Logout recently wrote a great phlog
that discussed a number of alternative
mobile OSes.[1] Back in November, I
ordered a Pinephone (which arrived
some time in February), so I've been
following the development of operating
systems for that device ever since.
There is a list of OSes currently in
development for the Pinephone at their
Wiki.[2]
Among those that stand out that were
not mentioned in Logout's phlog are
PureOS, which was developed for the
Librem5 smartphone (and a port is
available for the Pinephone); nemo
mobile (which combines the open
source parts of Sailfish with a libre
GUI); and a number of GNU/Linux
distributions that run natively on the
phone.
For me, the most exciting of those
distributions is a Debian-on-ARM image
that makes use of the Phosh desktop
environment from PureOS. Calling,
texting, and data already work. A lot
of Debian applications also work,
though many need their GUIs resized.
Some, of course, have not been ported
to ARM (yet). Hats off to the
developer, a-wai.[3] It's truly
amazing what one person can
accomplish!
I am really looking forward to the day
that I can run Debian on my phone,
especially since a clamshell keyboard
is in the works, and the device can
output USB-C to HDMI. Convergence is
almost here!
The main drawback at this point --
which affects all of the OS candidates
-- is power consumption. Very few
power-saving features have been
implemented. At present, the most you
can hope for is about 9 hours of
battery life on standby.
----
For those of you who make use of the
circumlunar.space XMPP server, I have
a new VPS provider and am in the
process of restoring from backups. It
should be running again soon. I'll
post an update as soon as it's
working. If I can't get it running
from the backup, I'll be emailing you
a new password.
[1]
gopher://i-logout.cz/0/phlog/posts/2020-04-07_alternative_operating_systems_for_smartphones.txt
[2]
https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone_Software_Release
[3]
https://gitlab.com/a-wai
