Fascists are the only ones who hate antifa.

I got a chance to try #GNOME mobile recently on my OnePlus 6T, but there was a critical flaw that made me switch back to Phosh.

I'll start with what I like about GNOME mobile. I'll say it is the smoothest experience I've on any mobile GNU/Linux environment so far.

GNOME's use of triple buffered swaps in Mutter has made it feel much smoother than the compositors without that feature (such as Phosh, as far as I'm aware). While GNOME mobile feels around the same as modern Android in smoothness, Phosh feels more like Android before project butter (which part of it was adding triple buffering to the Android compositor)

I'll also say that it has a nice set of animations. Phosh is relatively sprarce in that regard, but again GNOME mobile feels more like Android in regards to animations.

Before I talk about the critical flaw, I'll talk about some smaller (but significant) issues with it.

First was the one generally mentioned, in emergency calls anyone can access your contacs. Everybody who installs GNOME Mobile is probably aware of that though.

Second was that even if you select not to show notification content on the lock screen, content in notifications it can be still seen when pulling down the quick settings/notification shade.

So now, the critical flaw.

GNOME has been known (since the release of GNOME 3) for being a fairly CPU heavy desktop environment. GNOME here was pegging at least 1 core on my OnePlus 6T at 100% constantly. Checking the load average confirmed that, as it was always sitting at above 1.

Now being that the phone has 8 cores, it wasn't really a big deal for performance. However, this did directly impact 2 other areas.

First of all, the phone much hotter than it would usually, because of 1 core basically always being at 100%. Sometimes, it was a bit uncomfortable to hold for a while.

But the biggest problem overall was the effects it had on battery life. Now everybody knows mobile GNU/Linux won't give you amazing battery life, and that gets even worse considering the age of the battery on my OnePlus 6T, but on Phosh it was acceptable. Without automatic suspend enabled, I would get somewhere around 16-20 hours of standby time. On GNOME Mobile, that shot down to around 6-8 hours of standby time. The phone wouldn't be able to survive a sleeping session even charged up to full.

I really like how polished GNOME mobile is, especially for something still generally considered somewhat experimental. I hope it continues to get better, and I'd love to be able to daily drive it someday, but for now it's back to Phosh.