Hi Drew,

I happily own a Pocophone F1 as well and have been using for a few
years. I mostly used Android, Ubuntu Touch, and am now using
postmarketOS.

In your article, you said that battery life wasn't as good as the
PinePhone. Battery life actually depends on the OS you're using on the
phone. When using Android (lineageOS), the battery life is excellent but
when using postmarketOS, the battery life is worse. It's hardly a
dealbreaker for me though.

You also said that cameras don't work and that it won't be fixed in a
near future. You're sort of wrong: Joel and Caleb are working on getting
the camera to work, and Joel successfully got an image from it!

I see that you're using Phosh on your phone. Did you try using SXMO? I
personally use it and the experience is great! Anjan is using it on
his Pocophone F1 as well. SXMO support on the Pocophone F1 is pretty
good. The only problem is that Pipewire doesn't work well on the device.

Cheers!
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Ferass EL HAFIDI
Website: https://vitali64.duckdns.org/
Git: https://git.vitali64.duckdns.org/

On Mon Sep 19, 2022 at 4:07 PM CEST, Ferass EL HAFIDI wrote:
> You also said that cameras don't work and that it won't be fixed in a
> near future. You're sort of wrong: Joel and Caleb are working on getting
> the camera to work, and Joel successfully got an image from it!

Looking forward to it!

> I see that you're using Phosh on your phone. Did you try using SXMO? I
> personally use it and the experience is great! Anjan is using it on
> his Pocophone F1 as well. SXMO support on the Pocophone F1 is pretty
> good. The only problem is that Pipewire doesn't work well on the device.

I have tried SXMO and it's quite good, but not for me.

The good thing about the Pocophone F1 and other SDM845 phones is the
fact that they're really FAST! I tried to compile a minimal linux kernel
and it was faster than on my (decade-old) computer. I'm also looking
towards using QEMU (system-x86_64) on it, just for fun.

Also:

> A reverse engineered Java application supposedly provides support 
> for completing this process on Linux. However, this approach comes 
> with the typical bullshit of setting up a working Java environment, 
> and, crucially, Xiaomi appears to have sabotaged this effort

Xiaomi didn't sabotage the effort. They simply now require 2FA
authentication, which XMT doesn't support yet. At least, if I recall
correctly.

Cheers!
-------
Ferass EL HAFIDI
Website: https://vitali64.duckdns.org/
Git: https://git.vitali64.duckdns.org/

On Tue Sep 20, 2022 at 12:44 PM CEST, Ferass EL HAFIDI wrote:
> > A reverse engineered Java application supposedly provides support 
> > for completing this process on Linux. However, this approach comes 
> > with the typical bullshit of setting up a working Java environment, 
> > and, crucially, Xiaomi appears to have sabotaged this effort
>
> Xiaomi didn't sabotage the effort. They simply now require 2FA
> authentication, which XMT doesn't support yet. At least, if I recall
> correctly.

Is there any practical, sane reason to require two factor auth. just
to unlock the bootloader? I can't see any. In other words, this
definitely smells like making the process as annoying as possible
while still technically complying with EU law. So yes, this pretty
much is sabotage. Whether that is directly aimed at that project is
not particularly relevant.

Friendly greetings,
Leon Henrik Plickat

You're quite right, to be honest.

Cheers!
-------
Ferass EL HAFIDI
Website: https://vitali64.duckdns.org
Git: https://git.vitali64.duckdns.org