Changing Desktop Environments?

[ryo]

I feel like this is where most people are. Most people much prefer the look and feel of both Lomiri or Plasma Mobile but Phosh is more stable so it wins out. I've been daily driving it since September and I know I couldn't possibly do that with Plasma Mobile but man, do I wish I could. Phosh has plenty of design decisions that I can't stand and they don't seem to care much what the community thinks. The moment Plasma Mobile is stable enough I will be jumping on board and leaving Phosh behind forever.

To me it's not really about the looks, but rather usability, stability, hardware resources, and who it's being backed by.

Phosh is made by Purism, which is alright, but it's a shell to Gnome, which is owned by Red Hat which is owned by IBM which created systemd which is an attempt at a hostile takeover of Linux by pretty much all the bad guys most people escaped from.

Plamo is very unstable and slow, it's made by KDE which has bend the knee big time to wokeness, which is a hostile takeover by the same bad days as mentioned above on the cultural, sanity, and civilisational level.

Lomiri is rock solid and created by UBPorts which to my knowledge is pretty much independent, but desktop apps don't run on it without virtualization.

SXMO (and SWMO) is made by Suckless, which actually I believe are awesome people, but lots of features they include is pretty useless if you're not in America, the keyboard sucks hard, and trying to run Gajim made me give up on it let's just say.

[grump_fiddle_reinstall]

I know some people use Xfce, but don't know if they actually use any phone features.

Yep, I'm using Gnome Calls successfully with XFCE though I had to compile it myself along with all the dependencies. I run eg25manager manually at the moment when I want to make a call and I don't even have audio routing set up. I just run a script to unmute all the ALSA channels for the call.

I get SMS with Pidgin.

So it can certainly be made to work, but it won't have the easy to use polish of something like Phosh.

I got xfce installed today and for the first time managed to boot to desktop. There are some issues that I will start a new thread for but I was pleasantly suprised how touch friendly the xfce desktop actually is. I changed some of the font sizes whilst in an xfce session which appear to have been carried over to the phosh desktop.

I experience the xfce desktop as faster than either phosh or Plasma. The main menu works fine and I find it a lot easier and quicker than swiping up and down and rolling up and down to find an app as the mobile centric UIs force to you do. I am a long term xfce user (started on an eeepc 701) so I feel more at home with it than any mobile UI.

I made a test call to the phone which Calls picked up and was able to send an SMS, I didn't do anything other than starting the apps from the xfce menu. So I was interested to read that you had to do other things to get calls and SMSs working.

I installed Pidgin a couple of days but it crashes fatally on start up at the moment so I couldn't test how well it worked with SMSs.

[acid andy]

I made a test call to the phone which Calls picked up and was able to send an SMS, I didn't do anything other than starting the apps from the xfce menu. So I was interested to read that you had to do other things to get calls and SMSs working.

I had to rebuild the applications (and their dependencies) because I'm running Slarm64, an unofficial build of Slackware. That's good yours just worked, though.

[tophneal]

This should be removed.

i agree. off topic conversation removed.

[grump_fiddle_reinstall]

I made a test call to the phone which Calls picked up and was able to send an SMS, I didn't do anything other than starting the apps from the xfce menu. So I was interested to read that you had to do other things to get calls and SMSs working.

I had to rebuild the applications (and their dependencies) because I'm running Slarm64, an unofficial build of Slackware. That's good yours just worked, though.

That might explain the difference

I am looking for solutions that work out of the box with standard repos and distributions. Basically hoping to get something that will be easy to keep up to date without breaking changes such that say a PinePhone Pro plus keyboard case would make an interesting alternative to an Android device for my offspring. Debian and XFCE are things I am familiar with so I will run with those first.

Anyway it is good that those apps appear to work as it makes it worth my while trying to solve other issues with XFCE on Mobian/Phosh.