Phosh 0.56.0

This is a good example of a poor web site design. If you, like me, do not know what Phosh is and go to their website, it will tell you not much beyond "A user interface for your mobile phone," which could mean pretty much anything. Is it a UI level on top of Android? Is it an idependent mobile OS? How it is better that competition? What are key features and design goals?

Linux has long been the most practical laptop OS for me, but I can't see it ever being competitive with mobile OSes, and that's coming from someone who wants it to succeed (I've installed postmarketOS on a OP6T). I just don't see how it will overcome the various issues (app support, tap-to-pay, camera quality, etc).

The fact I thought it was a custom UI over stock android means they got this well rounded.

I've installed this on my Surface Go 2 64GB. Runs smooth! Absolutely the best tablet experience for Linux. The support is also wild: My silly questions are answered within hours.

What are the best phones/distros to use phosh with?

Seemed interesting until I read that Phosh pulls in GNOME - gnome-settings, gnome-session etc. Seems like a very strange bundle to bring in for an extremely power constrained device, where every % of increased battery drain is noticed by the user

The name sounds like someone driving by at high speed ...

Terrible name. It's going to fail on those grounds alone.

Not that it would really succeed otherwise. You need Android app compatibility to stand a remote chance.

The fact I thought it was a custom UI over stock android means they got this well rounded.

The name sounds like someone driving by at high speed ...

I've never understood tap-to-pay being a dealbreaker issue. It takes me just as long to pull out my credit card as it does to pull out my phone, and you can use them on the exact same terminals.

App support and camera quality I can understand more. I'm on a Linux phone using Phosh (FLX1s), and there's Android app compatibility, but it is a little rough (and of course things that rely on Play Integrity won't work). I've managed to avoid tying myself to anything that requires Google for now, but I acknowledge that I'm lucky there.

As long as every phone distro is just a desktop distro shoehorned on a small screen, that's not gonna happen.

IMO it's not a matter of tap to pay and camera quality, rather a matter of whole system paradigm. Having millions of disconnected services in the "do one thing and do it right" spirit and using text based communication and hundreds of python and shell scripts is relatively maintainable and relatively easy to use, but very inefficient when it comes to CPU cycles - and on a handheld every cycle counts.

And of course every app is optimized for desktops/laptops... but I guess that's a chicken-or-egg problem: once there is a working distro, there will be apps too. And once there will be apps to use, there will be a working distro. Maybe.

The main issue is lack of banking app support for me. Without that (which the banks will never allow) you would always need two phones.

Oddly enough I am using Win10 right now on my laptop. On my main computer I use linux but I also got tired having to set up things specifically for the laptop or be locked down in a specific distribution; plus, I also have to run various software on the laptop and when the rest of the class or group uses Windows, and you are the sole Linux person, it feels very lonely. So I fake being a win user in that case.

What are the best phones/distros to use phosh with?

I have a oneplus6 and use a mobile version of Debian called "Mobian". postmarketOS is a really good choice, and they have a wiki of supported devices: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

I'm a certified gnome hater, but a phone is basically the perfect application for it. As far as resource usage goes, I have been dailying an FLX1 for a year and a half now and Firefox is the only noticeable resource hog

Why? What's particularly heavy in these gnome tools?

Like the particular programs are no issue, but the whole UNIX-userspace as done in the mainframe era and still is. Like you definitely need cooperative program suspend/resume like on Android for any kind of sane battery life, but that's unfortunately completely missing in case of GNU/Linux.

Phosh is not based on gnome-shell and has its own settings and apps, but it does use parts of gnome, no reason to reinvent the wheel.

> Seems like a very strange bundle to bring in for an extremely power constrained device, where every % of increased battery drain is noticed by the user

I'm sure you can make your Frankenstein version that would be 10% as usable and secure as phosh by removing everything but for most users, 100mb more ram and 1% more battery drain for an OS aiming to be a daily driver is something that's worth it.

It works kind of okay for recent devices as phones are very powerful nowadays, Phosh on a <2015 device is much more painful though.

Terrible name. It's going to fail on those grounds alone.

Not that it would really succeed otherwise. You need Android app compatibility to stand a remote chance.

> You need Android app compatibility

That's not phosh's problem; waydroid is a pretty much independent component.

I have a oneplus6 and use a mobile version of Debian called "Mobian". postmarketOS is a really good choice, and they have a wiki of supported devices: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

It works kind of okay for recent devices as phones are very powerful nowadays, Phosh on a <2015 device is much more painful though.

Why? What's particularly heavy in these gnome tools?

