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Pocketblue – Fedora Atomic for mobile devices
  • Tepix
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  • 12 minutes ago
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Oh, Linux on mobile. My cynic take:

- only works with very few phone models

- battery doesn’t last long

- bad UI with tiny elements.

- not managing a smooth refresh rate

- no apps

That‘s the pattern we‘ve seen over and over again. The only approach that has worked better is to base things on AOSP.

This is a really cool project, and IMHO the most important new-comer in the #MobileLinux distro space in a long time, as it takes a model proven on desktop, building upon a well-run distribution (Fedora) and applies it to mobile.

I have yet to attempt daily-driving it, but just trying it and easily switching mobile shells (e.g., from Plasma Mobile to Phosh) so easily[0] without have weird side-effects from the previous environment has been quite exciting!

[0]: https://pocketblue.github.io/devices/oneplus-sdm845/#images-...

Updating without worries has made it much more daily-drivable for me on a Oneplus 6 (ie. it has rollbacks and image-based updates), despite being so new. It's fun that image-based OSs - which were arguably popularlized by phones - are now coming back to phones on the Linux side too.
This is based on bootc (bootable containers), so note that the OS build is described in a normal Dockerfile: https://github.com/pocketblue/pocketblue/blob/main/Container... which is then run by the Github action (or locally).

Very similar to how Universal Blue, Bazzite, Bluefin etc. build at https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite (see their Containerfile), but for mobile.

Has a similar mission to https://postmarketos.org, but with a different build system AFAICT

Are we really bringing OCI to freaking OS builds? Nothing about OCI is pleasant. A list of Tarballs is the most backwards boot format I can think of. Terrible for reproducibility. Terrible for security.

Boot images should be Dm-verity protected EROFS images. We should not be building new things on OCI. It's really mind-blowing to me that this is a new direction people who are supposed to be top of class OS builders are moving to as a direction.

They took the CoreOS dream and threw everything in the trash

Very cool project, just wish it was a available on a wider range of devices. Hopefully someday!
It doesn't look like there's anything in the way of information posted that includes screenshots or what apps are included or available? Am I missing the link?
It's a new-ish project FYI. But to answer your questions:

- Apps: It's Linux (like desktop or server), but "image-based" so you install apps in containers like iOS or Android do (and therefore OS updates basically-never break). https://flathub.org is generally the main app store for Linux containerized phone apps.

- Screenshots: It'll look the same as other Linux-on-phones, so like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostmarketOS for instance. It's just built differently.

Supported devices:

Xiaomi pad 5/6

Oneplus 6/6T

... That's it.

Does anyone know if there's plans for more? Is this project in very early stages, or is it going to be another Graphene OS with an extremely limited device support?

There's also Poco F1, we just haven't released it yet, and I am yet to add it to the docs (we'll have a single common image for both op6(t) and beryllium soon)

There's also a person working on a Fairphone 5 support and I think someone was going to work on a PinePhone port

Contributions are always welome, we need more devices!

No shade meant by the way, I fully understand how difficult it must be to support devices. Good luck!
GrapheneOS has such low count of devices due to strict support for security features reasons.

These projects (Linux on mobile) are even more limited due to very poor support from the manufacturer for anything more than OEM and device specific build of Android, with lack of standards in mobile platforms. Every device support is reverse engineering effort. See https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices for the status of this effort.

how does something like this not support pinephone and librem5 from day 1?
Its just that none of the maintainers has a pinephone

Though it would probably be trivial to just copy what the non-atomic Fedora Mobility does for pinephones, I might as well do this in the future and just ask someone with a pinephone to test

I have a PinePhone (original KDE Community Edition, convergence variant). I'd be more than happy to test for you! Email address in my profile :)
I'm sure PRs would be welcomed if you have those devices to test on.