Hi there . Thank you very much Manjaro team for having this effort for the good of the community. Phosh is turning out great!
I’m trying to understand a bit more about the differences between a mobile Linux system and a desktop one. My knowledge of the technical terminology is limited. I notice in Phosh’s app list that you can press «Show Only Mobile Friendly Apps». What does this mean? I’m trying to figure out how can I know beforehand by searching for a package in pacman, if it will work on Phosh or not?
I understand more or less that Manjaro ARM should have a Linux Kernel for a different architecture than the regular Manjaro, but what does it mean? Does it mean that for converting an existing package in regular Manjaro to ARM one would have to re-code it?
Mobile friendly means that in the Phosh/Gnome world, an application has been built/developed with libhandy or libadwaita in mind.
Hm. Best I can think of is to see if the application in question requires either libhandy or libadwaita. If they do, they should be “mobile friendly”.
For Manjaro software to work on Manjaro ARM it has to work with a different architecture. The kernel does not have much to do with that part.
Manjaro currently supports the x86_64 architecture, while Manjaro ARM supports the aarch64 architecture. They are both 64-bit architectures, but they are different, so if a software is compiled, it will need to be compiled for the aarch64 architecture before it will run on Manjaro ARM. We already do this with most of the software that makes sense to have on ARM and can be found in the Manjaro ARM repositories.
I’m asking this because I notice that some packages that I try to install with pacman are out of scale. So I guessed that it meant that the software wasn’t correctly compiled for aarch64. But from your reply the story seems different?
For example, I notice that Telegram doesn’t expand the digital keyboard correctly when I try to type in the chat. Might this be a problem of Telegram not being correctly adjusted to aarch64 or a problem from the software itself. I wanted to help out the development of Phosh and Pinephone, but I’m a little confused about who should I report a potential bug to. Of course that Pinephone should be more concerned with the hardware. But for example in Telegram’s case does Manjaro team takes something from the Telegram team and adapts it to the aarch64 architecture or you have to ask someone in Telegram’s team to change something in their code?
If the software wasn’t compiled for aarch64, it will not run at all (unless you install a software emulator for x86_64 and all the needed x86_64 libraries and install a binfmt handler for x86_64 executables, then it will run extremely slowly, so it is not worth the effort).
Software that does not scale properly is just software that was not developed to be mobile-friendly, so recompiling it will not help. (In fact, the software is already compiled for aarch64 and will run properly on larger devices such as the Pinebook series.)
For Telegram, the issue is that the only client that runs on the PinePhone at all is the GNU/Linux desktop client, which, as the name says, is not mobile-friendly. It is known to mostly work, but the keyboard placement is reported to be an issue. (It reportedly also happens on Plasma Mobile, so it is not Phosh’s fault.)
. Thank you very much Manjaro team for having this effort for the good of the community. Phosh is turning out great!