As is quickly becoming tradition, the postmarketOS team made their way to FOSDEM at the beginning of February again. We rarely get the chance to have the entire core team in the same place (unfortunately we still had Dylan missing). As such we took the chance to not only take part in this wonderful conference in Brussels, but also spend three additional days hacking away in a nice distraction-free apartment that we booked, powered by the donations we receive on OpenCollective. It was extraordinary, we had so much focus, did an enormous amount of planning and tackling of hard tasks, wrote new code, removed legacy code, worked on infrastructure and just had a good time. There is a lot coming up, you can expect to read more in blog posts and merge requests in the next weeks and months. That being said, we wanted to share some of the highlights, especially for the people supporting us. Without you, this would have been significantly harder to organise.
FOSDEM Saturday
By the fact that Clayton lost his voice on Saturday, you can tell it was busy.
FOSDEM is known for many things taking place in parallel and so did, in addition to the countless stands, an incredible amount of devrooms have talks going on at the same time. One of these devrooms was FOSS on Mobile Devices. Again a collaboration with our friends from projects such as Mobian, Sailfish OS, Ubuntu Touch, PureOS and NemoMobile. Folks related to postmarketOS gave a few talks and helped running the devroom. At the same time, quite a few people streamed the talks and had some good questions in the Matrix chat that were asked to the presenters in the short Q&A sessions after each talk. The devroom was a total blast, we were happy to have so many amazing presentations there! All talks were recorded and have been uploaded if you have some hours to kill.
After everyone left ULB in the evening, we spontaneously decided to go to the GNOME Beers event. Even our two renown KDE devs Bart and Luca joined in and made it out alive!
FOSDEM Sunday
As the devroom was "only" taking place the whole Saturday, the people who spent all day in it could get the full stand experience. Thanks to help from the Sxmo IRC channel, we figured out how to make the Sxmo demo phone not blank its screen as well (it is actually a standard feature that can be accessed through the menu). We made a post-it with instructions for our favorite tiling window manager based phone UI and people were happy to give it a try and to learn the combinations (if you really try and have a guide infront of you, you can get the hang of it in a couple of minutes). We had many more great conversations, and handed out a lot of stickers. Thanks to everybody who came by, it was amazing!
Again, in parallel, talks were visited, and at the end of the day we were surprised to be not kicked out of the cafeteria after FOSDEM was basically over. Big cheers to Raffaele, Peter and Sebastian for sticking around and joining us in recording postmarketOS podcast #38.
Hackathon
One of the first things we did on Monday morning, was taking pictures off from a wall and use it for nice visual planning with post-its. As mentioned earlier, we will make separate blog posts for the bigger things in the near future, but here are some of the topics that we discussed and worked on with intense focus:
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Did a big prioritization of projects within postmarketOS, such as VoLTE, cameras, HW testing-setup, PipeWire and power management. To drive them forward effectively, we matched them with possible grants and funding opportunities and contected people from the community who could possibly work on them. (If you are interested and really have knowledge in one of these areas, reach out to us!)
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Moving forward with migrating away from gitlab.com (why?). We have two promising new places where we could go, and did a video call with one of them.
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Discussed potentially shipping Flatpak packages from Flathub by default. From discussions with both KDE and GNOME people, it is clear that this is their preferred choice of how users should install their apps. By now probably everybody knows the upsides of sandboxing and having a clear path for shipping updated apps with a stable base system (i.e. new apps on postmarketOS stable, without backporting them through a service pack). The downsides are that not all devices have enough space or resources for them, and that Flathub only supports x86_64 and aarch64 (no 32-bit architectures or RISC-V). We still need to figure out the details, but the idea is to ship it by default for the UIs and device combinations where it makes sense in terms of being desired by upstream (the folks providing the UI) and in terms of having a great experience on the device. And that if you build your own image, you can just choose it as you prefer. See !4820 and !2254 for more information.
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Worked on improving the status and handling of non-free firmware. The thing is, it would be very nice if you could use your phone without non-free firmware. But in practice, the mechanism we have right now is hard to maintain, not well tested, and consequently you would sometimes even get an image with non-free firmware installed even though you selected that you don't want to have it. Furthermore, in modern phones you sometimes cannot even charge your phone without proprietary firmware. So in reality the feature of opting out of non-free firmware doesn't really work anymore and we will probably just remove it. !2255 works towards that.
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Had a very fruitful discussion about device maintainership and categorization. We discussed on how to improve the status of main and community devices, and possible ideas to help maintainers in their tasks. We have had a very positive experience with the creation of the Trusted Contributors procedure, and we hope to be able to replicate the success when it comes to device maintenance. You can expect a blog post about this soon™. If you are curious, our notes are in #59.
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Applied to GSoC with some smaller, yet very useful project ideas. We have not done this before, but trying it out at least once seems useful.
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Reviewed pmbootstrap patches, made new performance and other improvements to it and released 2.2.0. While at it, we made all PyPI releases deprecated - since pmbootstrap does not have dependencies on other Python packages it does not offer a benefit for us while at the same time adding a few more steps to the release process. We have been recommending to install from either distros' package managers or git for quite some time now.
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Improvements to the infrastructure were made, and we continued to move services over from the old server to the new one. With the work in January we already managed to get the infrastructure stable again (back when everything was running on the old server, it really wasn't in a good state). Now the goal is to move the rest over as well, so we don't need to pay for the old and less reliable server anymore in addition to the nice new one.
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Did a lot of smaller tasks, such as archiving Megapixels in the pmOS namespace (now that Martijn made a new release in his megapixels-org namespace, which also holds WIP code for Megapixels 2.0, yay!), and moving forward with integrating the new wallpapers (!4716).
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Watched The Gnome Mobile, don't miss the reviews.
On reflection, this has possibly been one of the most productive (and fun) weeks for the project in a very long while. And your donations have been a clear enabler for this to happen. So if you appreciate the work we're doing on postmarketOS, and want to support us, consider joining our OpenCollective.