SXMO PinePhone Demo

Recorded a demo of me trying SXMO again. It's pretty nice and probably the fastest user experience I've had on the PinePhone. It does take some learning to get used to the shortcuts though.
This is using an SXMO image generated for the PinePhone from postmarketOS edge since postmarketOS is currently right in the middle of releasing v21.03
The information on SXMO can be found on sr.ht/~mil/Sxmo/

[@mtothem1337]

I think this will be really sweet paired with the keyboard they are making. You still get a usable mobile interface. But then the full capabilities of a Linux desktop using the keyboard.
Ontop of this it comes with a 6000 mAh battery also. So essentially 3x battery life.

[@sirdiealot7805]

Thanks for the video Martijn. I tried it from the by now pretty outdated multiboot image but it looks a bit nicer now. It feels much faster and more responsive than Phosh or Plasma Mobile.
The UI seems very unconventional for a phone, which is not necessarily bad, but all those button combinations and swipe gestures are frankly overwhelming.
I'll try this with pmOS stable these days. Hopefully the scripts for calls and texts work. Can't be much worse than Phosh or Plasma Mobile.
I read your recent blog post btw. and I for one want a Linux phone and also develop things for it. Before that I want to use the phone as a daily driver and even from my perspective neither Phosh nor Plasma Mobile is quite there yet. Do I want to jump in the deep end like you do and fix up all the things? No. I think few people are prepared or capable to do that.
I absolutely agree that we don't need another ten distributions shipping the same software at this point. The main thing that seems to differentiate distros on the PinePhone and why I think people care about them is that they preconfigure applications to somewhat work. The application size adjustment tweaks, the Firefox tweaks. No one wants to do that himself. So if a distro ships a large set of applications that work, and even if all they did was invoke whatever magic incantations Phosh or PlasmaMobile need to show the application rather than a fraction of it, then that is seen as a great benefit of the distribution.
If Manjaro has a out of the box usable Firefox and pmOS doesn't then Manjaro > pmOS. You get the idea.
So what could be beneficial would be a shared set of configurations that make the existing applications usable, no matter the distro. Just an idea.

[@MartijnBraam]

That's funny because the out-of-the-box firefox config in manjaro is _from_ postmarketOS
I'm not annoyed that some people aren't developers. I'm annoyed none of them seem to be

[@sirdiealot7805]

@@MartijnBraam I know, it was a fabricated example because I didn't have a good one on hand.
I've mostly been switching back and forth between Manjaro and pmOS these last few weeks and read the comments on the Manjaro pinephone release forums. Those are weird in that people ask for a new image for every little thing that can be easily solved by a package update. So yeah, I guess a lot of people are more familiar with Android than Linux.
I hope that with SXMO on pmOS stable I'll have something that works well enough and that feels less ephemeral than what I've had so far. Something where it feels worthwhile to settle in so to say. Then maybe I can find something small to fix or develop.
So here's a video idea: development setup and workflow for the PinePhone.
E.g. do you work on the phone, if so how? Do you cross compile? Where do you even start with developing for pmOS (or Phosh, Plasma Mobile, SXMO, Megapixels ...)

[@ultimatums1]

im on 22 and it's so frustrating to do with the constant hangs and menu responses. sometime, it will open several menus on top of each other and it won't close it even if you clock on close menu. also, it's not clear how to close the camera. shouldn't have to look at documentation for that. smdh, is pmos team thinking?

[@Suppboio]

the keyboard shortcut is really useful

[@vprwave]

That's great, thanks for sharing!
I tried it from a multi-image SD a while back, but actually failed at the not-overly-intuitive log-in at first boot. 😌 For sure will check it out again.

[@MatrixMaverick1980]

Too bad it relies on phone button input, which wares out the buttons.

[@chasarr]

Luckily they are quite cheap to replace. also you don't really need to use your button except for starting the phone. Most things can be done through gestures

[@TechTino]

I'd say the touch gesture system is actually really smooth and I use it 99% of the time, I never use the side buttons