Fedora 38 Looking At A Phosh Image For Mobile Devices

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 38 Looking At A Phosh Image For Mobile Devices

It looks like Fedora could be taking on more mobile ambitions with a Phosh image now proposed for running that Wayland shell focused on smartphones and tablets while delivering a good GNOME-based experience. Separately, a change proposal is expected for also introducing a Fedora Linux image with KDE Plasma Mobile...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-38-Phosh-Proposal

[darkdragon-001]

Maybe for Fedora 38 (expecting Gnome 44), the mobile patches will be upstreamed and the default image with Gnome will work well on mobile devices?
https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/20...ile-an-update/

I tested it on PostmarketOS (https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmap...i-gnome-mobile) myself on Pinephone and was impressed how performant it works given the low specs of the device.

[sinepgib]

Maybe for Fedora 38 (expecting Gnome 44), the mobile patches will be upstreamed and the default image with Gnome will work well on mobile devices?
https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/20...ile-an-update/

I tested it on PostmarketOS (https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmap...i-gnome-mobile) myself on Pinephone and was impressed how performant it works given the low specs of the device.

Do you have any numbers? Have you compared to Android things like battery life or (perceived) responsiveness or memory usage? I'm interested in trying out PostmarketOS but I'm trying to do my proper research on viability first regarding whether to actually keep my current phone with it or just have it as a toy to play with after I change it for a new one (I'll probably buy a new one anyway because the screen is shattered and I replaced it once and it's expensive and much less durable than the original one).

[microcode]

It'll be interesting to see if, over time, this encourages shell and toolkit developers to improve efficiency.
Is there sophisticated performance tracing tooling available, or are the developers basically in the dark right now?

[RahulSundaram]

It'll be interesting to see if, over time, this encourages shell and toolkit developers to improve efficiency.
Is there sophisticated performance tracing tooling available, or are the developers basically in the dark right now?

My understanding is that some of the recent performance improvements have already been driven by people involved in the mobile efforts. There are generic tools like Valgrind(example) that can be used in the context of GNOME as well and sysprof is typically used too.

[ezst036]

Will this Phosh image be limited to OSS type devices such as Pinephone or Librem/Purism (or others), or will it be possible to squeeze this onto a "mainstream" device such as a Samsung, a OnePlus, or Motorola (or others)?

[sinepgib]

It'll be interesting to see if, over time, this encourages shell and toolkit developers to improve efficiency.
Is there sophisticated performance tracing tooling available, or are the developers basically in the dark right now?

Since this is regular native Linux most of the tooling you use on the desktop should work. So I'd say yes, the tooling is most likely good (I know it is on the desktop/server).

[johanb]

Do you have any numbers? Have you compared to Android things like battery life or (perceived) responsiveness or memory usage? I'm interested in trying out PostmarketOS but I'm trying to do my proper research on viability first regarding whether to actually keep my current phone with it or just have it as a toy to play with after I change it for a new one (I'll probably buy a new one anyway because the screen is shattered and I replaced it once and it's expensive and much less durable than the original one).

As someone owning a Librem 5, unless you have very low requirements don't bother (yet).

It's an incredibly fun device to tinker around with, but a lot of basic stuff are still missing. Give it a year or two more. Mobile connection, bluetooth reliability etc usually works but with regular hickups which to me is not acceptible (bad bluetooth headphone connection, VoLTE support not always working etc.). Battery life without any custom tweaking is good enough for a day of light use, but nothing more. What surprised me the most is how well it works to connect it to a dock, it's pretty amazing to just see your apps scale from phone-size to real desktop apps when connecting to a bigger screen, especially apps like maps and firefox. It's not fast though, expect "7 year old cheap chromebook" performance which IMO is alright for a phone. Camera does not have auto-anything (focus, contrast, etc), but if you spend 30 seconds tweaking those settings you can get a picture that is a little blurry and has colors that are a bit off, and if you spend 3 minutes tweaking them you can get a picture with pretty good detail and almost normal colors. Some things are likely better on the PinePhone (Pro) but some things are likely worse as well. So if you are looking for that one, take all I'm saying with a grain of salt.

[sinepgib]

As someone owning a Librem 5, unless you have very low requirements don't bother (yet).

It's an incredibly fun device to tinker around with, but a lot of basic stuff are still missing. Give it a year or two more. Mobile connection, bluetooth reliability etc usually works but with regular hickups which to me is not acceptible (bad bluetooth headphone connection, VoLTE support not always working etc.). Battery life without any custom tweaking is good enough for a day of light use, but nothing more. What surprised me the most is how well it works to connect it to a dock, it's pretty amazing to just see your apps scale from phone-size to real desktop apps when connecting to a bigger screen, especially apps like maps and firefox. It's not fast though, expect "7 year old cheap chromebook" performance which IMO is alright for a phone. Camera does not have auto-anything (focus, contrast, etc), but if you spend 30 seconds tweaking those settings you can get a picture that is a little blurry and has colors that are a bit off, and if you spend 3 minutes tweaking them you can get a picture with pretty good detail and almost normal colors. Some things are likely better on the PinePhone (Pro) but some things are likely worse as well. So if you are looking for that one, take all I'm saying with a grain of salt.

Thanks for the detailed answer, it's super helpful!

To clarify, I'm not planning on buying a Librem or similar. They simply don't ship to my country to begin with. My idea is mainly flashing (maybe having to cooperate in getting the support finished) my current Xiaomi Mi A2 Lite which has been missing security fixes since more than a year ago. I'll probably buy a different, mainstream one anyway. If I buy it'll definitely be Android.
In terms of needs, mine are pretty basic, but there are caveats.
First, I'll need to check how well Waydroid works with WhatsApp. The only other apps that I really use are either commonplace enough to expect a reasonable replacement (say, email client, calculator) or preferably native but where compromises can be made to use web versions (Slack, Telegram, Instagram). So I guess I have a chance, it's just one app that I need to make 100% sure works on Waydroid if I want to keep using that phone as daily driver with PMOS.
Then, I care about battery life (it's already rather short, I need to charge every day). That's where I'm just being picky, I can technically use it if there's a reasonable hit. But since you mention those hickups, yeah, I expect the hardware to Just Work TM properly, even if it feels slightly slower or I have to charge it a bit more often. I don't think I'll dock it, it's a cool feature but I much prefer just using my laptop.

[Quackdoc]

I hope they have x86 images, a lot of older wintabs that can benefit from this, also nice for testing in VMs