No, because Telegram has a centralized and proprietary backend and shouldn’t be used.

Running Element in a browser on your PinePhone, really? I wonder why that is worth reporting, of course it works. If the cameras work, such applications will work.

Also I wonder why that post mentions you have to install Element on a webserver yourself, I’m pretty sure you can just use pre-hosted instances like https://app.element.io

It can actually, it’s under privacy settings in preferences. I’m not trying to justify this feature btw.

Well you’re posting a blog of the Plasma Mobile team, it’ll always be about phone specific stuff lol.

Normally don’t think these style updates fit here

How do they not? This is literally a community about Linux phones, and these are updates for one of the big Linux mobile platforms.

Not really. The PinePhone requires no userland blobs anywhere. I guess you could say the modem isn’t entirely free yet, but even that is being worked on. The first people have already got postmarketOS and buildroot with mainline Linux running on it to replace the original firmware.

To be honest, this is one of the best supported devices. There aren’t that many that support mainline Linux and hardware acceleration. This device is being actively worked on still and stuff like SMS and calling will probably work relatively soon.

Quick promotion of !postmarketos@lemmy.ml 😉

Any device in the community category on the list of supported devices on the postmarketOS wiki has close-to mainline support and will thus support basically anything you want to do with it.

It’s mainly not our target really. We focus on mobile devices mainly, with the extra of also trying to support SBC’s and even smart TV’s if it comes to it (we don’t currently have a port for a smart TV but we would accept it if someone makes it). For laptops like ChromeBooks it’s better to get straight up Alpine Linux running on it.

what just looks like desktop GNOME

That picture is actually Weston, which is basically the first interface anybody should try when they just ported the phone. It’s just used as a demo, it’s not actually usable really.

It seems the Find 7a is using the downstream kernel still (rather than mainline), which means it has no DRM support and can thus not run DE’s like GNOME, Phosh, Plasma Mobile, etc. You will be stuck to interfaces like Weston, XFCE4, etc. So no, if you boot pmOS on it you won’t be able to use it like an actual phone. Besides, it seems modem support is missing so you wouldn’t be able to call or be called.

Finally, I have TWRP installed on that phone and I really like it, so am I able to still have it as the default recovery image?

Sure you can, we don’t touch the recovery. It’s however not really useful for non-Android OS’s.

so I’m wondering if anyone has had any experience booting it on the 7.

It seems there isn’t a device port for it so no I don’t think anybody tried it yet (or they failed, who knows). You can give it a shot porting yourself, we’d love to help you out on our Matrix channel!

And you can try it on postmarketOS too! 😁

/me sneaks in link to !postmarketos@lemmy.ml

Thanks for posting this here! I did not know about this community yet

I’m not sure what you mean? You can just register an account on a Dendrite server using any client that supports registration.

You can already try it out! Use this version of Element and register an account on https://dendrite.matrix.org. That Element version is built straight from the PR adding support for Spaces to Element. It hasn’t been merged yet but you can test it out that way.

Make sure to enables spaces from the “Lab” setting.

Interesting, most people seem to think Plasma Mobile looks more like Android than Phosh does. That’s not a bad thing imo, it’s what most people are familiar with so they can get used to it quickly.

Thanks for the tip! I’ve used Lemmy before federation was a thing and not since, so this is new to me.

Not the OS, but one of. We had our own community edition (the postmarketOS CE PinePhone) and since then there have been editions for Manjaro, Mobian and Plasma Mobile (and before us Ubuntu Touch).

Ubuntu Touch is it’s own beast. It’s Linux, but really closer to Android in how it works than a regular Linux distribution. It has a read-only filesystem and you install applications using it’s own Click format.

postmarketOS however is a true “regular” Linux distribution. The whole system can be written to, you have root rights by default and you update your system and install applications using a package manager (apk, don’t confuse it with Android’s apk format!).

Oh, so this would even allow using a completely different front-end, or even running an instance without one just to be used with native applications?

@onlooker@lemmy.ml is right, monitors of comparable size are way pricier than TV’s. If you want something big, you get a TV.