This is my first week attempting to use @postmarketOS on OnePlus 6T as my daily driver. Yesterday was my first full day with the device and it's fantastic! I was running errands, taking meetings out, and using the phone as my primary communicator.
For context, (and this is going to sound brutal, but it's the truth) I've been using a Librem 5 on PureOS as my daily driver since February, so my expectations are pretty low at this point.
In no particular order, here are my main observations so far.
This thing is fast! So responsive and slick. Again, I am comparing it to Librem 5, not iPhone. That said, @phosh performs so well on this device, it really feels like THIS is how it is supposed to work. (This is an aside, but it's a real shame how stuck and abandoned Phosh is on Librem 5, when that was the device it was originally made for.)
Cellular phone calls on my carrier (AT&T) require VoLTE, so I am using this hack (a) (b) to enable voice calls. Some people have reported issues with call audio; I've only noticed call audio loss very occasionally, and they are resolved for me by toggling the modem on and off.
Battery life is good, but not great. I was using the phone pretty heavily yesterday and I needed to top up the battery once in the afternoon. I'm interested to see how it fares on a day when it spends most of the time in my pocket.
Do not allow the device to suspend! Unlike the Librem 5, it won't automatically wake up for calls or SMS messages. And very much like the Librem 5, you won't receive any other notifications while it's asleep.
I'm using Fractal / Matrix / iMessage bridging (c) for the majority of my instant messaging needs. This works great, but the notification integration kind of sucks.
Core notification support appears to be handled by feedbackd (d) - thanks @agx! - which works really well. However, there's no obvious way to link general Freedesktop/libnotify notifications (e) to a feedbackd event.
The practical effect of this is that messages coming in over Fractal are received immediately BUT with no visual, audible, or haptic cues to indicate that they've arrived.
I'm solving this problem right now with a horrible little Python script that watches for Fractal notifications on dbus, and triggers a message-new-instant event when it sees them.
This is working for me right now, and I'm happy to share the code if anyone wants to see it. But I'm sure it's not how things are supposed to work. I would love to hear from the developers on what the "right" solution is supposed to be here.
I'll have more thoughts to share over time, but I'll wrap it up for now. At this point I'm really pushing the limits of what a "microblog" entry should look like.
References:
(a) https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/issues/1878
(b) https://gitlab.com/flamingradian/81voltd
(c) https://github.com/mautrix/imessage
(d) https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/feedbackd
(e) https://specifications.freedesktop.org/notification-spec/latest/
#postmarketos #mobilelinux #phosh #oneplus6t #linux #librem5
Nice! 🎉
Regarding fractal: Fractal could set the `im.received` category on the notifications (this is supported by glib via https://docs.gtk.org/gio/method.Notification.set_category.html) so you'd get feedback
Regarding suspend: A good way to keep the device from suspending is the caffeine quick setting toggle. Toggling this on prevents suspend, toggling it off allows the device to suspend (e.g. at night). So one can save battery over longer non-use periods easily.
See https://specifications.freedesktop.org/notification-spec/latest/categories.html and https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/phosh/-/blob/main/src/notifications/notify-feedback.c#L66
Regarding suspend: caffeine is just a quicker way to do it (so it's also available when the phone is locked) but tweaks certainly works too.