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!
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.
nitpick: Containerfile. I mention it because people still think container==docker. I am sure the Fedora people focus on podman, as part of the Red Hat ecosystem. For a better dev experience they offer podman-bootc¹, which you will miss when using Docker. Personally I am convinced that we should steer people to podman instead of Docker.
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
How is OCI terrible for reproducibility and security? They are certainly more reproducible than what we had before. I haven't heard "Works on my machine for a long time". If you're talking about reproducible builds, there aren't any hard issues either that are directly caused by OCI images - except setting the clock correctly.
> Boot images should be Dm-verity protected EROFS images
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you - I gather that you think the boot images are distributed as OCI images? That's not the case, bootc is more about building the image, updating it and the overall structure. Booting an image built with bootc does not involve any container infrastructure (unless you start services that depend on containers, I guess - but that's deep in userspace). There's technically nothing preventing this from using verified read-only images.
This is good to see. The concept of immutable OS and fallback boots is going to be much more common. I think there are similar concepts being explored in postmarketOS such as https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/duranium
I've tried the silverblue desktop version of this and while I'm not convinced that a mix of OS/Brew/Flatpak/Containers is making things more approachable it's interesting to see these concepts progress and the tools improve.
Immutable OS is just a glorified liveCD with "persistent" user storage, it's really nothing new as far as the concept itself goes. Only the implementation differs.
How well does it work on the supported devices, including for things like calls, SMS, GPS, camera, bluetooth etc? The OnePlus 6/6T is in the "community" category of supported devices for postmarketOS and (like most devices in that category) has a laundry list of issues with hardware support that either need workarounds or just don't work at the moment. Does Pocketblue have the same limitations?
Mobile Linux is a super interesting but difficult area so always good to see another effort in the space, hopefully Pocketblue and postmarketOS can benefit from each other.
> Mobile Linux is a super interesting but difficult area so always good to see another effort in the space, hopefully Pocketblue and postmarketOS can benefit from each other.
Yea. I hope the same thing. I just wish that a defacto affordable device can finally emerge and the whole process can just be made easier and people might even base their hardware decisions on top of it.
A lot of the times I find Mobile Linux un-approachable because a lot of essential features only work in phones which are extremely expensive with less specs compared to its peers and in normal phones, half the features might not work (which is understandable given they are community efforts but still)
I just hope that the community/such-projects can decide on one single affordable phone and then make it feature complete and maybe even recommend people to use it as well imo.
> because a lot of essential features only work in phones which are extremely expensive with less specs compared to its peers and in normal phones
I assume you are refering to the Librem 5? These days the Google Pixel 3a is coming close, as multiple people report reliable phone calls. Camera is still lacking, but once libcamera add auto-focus and the device gets a driver for the focus actuator (already in the works), it's going to be just as competent with better battery-life for less than USD/EUR 100. On the more pricey side, the Fairphone 5 has a good mind share and contributor count, making it quite likely that remaining issues are being solved soon.
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.
Nitpick regarding apps: https://flathub.org/en/apps/collection/mobile/1 is the better link IMHO, even if not all apps in it do actually perform great on mobile [0], and some apps that work well on Mobile are not part of the collection due to lacking some bits in app metadata [1]. Help with sorting this out is very much welcome :-)
To be fair while the Pinephone is quite common, it's SOC is so bad you only get opengl ES2.0 I would not blame anyone for ignoring it early on. You'd have to make sure the graphics stack works on it in particular.
Readit News
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-...
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
1. https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/bootc/getting-started/
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
> Boot images should be Dm-verity protected EROFS images
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you - I gather that you think the boot images are distributed as OCI images? That's not the case, bootc is more about building the image, updating it and the overall structure. Booting an image built with bootc does not involve any container infrastructure (unless you start services that depend on containers, I guess - but that's deep in userspace). There's technically nothing preventing this from using verified read-only images.
https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc/issues/865
I've tried the silverblue desktop version of this and while I'm not convinced that a mix of OS/Brew/Flatpak/Containers is making things more approachable it's interesting to see these concepts progress and the tools improve.
My eyes are currently on the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 3 as it seems to tick most boxes on PMOS' compatibility matrix.
Mobile Linux is a super interesting but difficult area so always good to see another effort in the space, hopefully Pocketblue and postmarketOS can benefit from each other.
Yea. I hope the same thing. I just wish that a defacto affordable device can finally emerge and the whole process can just be made easier and people might even base their hardware decisions on top of it.
A lot of the times I find Mobile Linux un-approachable because a lot of essential features only work in phones which are extremely expensive with less specs compared to its peers and in normal phones, half the features might not work (which is understandable given they are community efforts but still)
I just hope that the community/such-projects can decide on one single affordable phone and then make it feature complete and maybe even recommend people to use it as well imo.
I assume you are refering to the Librem 5? These days the Google Pixel 3a is coming close, as multiple people report reliable phone calls. Camera is still lacking, but once libcamera add auto-focus and the device gets a driver for the focus actuator (already in the works), it's going to be just as competent with better battery-life for less than USD/EUR 100. On the more pricey side, the Fairphone 5 has a good mind share and contributor count, making it quite likely that remaining issues are being solved soon.
- 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.
[0]: https://framagit.org/linuxphoneapps/linuxphoneapps.frama.io/...
[1]: https://framagit.org/linuxphoneapps/linuxphoneapps.frama.io/...
That said, as mentioned in another thread here, work is being done to add PinePhone support.
Written on a Pinephone.