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Jake - 2021-10-20 9:35 PM
Whenever my Planet phones break, which is pretty frequent, I unearth my Priv stuck on Marshmallow. Your Key2 is far ahead of mine.
Given that your PP is still in production as the much more robust PPro rolls out, is very interesting. Niche vs Daily Driver, but from the same company.
Your kit is as retro as anybody's here
You fit right in.
Jake
Thanks Jake! From what I've read here there are certainly a few people who have been experimenting with various 'smartphone with keyboard' types of devices. Interestingly I've briefly owned both a Priv
(moved to a Galaxy S7 after I cracked the screen - I loved the sliding keyboard though
) and a Gemini
(I couldn't get on with the keyboard that only opened to one angle - more of a 'me' problem than a criticism
). The Key2 is quite imperfect in use
(mostly due to a lot of Android apps not getting on with the screen ratio
) but 'good enough' as phone I can do some serious typing on when needed.
I've done a little more playing with the Pinephone, and I have some updated findings / observations:
- I found I was able to install Plasma desktop on Mobian and I hoped this would give my my ideal 'Debian+KDE' system, but it's poorly optimised vs. pmOS so Plasma ran very slowly. It's also very difficult to completely remove Phosh - I suspect part of the reason it's so slow is the number of unnecessary processes running in the background. I'm back on pmOS again. I'm losing the dpkg / apt package system
(Alpine / pmOS has the apk system instead, which does most of the same things with different commands
), as well as the larger number of packages in the Debian reposititories. It does have the advantage of running very light on resources - Certainly useful on the Pinephone!
- Abiword turns out to have a few issues running in Plasma with Wayland
(the new display server / compositor for Linux
) - If you use the menus the titlebar/toolbars start flashing and it becomes unusable. If you run Plasma using X11 instead of Wayland this is fixed but then you lose most of the touch optimisations
(the touchscreen effectively becomes a mouse
). I was able to get around this by running Plasma with Wayland but launching Abiword with a command telling it to use X11. This should probably work for any other applications that misbehave in Wayland so useful to know!
- The terminal
(outside of Plasma
) and login screen are both in portrait format. I've found I can rotate the terminal so I'll set this command to run on boot. It should be possible to set the login screen
(SDDM
) to landscape but I haven't got this to work yet. I tried bypassing this by enabling auto-login but Plasma then didn't launch.
- I've still not tried out email clients.
Altogether I'm pleased with how well the Pinephone works as a mini-laptop / HPC, especially given that this isn't the focus of most of the development effort at the moment. This may well change once the keyboard case arrives - Here's hoping...