useable GUI for N900...
...would be greate to have a useable GUI for N900 like https://leste.maemo.org/ - i mean a real phone-GUI - not a text-console. Do not missunderstand me - i love to do things in the text-console (shell) but not when using a phone!
...and performance/memory is also a pain on all the existing GUIs - again i am thinking of a USABLE GUI!
Activity
moved from postmarketos#50 (closed)
By Bart Ribbers on 2022-09-27T13:58:27
added category::device device-nokia-n900 discussion labels
I know, we would all like that. However it's not as easy as you might think. To run anything well on the weakly-powered N900 we would need hardware acceleration. However the N900 uses an (old) PowerVR GPU which only has a binary blob available we can't run. There are methods to work around it and Maemo Leste uses it successfully, but it's still a binary blob. For us it's more trouble than it's worth and although some have tried in the past, we decided it's not worth the effort.
Thus besides the current i3wm-based UI we offer, nothing else will ever really get usable. If you want to use an UI like Maemo has (the Hildon UI), it's probably better to just use Maemo Leste.
By Bart Ribbers on 2022-09-27T14:02:17
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@robiwan1 I have some ideas to customize the i3wm config to make it a bit more touch friendly. This is possible, as projects like Penguinphone have shown, my own sway work on N900, and in more recent times, sxmo. I am not fully sure (yet?) if just porting sxmo would be the better option, but it requires a lot of other things, seemingly
As for Maemo UI (Hildon) - I think someone wants to package it again in postmarketOS.
Anyway, for the time being, my focus in on fixing N900 kernel bugs (e.g. we currently can't upgrade to linux 5.19 onwards, since something breaks USB). Userspace is a bit low priority to me.
That said, what ideas did you have, if any? And yes, I recommend aiming for something that will not rely on acceleration (for the reasons PureTryOut already mentioned. So we have to limit ourselves to plain X11 or something light that's Wayland based, e.g. SwayWM. We have DRM even without full GPU support, so Wayland has no problem at all.
By Sicelo on 2022-09-27T14:44:31
Edited by Administrator -
well, I have matchbox and fbpanel running on my gta04 and also one of my Kobo Clara HD, both with debian, because of lack of these packages in pmOS. So now I make sure things keep working for myself... maybe that effort can be optimized.
By Andreas Kemnade on 2023-01-11T20:18:19
Edited by Ghost User -
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well, matchbox is used in GPE, what I am using is a mixture of things, my dialer is selfwritten and monolithic, no that it does not rely on any infrastructure I might accidentially break. Some other things I also take from GPE, some other things are newer.
By Andreas Kemnade on 2023-01-11T19:09:32
Edited by Ghost User -
As fbpanel has some trouble together with matchbox + literally cold boots + eink which triggers some strange race condition in fbpane. So it is time to look into it and probably is really time to package it for alpine/pmOS. So seems that I am not alone with a desire to have such a system.
By Andreas Kemnade on 2023-01-11T19:16:34
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So seems that I am not alone with a desire to have such a system.
You're definitely not alone.
I recall there was a BitTorrent website which was similar to WHAT.CD.
I've used it for a couple of years. Then I had some exclusive and original content to share, so it started with one, two (I though I wouldn't pass 10) and later it became into 5K over 3 years and I managed to be at the top 20 out of 500 content uploaders.
I had only less than 10 items that could be considered exclusive, but I continued after I've started to be an active uploader. The reason was start. If I didn't had the few special items, then 5K might not have ever happened.
What I'm conveying is that for every one or two (or even zero) there are hundreds and even thousands of lurkers, so we can never know what the public really desires.
It's best to have in mind power users.
Power User = A user who is no a programmer but just wants to get things fast and simple.
There are lawyers, physician and physicists I know that would be considered as power users.
Also, I bet that there are people who prefer usability and simplicity over fancy animations because they travel or relatively have lesser access to electricity; this is also a reason to take into account.
By GreenLunar on 2023-02-27T12:08:14
Edited by Ghost User
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@robiwan1 I think that GPE or ROX would be good environments for end-users who want more usability than special effects, and also for e-ink displays.
See https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/GPE and https://rox.sf.net/
Also http://web.archive.org/web/20090331152022/http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/
Related #372 (closed)
By GreenLunar on 2023-02-09T19:02:02
Edited by Administrator
