I've spent a week or so using #MobianOS & #phosh and while it's pretty, it's also pretty slow. I know a lot of people warned me about this but it still surprised me because I've used plenty of Linux systems with far lower specs that had much snappier GUI performance.
This got me thinking about what contributes to this and maybe it's got to do with Gnome/GTK and all the various "desktop environment" processes and stuff that go along with it? It could also be the "cleverness", things like having the interface scaled to 200x all the time or the effort to try and make UI's designed for the desktop fit onto the phone screen, etc.
All this gave me the (weird?) idea of dumping phosh/gnome and running something like X11/twm (which was fast even on a 486).
But of course none of the GUI "apps" you expect on a phone would run (or not without adding-back a bunch of dependencies), so I added another weird idea: replace the apps with tcl/tk scripts. Personally, I think tk is a great way to create GUI applications because you don't need to waste any time designing them. You just plop controls into grids or whatever and they kind of float wherever they want to. Some (most?) people want more control because they think this is ugly, but I think an argument can be made that all the effort that has gone into cute/unique UI's has has negligible impact on usability (especially from an accessibility perspective). Wrapping existing commands with tcl/tk GUI wrappers would be a very fast way to recreate the essential phone functions and if you really must do thing the hard way you can always write an x11 application.
Related is the matter of scrolling. One place where the Pinephone's performance issues are most apparent are scrolling. We've come to expect the fake-inertia style of scrolling with our fingers on phones and I'm sure this involves non-trivial amounts of computing resources. Couple this with my personal feelings about scrolling in general (if scrolling was so great we wouldn't have switched to books with pages thousands of years ago) another weird idea is to eliminate scrolling and replace it with pagination. In a device with the form-factor of a small paperback, pagination makes a lot of sense in addition to being faster and require fewer system resources.
Finally the last thing on the hatchet list is multiuser mode. Why should my phone support multiple users? Why should I have to "log-on" to my phone? I understand the utility of locking it (maybe), but I can't think of any reason to dedicate resources to support the ability for more than one person to use my phone, especially more than one person at a time. So I'm considering running the thing in single-user mode as well.
So that's the plan. I'll let you know how it goes and maybe at some point pick a hashtag to link all these rambling posts together.
Aiyame
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Robert Mader
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