Gnomes' a massive memory hog

I was looking at this and thinking maybe it would improve a cheap android phone. But now I know it's running gnome I won't even consider trying

Gnomes' a massive memory hog

I was looking at this and thinking maybe it would improve a cheap android phone. But now I know it's running gnome I won't even consider trying

> maybe it would improve a cheap android phone.

Not in a million worlds. Android is by far the most optimized OS (as a whole, including user space, graphics stack everything) for mobile devices. It's almost like the most widely used mobile operating system has had quite a bit of dev hours spent on it.

Every desktop environment is a massive memory hog. Do you really want something minimal like xfce on a touchscreen?

Do you have any numbers? The last numbers I remember seeing, had XFCE around 500 MB and gnome around 700 MB. I'm trying to find some current numbers, but it's a pretty tough thing.

Without any different numbers, I think saying a massive memory hog is a little hyperbolic. Applications in use, especially browsers, are going to dwarf the desktop environment anyway. Having the polish is well worth it to many people, myself included.

I would definitely like to see less memory requirements for the various desktop environments, but at the end of the day I don't pay for any of this

Do you have any numbers? The last numbers I remember seeing, had XFCE around 500 MB and gnome around 700 MB. I'm trying to find some current numbers, but it's a pretty tough thing.

I would definitely like to see less memory requirements for the various desktop environments, but at the end of the day I don't pay for any of this

Every desktop environment is a massive memory hog. Do you really want something minimal like xfce on a touchscreen?

SXMO is pretty minimal in that regard, but it doesn't force you to use the touchscreen. Can also navigate through menus via the volume buttons...

I've been using openbox for over a decade. That's completely false. Xfce is not a memory hog. And it's not minimal either it's fully functional.

Gnome is a bloated mess of a thing and I hate it. Why would anyone want their desktop to use over 1gb of ram. I have a 32gb laptop and I still loath the idea of throwing away memory on such a bloated awful thing.

Running gnome on a phone. Yeah... No

SXMO is pretty minimal in that regard, but it doesn't force you to use the touchscreen. Can also navigate through menus via the volume buttons...

Even that will be a massive energy vampire compared to android, that had top notch engineers working on it for close to 2 decades...

I've been using openbox for over a decade. That's completely false. Xfce is not a memory hog. And it's not minimal either it's fully functional.

Running gnome on a phone. Yeah... No

It doesn't run GNOME Shell, which is the main memory hog of GNOME.

It uses some GNOME services, namely so it doesn't have to invent it's own. None of these services are memory heavy and all have a purpose (e.g. managing Bluetooth)

Phosh is not based on gnome-shell and nobody cares if you want to run openbox on your phone.

Even that will be a massive energy vampire compared to android, that had top notch engineers working on it for close to 2 decades...

Yes and no, SXMO will work without hardware acceleration, I've not tried but I doubt that Android will.

Additionally, minimum requirements of Android 17 are way above what SXMO allows.

With Phosh you would have a point but SXMO is lighter than a modern Android.

I've installed this on my Surface Go 2 64GB. Runs smooth! Absolutely the best tablet experience for Linux. The support is also wild: My silly questions are answered within hours.

Phosh is not based on gnome-shell and has its own settings and apps, but it does use parts of gnome, no reason to reinvent the wheel.

> Seems like a very strange bundle to bring in for an extremely power constrained device, where every % of increased battery drain is noticed by the user

I think it’s more a failing of a link aggregator site like this one dropping you into a release announcement page without context. If you don’t already know what Phosh is, why would you read their 0.56.0 announcement? Normally you wouldn’t. But here we are. Putting “The Phosh project aims to provide a daily-usable, robust and easy to use graphical user environment for mobile devices running mainline Linux” on every release page feels like a waste of time.

As it is I didn’t find it at all difficult to find the answers to your questions by going to the “about page”.

From that same website:

> About Phosh

> The Phosh project aims to provide a daily-usable, robust and easy to use graphical user environment for mobile devices running mainline Linux. The name is a portmanteau of phone and shell as phosh was one of the first components developed by the project. It hence coined the whole project’s name and is still one of its core components. All of Phosh is entirely Free Software.

The main issue is lack of banking app support for me. Without that (which the banks will never allow) you would always need two phones.

At the risk of sounding really old can't you use your computer/laptop for that?

I've never understood tap-to-pay being a dealbreaker issue. It takes me just as long to pull out my credit card as it does to pull out my phone, and you can use them on the exact same terminals.

As long as every phone distro is just a desktop distro shoehorned on a small screen, that's not gonna happen.

> You need Android app compatibility

That's not phosh's problem; waydroid is a pretty much independent component.

It doesn't run GNOME Shell, which is the main memory hog of GNOME.

