Ivan Janjić 🐧💻Feb 26
elly
I have to say that using Linux on a phone feels... nostalgic? Kinda like Windows Mobile PDAs used to or Android in the very beginning (in a good way).

These days mobile OSes obscure everything from the user, actively punishing them for rooting their devices or instaling custom builds.

Linux on the other hand feels like ~2008. You have apps for daily needs (like you did on PDAs back in the day), you can consume media (reading books, watching movies, listening to music).

But if you're a curious person... there's a terminal. You can see exactly what your device is doing and how it works. You want to know which GPS satellites can see you? No problem, just query the modem-manager or use simple GUI app that will tell you the name of a satellite and which system/country it belongs to (turns out my device supports GALILEO, neat!).

Im really enjoying it. Two years ago I would say it was still unusable, but now (despite WiFi, Audio and Cameras not working on my device yet) it's... neat.

(Post written from xiaomi-pyxis running postmarketOS with Plasma Mobile while walking back home from a supermaket btw)
Feb 26 at 10:07pmWeb
Show threadSebastian KrzyszkowiakFeb 26
@elly 2008 happens to be exactly when I started using GNU/Linux on my phone and never stopped 😁 I changed my phone twice since (not counting replacing units of the same models), though I always used ones where WiFi, audio and (eventually) cameras have worked fine (well, except the first one, there was physically no camera there 😄)
Show threadSebastian KrzyszkowiakFeb 26
@elly Frankly, if I wanted to switch to Android I'd probably have many of the same problems with adjusting that people switching the other way tend to have.
Show threadVal Packett 🧉Feb 27
@elly heh having mobile data but not wifi is a very 00s early smartphone thing
Show threadellyFeb 27
@valpackett I think WiFi might be causing XPU violation to be honest. In:
"Documentation/devicetree/bindings/net/wireless/qcom,ath10k.yaml"

You can find a DT override that tells the driver to not take ownership of the reserved-memory region (as far as I understand it), but doing so causes WiFi firmware to crash. I didn't expect WiFi to give me more issues than a Modem lol.
Show threadVal Packett 🧉Feb 27
@elly so weird. I have several devices with snoc ath10k, from a windows miniPC (sc7180) to various generations of phones (msm8916, msm8917, sdm632, sm6115) and never saw anything like that, wifi was always the easiest thing ever to get working. Gotta compare stuff to see what's different on that device…
Show threadNova🐧✨Feb 27
@elly would you say it's daily drivable if you can daily drive lineageOS (on a oneplus 6 so best compatibility afaik)
Show threadellyFeb 27
@technobaboo It... depends. It definitely can't be the only device you carry with you because of modem wakeup issues (you're pretty much guaranteed to miss a call before phone wakes up from sleep state).

In my case I could just stash a SIM card into a dumbphone or something and use that in case someone needs to call me (which are mostly scammers or government offices these days). Other than that, it definitely is daily-driveable.
I'm tempted to steal i2c lines from NFC, 3D print casing and make a keyboard folio to turn it into a real PDA (like the one Saten had in the beginning of Railgun)

Seeing how modem is done on tensor-based pixels I wonder if we'll have better luck with that once we get to modem bringup on GS101/GS201. It's basically just a PCIe device running it's own firmware, so it can send an interrupt to main SoC on incoming call to wake up, re-enable PCIe link and show the notification.
Show threadMoses IzumiFeb 27
@elly @technobaboo
>I'm tempted to steal i2c lines from NFC, 3D print casing and make a keyboard folio to turn it into a real PDA
I find touch keyboards to be pretty okay if the keys are as wide as my fingernails (i.e f-droid's Simple Keyboard on a horizontal display) but still.

On that note: have you ever considered adding a hardware modding section to the postmarketOS and Chrultrabook websites/forums/docs?
Not only for grafting on input devices, but also building battery packs and replacing the on-board eMMC storage with SD card readers.
Show threadJonFeb 27

@elly your post has sent me down a real rabbit hole today....!

Thank you for reminding me of my Ubuntu Phone days.

If you had to pick best hardware for postmarket, what device would it be, still rabbitting along looking for the answer to that and reading out of date things.