Hi folks! Yesterday, I joined the club and installed PostmarketOS+phosh on my “new” OnePlus6. Besides a usb-c (power only) cable that cost me an hour to troubleshoot, everything went smoothly.
Well, nearly everything. What I cant figure out at this point is how to install and get software. I’m on the latest stable release which might have been a mistake but I’m usually quite cautious at first.
So my problem is pmos came with 16 apps preinstalled and the software app only shows these when I open it. Can someone confirm or deny if this is normal? I asked around in 5 different places for stuff in the last 16 hrs (yes, I did sleep in between) and I know a lot of stuff now but this I could not figure out. :D
I know I can install flatpak, which I did but it never shows any results at all which I find unrealistic. I put in the repo like it is shown in the wiki and I have internet. Something else must be wrong.
I’m an admin by trade and I do some software development as a hobby so feel free to assume I know how to use the command line. I’m only a full time linux user for maybe half a year.
Anybody got ideas what might be wrong?
Flatpak while agnostic is currently only working as expected on x86_64
https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/5210
Postmarket uses Alpine for its base; if the package exists in the Alpine base repo you’re using then no issues.
https://liliputing.com/how-to-install-apps-in-postmarketos-with-phosh-shell/
So its essentially like this for two years now… all the apps hang in alpine testing and none make it to postmarketOS. Thats sad.
I filed a bunch of issues today and started testing with phoc and phosh on my pc to help speed this up a little but without a real process its slow and draining.
Its a great project but the wiki needs to be more detailed and honest. I requested an account to help with that.
Thanks for mentioning it.
Alpine edge testing apps are in postmarketOS edge. So yeah, not all of them make it to stable, but quite a few do:
For software listed on https://linuxphoneapps.org/ the count is as follows: Alpine 3.19: 160 Alpine edge: 198
(Source: https://linuxphoneapps.org/packaged-in/)
The difference should be mostly the apps that have not made it beyond testing, yet.
Please note that you can also try installing testing apps on stable by
apk add PKGNAME --repository=http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing, or, maybe as more safe way of doing this, use distrobox, install alpine:latest in it, and changing/etc/apk/repositories/to make it edge instead of 3.19.You can also try to build some software that’s not packaged by coming up with your own APKBUILDs, I did so a while ago on https://framagit.org/linmobapps/apkbuilds, maybe the notes I left there can be helpful to you.
Regarding Wikis: They always get stale, so clarifications and additions are surely welcome!
Thanks for the suggestions. Thats exactly the route I‘m taking. I made an account on alpines gitlab and also did a gnome app tutorial to make some rudimentary things for the phone.
While we‘re at it: do you know if there is any way to get alpine apk visible in gnome software? Its driving me nuts that flatpak is visible and apk which is a lot of stuff can only be installed through cli.
Nice!
It’s a long standing issue, for context I recommend reading https://blogs.gnome.org/pabloyoyoista/2023/03/05/gs-and-pmos-a-bumpy-road/
Thanks a lot for mentioning this. In other words, this does work on edge. But it does not work for me on stable… the question being if its because stable or because of a bug…
It did work on edge at the time of that post (March 2023), and IIRC it may have worked in stable 23.06 (the release right after that post) - I don’t have a device still running that to confirm. It since broke again, and it’s currently broken in stable and testing (it’s definitely broken for me in edge in both Plasma Mobile (KDE Discover) and Phosh/GNOME Mobile (GNOME Software). So don’t go to edge because of this, especially not right now.
Wow! Now I‘m somehow more informed and confused at the same time which is on par for my experience with linux phones so far :D
Thank you very much for elaborating. This is really important info for me.
So, it might be my device on 23.12 stable that is having issues but it might also be 23.12 itself that is causing this. Please correct me if thats wrong.
As flatpak apps show (correct?) your situation is not different from what I would expect. I installed 23.12 on one of my devices and see a similar behavior. Generally, assuming you did start with a Phosh image or used pmbootstrap and chose phosh as UI (and did not, say, start out with Plasma Mobile and then switched over to Phosh, which can cause weirdness), I think we can safely say that this not just an issue on your end. This is very likely a general issue on 23.12 and edge currently.