It uses some GNOME services, namely so it doesn't have to invent it's own. None of these services are memory heavy and all have a purpose (e.g. managing Bluetooth)

Phosh is not based on gnome-shell and nobody cares if you want to run openbox on your phone.

With tap-to-pay, you can store multiple cards in your digital wallet, and you don't have to remember any of their PINs. You can use your fingerprint to sign transactions. I believe this makes it faster.

I often leave the house without my wallet these days. It’s great. Especially riding the subway, where Apple’s transit functionality means you don’t have to do anything other than tap your device without even unlocking, is a very nice convenience when you’re carrying groceries or something similar.

Tap to pay isn't itself a dealbreaker, for me it's more a representation of the status-quo and what is to come, specifically how more and more of the modern world will rely on integrations with proprietary software and hardware on phones. Tap to pay with credit cards isn't too big of a deal, but the wallet as a whole (i.e. boarding passes for airplanes, gift cards, ChargePoint tap-in) is a major feature.

> It takes me just as long to pull out my credit card

It can be a lifestyle difference.

I personally don't being my wallet in most daily trips, have no use of it. I used to stick a credit card in my phone case but also got rid of it as more stores reliably offered wireless and QR code payments.

Mind you this comes with a specific environment I don't expect everyone to live in or long for, I'm just explaining.

I just put my debit card in the pocket in my phone case. Job done. If yours doesn't have a pocket, you can try putting it between the phone in the case. In that scenario, I suggest turning off NFC on the phone so it doesn't keep trying to read the card.

From personal experience, many apps work suprisingly well on Phosh. The thing keeping me from using a Droidian phone with Phosh was a seemingly device-specific issue with answering regular phone calls. Kind of ironic that the linux phone could do many apps from FlatHub flawlessly with touch and everything, but not regular phone stuff. Nevertheless, the smartphone part is handled quite well with the Settings app, the quick toggles, the support for flatpaks, and so on, especially with Wayland where the android ecosystem is within reach.

If I read correctly, you identified the lack of smarthpone-level apps and distro as the limiting factor. In my opinion, the lack of sufficiently powerful but still open hardware is what we miss. Mainline linux with proper hardware support is pretty good but not complete on the Snapdragon 845, a 9 y/o platform. Anything newer? Nearly impossible without some android-specific layers (such as libhybris in the case of Droidian). Currently mid-high level hardware with PinePhone-like openness would probably let Phosh (and Plasma-Mobile, SXMO etc.) distros strive. The smart features, as in the apps, are mostly there.

> maybe it would improve a cheap android phone.

Yes and no, SXMO will work without hardware acceleration, I've not tried but I doubt that Android will.

Additionally, minimum requirements of Android 17 are way above what SXMO allows.

With Phosh you would have a point but SXMO is lighter than a modern Android.

Lighter for what? Displaying a clock?

Add a bunch of fat, semi-desktop binaries that actually provide some kind of functionality to make it remotely comparable, and then you just have a worse, fatter system that runs hot and wastes the battery.

Android is a unified system working together to make the device race to sleep as fast as possible, with as few wakeups as feasible (e.g. batch together events that would wake up the device).

As it is I didn’t find it at all difficult to find the answers to your questions by going to the “about page”.

From that same website:

> About Phosh

At the risk of sounding really old can't you use your computer/laptop for that?

Unfortunately not. A lot of UK banks require using your mobile phone as the 2nd factor to log on to online banking on your laptop. They used to issue fobs/card readers, but have moved to using the app for this now.

There's also thresholds where a simple tap of a card won't work and you need to insert the chip, not the case with the phone. Phone is much much easier, don't even have to open the wallet app, just unlock the phone with your fingerprint and tap.

> It takes me just as long to pull out my credit card

It can be a lifestyle difference.

Mind you this comes with a specific environment I don't expect everyone to live in or long for, I'm just explaining.

See, I have to have my driver's license, but if I could have that on my phone as well, I might do this. Running out of battery is largely not a concern for me as I already carry an external battery with multiple days of charge.

Lighter for what? Displaying a clock?

Android is a unified system working together to make the device race to sleep as fast as possible, with as few wakeups as feasible (e.g. batch together events that would wake up the device).

Lighter as SXMO will run on a low budget 1GB of RAM armv7 handheld released in 2014 (maybe even 512MB of RAM), even without 3D acceleration and Android 17 just won't, no matter how much you tweak it

Ah interesting. We're still on the email/sms 2FA

Lighter as SXMO will run on a low budget 1GB of RAM armv7 handheld released in 2014 (maybe even 512MB of RAM), even without 3D acceleration and Android 17 just won't, no matter how much you tweak it

And what? I mean, I can also just run Linux on a raspberry pi and connect a screen to it. That in itself will have zero relevant features, it's a Linux with a screen that you can toy around with, not a phone.

