I've had a bit more time to play with @postmarketOS.
It is a joy.
I must look at how I can contribute, as this is a massively useful project, which I can see liberating numerous devices from outdated OSs in the future.
Discussion
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@neil @postmarketOS I’m still waiting for someone to liberate the pile of outdated iPads in my drawer. No idea why that is such an issue but I’m an admin not dev. Phones I get to dispose usually seen some hard time long before getting obsolete. People tend to care more about tablets. AFAIK it’s still just a branched iOS? Maybe @cas knows?
@neil @postmarketOS I'm using postmarketos on a pinephone to host my gitea system, works really well and otherwise would just be a wasted device
@neil Not just outdated devices. It's the key to liberating us all from Apple and Google. Nobody else is doing a real viable alternative like @postmarketOS is.
@neil @postmarketOS And I don't know if this is intentional or not, but I *love* the double entendre where "postmarket" can be interpreted either as "you install it after you buy the device" (as *all* software/OS's should be, by law, for consumer safety) or as "post-capitalism".
@neil Thanks to a kind loaner from a reader, I have a testbed phone, and flashed it with pmOS Edge + Plasma Mobile on Thursday.
TBH my impression was that the UI is shockingly flakey. I can't even open the browser. Great deal of flickering & redraws.
I wanted to try something non-Gnomic as I already have a GnomePhone: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/03/furiphone_flx1/
But this ain't gonna be it. Wondering if I should try Lomiri instead, or Gnome Mobile in place of Phosh (which is what Furilabs uses)...
We need lighter, faster FOSS phone OSes. GNOME & KDE are behemoths. 😞 In market share, in resource demands, in RAM & CPU consumption.
We had attractive, responsive GUIs in 0.5 MB of RAM and single-digit MHz of CPU 30 years ago. If it takes a gig of RAM, it's broken, simple as.
@neil if you figure out how to get camera and Wi-Fi of any phone to work, please tell me
(such feature must be previously broken)
(such feature must be previously broken)
@neil @Unreed @postmarketOS @cas Well PostmarketOS is supported on iPX and older so I assume it’s using the same checkm8 hack to bypass bootloader lock that should be applicable to iPadOS too…
And yes. There should be some easier way to support open source project funding. Something like buying a share on sprint with defined task. Buy me a cofee is somehow too abstract for me.
@neil *shudder*
Unity FTW. Failing that, Xfce.
@neil I might try that, then. Phosh looks slick and it's quick on the Furi phone, but the launcher is tiny and there's no drawer. So I put all my apps in groups... Only to discover you can't pin groups to the favourites bar. The phrase "WTAF?" sprang to mind.
It has way too few gestures (basically 2, swipe in from left or up from the bottom) and it doesn't support a button bar, so it basically reduces a capacitative touchscreen to a single button mouse. That was OK on a monochrome Mac in System 7 in the '80s but it's not really acceptable 40 years later.
It makes more sense on a phone than on a desktop, but it still feels very limiting to me. Like GNOME everywhere, it's claustrophobic: it makes me feel trapped and most of my familiar controls don't work any more.
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