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.
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.
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.
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!
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