In Denmark at least we have this, both our drivers license and social security cards are apps on our phones. I only need my old physical drivers license when I leave the country.

Ah interesting. We're still on the email/sms 2FA

In Denmark at least we have this, both our drivers license and social security cards are apps on our phones. I only need my old physical drivers license when I leave the country.

I don't see how it's relevant if you want something that works on said device?

In terms of resources I think it's roughly going like this, from lighter to heavier:

SXMO < Lomiri (Ubuntu Touch) < Plasma mobile < Android < Phosh < Gnome mobile

I could also add XFCE but they officially don't support mobile.

Android isn't the lightest mobile environment by any conceivable means, maybe it's the most featured but certainly not the most optimized for low-end devices, the days of Android 11 are over.

You need 4GB of ram, a good CPU and full hardware acceleration to run modern Android.

And if the next Android bumps the requirements again, I would put it at the end of the list.

I don't see how it's relevant if you want something that works on said device?

In terms of resources I think it's roughly going like this, from lighter to heavier:

SXMO < Lomiri (Ubuntu Touch) < Plasma mobile < Android < Phosh < Gnome mobile

I could also add XFCE but they officially don't support mobile.

Android isn't the lightest mobile environment by any conceivable means, maybe it's the most featured but certainly not the most optimized for low-end devices, the days of Android 11 are over.

You need 4GB of ram, a good CPU and full hardware acceleration to run modern Android.

And if the next Android bumps the requirements again, I would put it at the end of the list.

Featured img

Phosh 0.56.0 Link to heading

A new major release of Phosh is out. See below for a list of changes across individual components:

Core components Link to heading

phosh 0.56.0 Link to heading

A graphical shell for mobile devices

Summary of changes Link to heading

New load meter plugin for the top bar (demo)
Allow to hide applications from the app-grid when GNOME Software is not in use. This helps on immutable distro variants like postmarketOS Duranium and Phosh’s BengalOS to hide applications that are shipped in the base image:
Improvements and bug fixes:
- Allow to enable syncthing plugin via mobile settings
- Show notification when app can’t be uninstalled
- Avoid slow startup notification (with e.g. Firefox) by tracking apps we forked so they get more time during startup
- Unquote app-id’s if the app accidentally quotes them fixing another case of seemingly slow startup
- Avoid Bluetooth quick setting getting disabled on output changes
- Allow to rotate lock screen on tablets
- Apply cutout config changes immediately
- Lockscreen style improvements
- Some crash and leak fixes
Issues fixed:
Contributors:
- Domenico Iezzi
- Gotam Gorabh
- Guido Günther
- johnwa
- nicole mikołajczyk

i18n updates Link to heading

UI translations:
- Anders Jonsson (sv)
- Antonio Marin (ro)
- Asier Saratsua Garmendia (eu)
- Danial Behzadi (fa)
- Daniel Rusek (cs)
- Ekaterine Papava (ka)
- Emin Tufan Çetin (tr)
- Flynn Peck (kw)
- Hugo Carvalho (pt)
- Jürgen Benvenuti (de)
- Luiggi R. Cardoso (pt_BR)
- Martin (sl)
- Rafael Fontenelle
- Ryo Nakano (ja)
- Victoria Niedzielska (pl)
- Yaron Shahrabani (he)
- Yuri Chornoivan (uk)
- Марко Костић (sr)

Detailed list of changes | Tarball | Checksum | Signature

phoc 0.56.0 Link to heading

A Wayland compositor for mobile devices

Summary of changes Link to heading

Update to wlroots 0.20.1
Some internal cleanups and fixes
New protocol support:
- xdg-toplevel-tag-v1
Contributors:
- Guido Günther

i18n updates Link to heading

UI translations:
- Ekaterine Papava (ka)

Detailed list of changes | Tarball | Checksum | Signature

stevia 0.56.0 Link to heading

A user friendly on-screen keyboard

Summary of changes Link to heading

Allow to specify default layout per app. This allows to e.g. always use the terminal layout with Emacs.
Enable key repeat to non-modifier keys in the shortcuts bar
Add cursor keys to shortcuts bar by default
Add locale and flavor to layout information so Mobile Settings can make use of it.
Switch to ext-data-control-v1 for paste handling
Issues fixed:
- https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/stevia/-/work_items/105
Updated layouts
- ge: Add missing keys
Contributors:
- Guido Günther
- Łukasz Osadnik
- skysphr