Why isn’t it fixed already? It sure seems to be difficult, and most “long termers” (extrapolating from my own behavior) likely have given up on using front-ends like GNOME Software or KDE Discover and have become fluent enough with apk and flatpak on the terminal and thus don’t contribute to a solution.
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Please don’t ever suggest this. That approach is prone to breakage and shouldn’t be used. You’re installing an app built against edge on a stable release which has different versions of libraries and might even be missing dependencies entirely. If you want something from testing, just switch to edge and enable the entire testing repo.
It is not a product as so much a project. I would recommend reading up on the goals and mission of postmarketos and instead support rather than point out shortcomings.
If you are a developer I’m sure the team would be happy to give write access but considering your novice experience your opinion is likely less important than actually improving things.
Testing out the x86 builds using qemu is typically the first step to understanding and if you want to make changes, opening a PR or demonstrating your value to the project would make it more worthwhile for them.
I’m am a follower of this project myself and have nothing to do with postmarketos or the wiki.
I know
Thats what I‘m doing. I‘m opening issues all over the place, using my laptop to debug stuff and will likely make PRs soon but as I said, it takes a long time to understand stuff because no process. I‘d suggest you take constructive criticism as a positive thing instead of undermining my effort.
There is a general misunderstanding between folks that posts like mine are anything but a way to both give feedback, point to onboarding issues and asking for direction. Pointing out that someone „demonstrate their value“ is one reason our world is so fucked. I dont need to demonstrate my value. I fix things and I help with things. If people dont see value in that, they can f off.
I know you likely mean good so I will just turn around now and read up on the qemu stuff and try to provide more help and fixes.
This is … a bit false. Flatpaks do show in GNOME Software on other distributions, and while not every app on Flathub supports aarch64, many do. I somehow managed to not have a with postmarketOS stable and Phosh here right now (I misplaced my PinePhone that runs that combination), so I can’t say if it would work for me. It definitely works on other distributions, though; but there’s always the added difficulty of imperfect app metadata making it a game of luck to recognise a mobile friendly app as such.
That said, you can always install packages from the terminal, flatpak (flatpak install …) or apk (apk add …) or otherwise. To find apps to look at, maybe LinuxPhoneApps.org can be useful.
My statement is true , that flatpak is arch agnostic but primarily supports x86.
I never said it didn’t or wouldn’t work; if you’re not seeing your apps it’s not because they don’t exist, they aren’t built for aarch64 and target x86
https://discourse.flathub.org/t/how-to-provide-binaries-for-both-aarch64-arm64-and-x86-64-regular-64-bit/3521
I was referring to “Flatpak […] is currently only working as expected on x86_64” is … if not false, then far too easy to misunderstand. Flatpak works just as well on aarch64 for (at least) hundreds of apps. The software that’s not available on, e.g., flathub for aarch64 (but is available for x86_64) in most cases is not available (in compiled form) for aarch64 at all — because it is proprietary with vendors not caring about aarch64, or … just is electron-based ;-}.
It’s not Flatpak, it’s the entire aarch64 software ecosystem that’s lacking here. Stating “Linux on aarch64 has less available software than x86_64, which is especially so for proprietary software” would have been a far better statement.
Without any further configuration, might as well as add that to your edited paraphrased quote.
The op said it wasn’t working, I’m only agreeing with him that it doesn’t work as expected.
Your lengthy explanation of flatpak doesn’t seem to be postmarketos related.
Please correct me, but AFAIK, necessary configuration of flatpak (e.g., configuring remotes) depends more on the distribution than the architecture (as long as the architecture is supported at all, that is - so x86_64 or aarch64 AFAIK).
Sure? https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/merge_requests/4820 And does it hurt to mention differences in software support between x86_64 and aarch64? I would see your point if I had talked at length about Snaps. ;-)
got it, because the project supports flatpak, you feel like you need to explain it. yes, if the op configures flatpak to use a repo that has aarch software then flatpak works as expected. glad that could be cleared up.