ones including mobian (I struggled with the upgrade from bookworm to trixie and it failed to boot) and pmos (I am on edge and this has had problems with the modem over the last few months). 

It may be worth a try and danctnix is pretty responsive when it comes to patching the kernel - for example I do use the ppp in convergence and he has just today said he would look into putting this patch into the kernel to get usb audio out - https://codeberg.org/megi/linux/commit/e...2c3c01b9ce

Do try him as I know there is also a testing branch so it may be that the battery optimisations could go in there first. 

You should try the matrix channel if you are interested in looking into it further. 

the ppp is good for having a more 'stable' distro on say the emmc and then having another distro on various sd cards (I do tend to use towboot for this purpose).

[teekay]

What app/programme are you using for the alarm clock that works from suspend?

In terms of mapping I tend to use either osmin or mepo. 

I can see you are on mobian. Have you tried danctnix arch linux arm?

the ppp is good for having a more 'stable' distro on say the emmc and then having another distro on various sd cards (I do tend to use towboot for this purpose).

For alarms, the standard Gnome Clock app works for me from suspend (on Mobian). Unfortunately this isn't working for calendar reminders. I have not tried danctnix although I see it mentioned a lot and that it works well, mainly because Mobian is working really well for me and I now have a dev environment setup so that I can fix/patch things. So far all updates have worked for me smoothly. I have Mobian installed to emmc and I've been trying other OS's from SD card, so I'll give danctnix a try as well.

Here are more of my notes from daily driving PPP with Mobian + Phosh:

• Calendar reminders don't make any notification tone even though I cranked up volume and set tones everywhere.
  
• Calendar reminders don't wake from suspend (needs to implement the RTC wakeup like Clock does for alarms)
  
• Need a spam filter for SMS that works by regex or keywords, e.g. "Reply STOP"
  
• There is a "Do Not Disturb" toggle, but no idea what it does, as it doesn't let me set automatic schedules, ring only for contacts, etc.
  
• There doesn't appear to be a separate volume control for media vs notifications, so notifications are usually too soft.
  
• I cannot find a nice mobile-enabled app that simply lets me browse my Music directory, then I can click a song, and it will play that song and all the rest in that directory. Should also then remember where it was if I close it and re-open it. Like Vinyl on Android. Currently using Clementine, but it's not mobile optimized. Every music player assumes I have nice ID3 tags for everything, I do not, I have a nice folder structure.
  
• Most media players do not inhibit the screen idle/suspend, so the phone goes to suspend while I'm playing music, and recovering from that is not trivial. I wrote a script that uses dbus messages to detect when media is playing and then starts/stops gnome-session-inhibit and this works.
  

At least these are all easy-to-fix software niggles rather than technical limitations.

---

Oh, I got the USB-C dock and the convergence feature is really amazing, I love it! Phosh handles this beautifully, I forget that I'm working off a phone after a while

I noted two minor issues though:

• I can't use an external touchscreen as a tablet, probably because Wayland doesn't support multiple touchscreens simultaneously?
  
• Doesn't seem to support audio via HDMI (I see the commit you linked to might fix this, I'll try it in my patched kernel)
  

[biketool]

[quote pid="125277" dateline="1756190434"]

• (snip)Doesn't seem to support audio via HDMI (I see the commit you linked to might fix this, I'll try it in my patched kernel)
  

[/quote]

When will you be contributing the changes to Mobian?

[teekay]

[quote pid="125277" dateline="1756190434"]

• (snip)Doesn't seem to support audio via HDMI (I see the commit you linked to might fix this, I'll try it in my patched kernel)
  

When will you be contributing the changes to Mobian?
[/quote]

I'd be happy to contribute back once:

• I have fixed all the bugs in the battery driver for my use cases
  
• At least one or two other people in the community try my changes and confirm that it works for them and doesn't break anything obvious
  

So far nobody else has reverted to me regarding my changes and whether or not it works as I claim. In the meantime though, my changes are published, so nothing stopping Mobian team from picking it up. I am on the #mobian-dev channel and chatting to other devs there.

[biketool]

[quote pid="125277" dateline="1756190434"]

• (snip)Doesn't seem to support audio via HDMI (I see the commit you linked to might fix this, I'll try it in my patched kernel)
  

When will you be contributing the changes to Mobian?

I'd be happy to contribute back once:

• I have fixed all the bugs in the battery driver for my use cases
  
• At least one or two other people in the community try my changes and confirm that it works for them and doesn't break anything obvious
  

So far nobody else has reverted to me regarding my changes and whether or not it works as I claim. In the meantime though, my changes are published, so nothing stopping Mobian team from picking it up. I am on the #mobian-dev channel and chatting to other devs there.
[/quote]

post the DL link and instructions, how stable is this otherwise, this is my daily driver PPp.
I haven't had to modprobe anything but SDR and maybe WiFi drivers since maybe 2000 - 2002 so help us make the minimum of damage and distress to our systems with good documentation.

[teekay]

[quote pid="125277" dateline="1756190434"]

• (snip)Doesn't seem to support audio via HDMI (I see the commit you linked to might fix this, I'll try it in my patched kernel)
  

When will you be contributing the changes to Mobian?

I'd be happy to contribute back once:

• I have fixed all the bugs in the battery driver for my use cases
  
• At least one or two other people in the community try my changes and confirm that it works for them and doesn't break anything obvious
  

So far nobody else has reverted to me regarding my changes and whether or not it works as I claim. In the meantime though, my changes are published, so nothing stopping Mobian team from picking it up. I am on the #mobian-dev channel and chatting to other devs there.

post the DL link and instructions, how stable is this otherwise, this is my daily driver PPp.
I haven't had to modprobe anything but SDR and maybe WiFi drivers since maybe 2000 - 2002 so help us make the minimum of damage and distress to our systems with good documentation.
[/quote]

I posted the details in this thread: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=19940
I am using it on my daily driver PPP and everything works fine, only issue I am aware of is the battery percentage is sometimes wrong after a long suspend (overnight).