Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2021 17:46:00 +0100
To: Anjandev Momi <anjan@momi.ca>
Cc: ~mil/sxmo-devel@lists.sr.ht
Subject: Re: [Comments Needed] Is SXMO+pinephone Daily Driver?
From: Stacy Harper <contact@stacyharper.net>
References: <87zgzjcopi.fsf@momi.ca>
In-Reply-To: <87zgzjcopi.fsf@momi.ca>
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Very nice idea !

Let's try to summarise=E2=80=A6

I use the Pinephone as my daily device. It can send and receive sms and
calls. I dont think I miss calls or texts. The device rings and notify
(with a cute worms sneeze uwu) from crust hibernation without surprise.

I still got some issues on text messages with ModemManager as:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-broadband/ModemManager/-/issues/328
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-broadband/ModemManager/-/issues/274

I expect the second to be solved soon enough

As a web browser, I though it was reliable. But in fact, as I took back
my old Nexus 5X some weeks ago, I have to face the reality.

=3D> It is a way better experience to browse the web with the adblocked,
musl compiled, alpine version of firefox than with the android plain
vanila one. Point

One of the really important goal of my personal smartphone should be to
embed a navigation software. This still lacks at this time and I fear it
will stay the same for a long time. If someone got solution, PLEASE
share it :D

Sxmo satisfy me in regard of features a smartphone OS should brings. I
got main features (phone features) that I can stick easily to hooks or
whatever interface I want to. All of this in an alpine OS with loooots
of software packaged.

But Sxmo got at this time some issues to me.

One of my main frustration come from the virtual keyboard. It feel
really unreliable and I prefer to use ssh access to write sms. I think
it is an issue that we should focus. I got an vibrating patch too but it
feels not smooth enough. I frequently miss-click and have to backspace a
lot. The futur keyboard case will probably solves that issue but the
virtual one got to be fixed (or I have to find alternatives).

I have a bad feeling about the dmemu approach too. Those thoughts arent
mature but I feels that dmenu (in the current state) bring looooots of
limitations.

* not an interactive UI
* only one dmenu open in the same time
* slow, veeerry slow in regard of what it is doing (lets not try to
browse my Camera folder >_<)
* cant display long text entries

But in the same time, we got main menus, dial menu or some of
userscripts that rely on dmenu and it feels really good. So maybe my
solution should be to find an alternative framework that we could use
when we want to build a script with a more interactive UI. A suckless
alternative :D

I also feel that crusting and decrusting feels to hardy to do (long
press up then triple up is waaayyy too long for this basic task and we
got the same one for decrusting). I share the though that we should
rethink the buttons usage as we now can relly on lisgd to open/close
the keyboard and main menus. And a screenlock with authentication could
be a plus.

And, last thing, the display capacity feel very horrible when trying to
look at a video, or too high resolutions giff O_O Is the device that
low-tech or could we expect optimization or new drivers ?

Okay so I didnt summarize at all=E2=80=A6 Feel free to react.

Stacy