Announcing the Mobian project

[justaquestion]

What are the benefits of Mobian vs. Purism's PureOS?

[paju1986]

PureOs is really ment for the librem 5 only, and its fine tune for it

[a-wai]

I think leaving it on the default value and installing the user-agent switcher extension would be better, as some websites (like WhatsApp Web) insist on you using their stupid app when you arrive with an Android user agent. But I guess the Firefox Android user agent posted by @minkiu should allow one to install the extension themselves.

That's a good point, I'll tweak the UA to be more in line with FF's default.

What are the benefits of Mobian vs. Purism's PureOS?

Mobian is closer to being "pure" Debian than PureOS:

• the base repository is Debian's archive, while PureOS uses a completely separate repo, by importing and rebuilding Debian packages; this means some packages present in Debian (and therefore, Mobian) won't be available on PureOS, or sometimes with an older version
  
• Mobian uses custom packages only when absolutely necessary (30 source packages as of today, not counting mobian- and pinephone-specific ones)
  • when the package needs to be modified to work fine with the phone's display (gtk, gedit, gnome-software...)
    
  • if upstream doesn't have required hardware support (mainly u-boot and the kernel)
    
  • because the package doesn't even exist in Debian (mostly the "phosh" ecosystem, although that should change soon)
    

I would also add that:

• patched packages use the most recent upstream version (and even Purism software land in Mobian first )
  
• Mobian doesn't include the default configuration for Purism's Librem One
  
• in the long run, Mobian will support more devices than PureOS (currently thinking about bringing it to the PineTab, and a Librem 5 build should also be available by the end of the year)
  

PureOs is really ment for the librem 5 only, and its fine tune for it

Indeed, however I believe mozzwald did a great job at tweaking PureOS to support the PinePhone

[justaquestion]

Thank you for the reply. That fact that it is closer upstream makes it a winner. My dream phone would be using Debian as close to Stable branch as possible. This work seems to be closest to that reality. Maybe one day we will have a well developed device. Seems years away. Cool to see nonetheless. ?

[dukla2000]

Is it some new normal, or an artefact, that all media are now mounted in /media/?

I am confused by it and expect /etc/fstab to rule all, but on my system I get emmc sort of mounted as / (but not according to lsblk) and my SDcard appears fine in my home directory but not according to df or lsblk!?

Code:

chris@DuklaPP:~$ cat /etc/fstab
UUID=8bceb394-0f35-4010-b1c6-d7b3316fbf19 / ext4 defaults 0 1
LABEL=Evo128G /home/chris/SDcard auto comment=systemd.automount,defaults,sync 0 0
chris@DuklaPP:~$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            895M     0  895M   0% /dev
tmpfs           193M  1.5M  192M   1% /run
/dev/mmcblk2p1   15G  2.9G   11G  21% /
tmpfs           965M   24K  965M   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           965M     0  965M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1  118G  108G  3.5G  97% /media/mmcblk0p1
tmpfs           193M   20K  193M   1% /run/user/1000
chris@DuklaPP:~$ lsblk
NAME         MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
mmcblk0      179:0    0 119.3G  0 disk
└─mmcblk0p1  179:1    0 119.3G  0 part /media/mmcblk0p1
mmcblk2      179:32   0  14.7G  0 disk
└─mmcblk2p1  179:33   0  14.7G  0 part /media/mmcblk2p1
mmcblk2boot0 179:64   0     4M  1 disk
mmcblk2boot1 179:96   0     4M  1 disk

A supplementary question: in /etc/phosh/phoc.ini I am happy to start at 1.6 and then use scale screen to recover if my setting exceeds my vision! Is there any benefit/penalty to changing the X11 and WL sections to 450*900 as well? (I can drive an editor but most of the time do not know what I am doing!)

PS - delighted to have King's Cross back again :-)

[cefre00]

I waited some time to get the feeling really but I was lucky enough to follow this development from the beginning (since it was posted here in the forums). So I feel incredibly lucky and proud that after so many years of "linuxing" I could witness a new distribution being born. Great to see this happening in from of my eyes.

Thanks @a-wai and all the others putting so much effort to Mobian. It really feels that the system is really developing week after week.

[e1337]

• Mobian uses custom packages only when absolutely necessary (30 source packages as of today, not counting mobian- and pinephone-specific ones)
  

• • when the package needs to be modified to work fine with the phone's display (gtk, gedit, gnome-software...)
    

I do wonder, wouldn't it be a good idea to add some sort of runtime query so apps like gedit can detect they're on a phone-like device and have these UI modifications upstreamed as well? A bit like brought up here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-s.../issues/56

Because if gedit is modified as a separate package, won't that break/remove the possibility of desktop UI when attaching a big screen via USB? (Apart from the other issues that come with a patched mobile package, like constant work to keep up with upstream etc.) It would be nice if this was instead attached to some toggleable property that apps can detect at runtime and adjust their UIs accordingly.

[a-wai]

That would be a good thing yes, but tbh I know very little about this stuff, I really am an embedded software developer, GUI apps development isn't my thing.

All of these patches come from Purism, and I know they mean to upstream them, but it requires some groundwork (the xdg issue you linked above being one possibility, there may be others) and will therefore take some time. Meanwhile we have no choice but to carry these versions, but I agree, the more upstream we can go, the better.

[dukla2000]

Is there a version of "double tap to wake" in Mobian now? I loved that function in my LG G2 (and I think some versions of Cyanogenmod): I think this phosh version is causing some phone hard locks occasionally? After a long period of no use I get the clock screen appears with the time I last switched off the screen. And no way will slide up work.

Indeed, is there any way to disable the PIN security? I would probably be happy for a double-tap to take me straight back to my applications and bypass both the slide-up and PIN screens?

[eaglecup]

Am I correct in understanding that Mobian does not have drivers for the camera built in yet?

I'm trying to follow the steps here, and was hoping it would be possible on Mobian too:
https://twongkee.wordpress.com/2020/02/2...ne-camera/