sado1

I second this, I use it with a Dell docking station at work (90% sure it’s the same model) and updates for firmware just work on Kubuntu.

As much as I like the idea behind Pine64, make sure you understand what you’re doing - their devices usually need some time before they’re useful, they might underperform, etc.
On the other hand, they’re usually priced well for what they offer, and I think the ARM model of new PineTab might look better than their usual new offerings. Make sure to find out, how polished it is before you buy.

It’s the moderation staff’s responsibility. Sorry for nitpicking, I understand in this case it’s likely the same people.

I just get triggered when I hear that an open source software developer should have any responsibilities at all (maybe apart from some extreme examples), and I wouldn’t like this idea to stick in anyone’s head.

It would be a nice feature, if Phosh behaved a bit different in landscape mode; it wastes too much vertical space, especially using Firefox to browse the web is a disaster. Maybe the top and bottom panel should share screen space at the top instead (each half of the screen); or they should be on the sides instead…

From what I understand, the RISC-V ecosystem is not polished enough yet, so the state of PineTab-V roughly represents the state of the entire platform for desktop Linux.

My personal workaround is a smartphone book case with a spot for the debit card.

I own OP6, on Ubuntu Touch it has an annoying bug with shutdown (see my other reply here).
On mobile Linux, though, it’s quite close: camera is missing, GPS is a bit finicky about SIM card you use, I did not seriously test battery life yet. I plan to give it a proper try to daily drive it soon.

The entire idea of Ubuntu Touch device support, was to be based on Halium. It’s a bit different than regular mobile Linux (outside of Droidian, of course), where mainline is a requirement.

It won’t be much of help, but I have a few devices:

• Xperia X which so far works well, except that it feels like the phone’s internals are a bit too slow for today’s standards, so even if I will use it for the time being, if I were yo,u I would pick something more powerful.
• OnePlus 6 which would be very cool (especially that it’s one of the best phones for regular ‘mobile Linux’ so far), if not for shutdown being bugged, which results in time getting reset on every boot. But it’s fast enough, and I hope the bug will eventually get a fix.
• last time I tried PPP was not good enough, but it’s been ~2 months ago and support was quite fresh. Might need to check again.

I’m as skeptical as you are, but at least they automatically preinstall a few useful gaming apps by default, ie. LatencyFlex.

I think the beginning sets the context - a history of business models related to Unix, and later Linux + Open Source software. It’s important to learn from it.

It also shows that the challenges of the clash between capitalism and software freedom are constantly evolving, and presents how our battles were won (or lost) in the past.

Oh, and as for the touch UIs, not much luck if GNOME doesn’t work well enough. KDE can be made to run well with touch input, but for me it needed some work to configure it. But I liked it afterwards.

There are Mobile Linux UIs (which might run better on tight resources) but I am afraid they might not be good for multitasking on a tablet screen.

Mobile Linux distributions for smartphones might offer some hints on how to tackle your problems - these apps are created in a convergent way, which makes them work well on laptops, tablets and PCs alike. Look for an alternate file manager, for example, to replace Nautilus. Check out https://linuxphoneapps.org/apps/

What do you think about using a keyboard-based workflow: hit Super button (or click on Activities) to make the fullscreen menu pop-up, then write the first few letters of the app name, and finally hit Enter? Search-based workflow is my favourite way to navigate app menu, on GNOME and KDE alike.

Maybe it’s obvious, but how about Kodi?
It has support for CEC (for utilizing your TV’s remote through HDMI), of course there are other input options as well.
There’s plenty of plugins to support online video services. Needs some work to configure them, and sometimes it requires maintenance when a plugin stops working, but I was in general happy with the way it worked while I used it for a few years.

I’m guessing it’s not a big deal to replace it with a third party text messaging open source app; I’m not sure about the Dialer, though.

It would be an interesting solution, to port a few mobile Linux apps to Android (some of them are already there) - I’m a bit worried about potential maintenance burden for platform support; but it could benefit KDE/GNOME apps by getting feedback from a bigger bunch of users.

Looks like the ecosystem still needs another year or two, but it’s going forward steadily.

They chose an action that is not harsh enough for them to be “fired” as mods, yet is strong enough to be visible.

It reminds me (to a certain extent) of absurd protests against communist authorities, which happened in my country back in Cold War times, ie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Alternative . The aim is to make the authorities look like idiots, using force to make them stop. You have to be creative, when you’re fighting with someone who has total control over the platform, for me their move makes sense.

1 for email? Geary is so cool on mobile, this is the last place I would complain about the state of things for mobile Linux.

Agreed on other points - phone calls are an absolutely crucial feature, but it’s one of the last things to be made work well on each model; due to number of technical difficulties related to modem support, modem software stack, and support for making four things work well at the same time: phone calls during suspend, good battery life, wakeup on calls and audio routing.

We’re getting there, but instead of coordinated efforts between different models, each phone requires a per-model/per-SoC solution for these issues - we’re not going to make it work well in the long run, I’m not sure we will ever be able to, given that the issues are directly related to driver support, it will always take some time.

A part of Drew’s issues could be fixed by using something like Mobian stable instead of pmOS. pmOS by design, at this point of time, isn’t able to avoid regressions, if “code freeze + testing” period takes only one month and pmOS gets shipped with known issues and regressions. What in my opinion should be done, is releasing new pmOS as a Release Candidate only, and fixing all regressions per each device, before it’s greenlit and recommended as an update to those using old stable release.

Worth mentioning, this also brings the first ever stable release of Mobian: https://blog.mobian-project.org/posts/2023/06/10/bookworm/
Hardware support still needs more love, as Linux phone ecosystem depends entirely on volunteers writing the drivers, but we’re getting there.