Manjaro phosh annoying problems and a bit of usage experience

[ryo]

Hi there, i have encountered a couple of annoying things about using manjaro phosh after the latest update:
1) Sometimes modem goes down completely. I don't know how to reproduce that, but sometimes modem module shuts down completely, and calls application says that there is no calling device at all. Naturally, internet also goes down. Rebooting does fix it, but a couple of times it caught me when i had to give a call or quickly search for something on the internet.

This has been the case for a long time.
Especially when traveling by train when getting near Maihama station (which is where Tokyo Disney and Disney Sea are).
Not specific to Manjaro or Phosh, probably kernel related, or even modem firmware related.

1. Browse internet. Firefox works nice here. Unfortunately, ui of extensions is broken, but the rest is fine

Try Qutebrowser.
It's more lightweight compared to Firefox and Chromium, and technically has no UI, and therefore it can't be broken.

2. Watch youtube. I use freetube application with legacy video format, which gives me acceptable ~480p video.

I'm watching videos exclusively on PC myself, so I don't have a solution to that.

3. Use messangers. Telegram works fine, fractal and NeoChat launch and look good, but did not use them yet. Pretty sure it will run any messanger you would like to install.

Not any.
Both Skype and Discord are closed source for example, so neither will work unless the developers release an ARM version.
Or otherwise run them in a browser at a lowered scale (I recommend Qutebrowser at 67% scaling, so you can use the "F" key to prevent from touching the wrong buttons).
On top of that, both Skype and Discord have banned the use of 3rd party clients, even though Discord provides APIs that allows you to create a 3rd party client.
Which is why I'm trying to get most people on Discord I talk to regularly to move to Matrix, but so far there's little to no progress sadly.

4. Listen to music. Mentioned above problem is annoying, but is not fatal. Furthermore, there must be player that can avoid that problem.

VLC?
I didn't encounter any issues with VLC myself, neither on Phosh nor PlaMo.

5. Call. Calling is allright, both incoming and outcoming (if modem did not go down, but this is temporary, i hope)

yup.

6. Use navigtion. Standart maps application works normally.

Not working at the moment I believe.
I barely use navigation myself, so I don't really care.

7. Programming. I wrote a couple of python scripts using vim and launched a couple of self-written java console utilities. Did not find a proper IDE yet, but it has jdk, gcc, python and tons of other development tools. When a physical keyboard finally comes out it would be excellent development tool to use "on a go"

Vim is probably going to be your best friend for the time being.
Once you get used to it, you might probably love it so much, it might easily become your default IDE in the end.

1. Run android apps. I've seen messages on forum that anbox is working, but mine doesn't. Probably because i use beta5 and update it with pacman -Syu. I will try to fix that later, but now i have to write diploma.

Probably not a good idea to use Anbox on a phone that already has a super short battery life without it.
But perhaps it would work in the future.

2. Take photo and record video. Technically, megapixels app can take photos, but preview is much worse than the actual photo. It also works very slow, which is critical if you want to catch a moment.

For taking a photo, you'll need to open → close → reopen for it to work.
For recording a video, I don't think you can do that yet.