Wolfgang Maier @zerodivision@scholar.social

Overall, you can say that nearly every frequent activity worked slightly smoother on my old android phone, but most things *do* work.

One thing I haven't found yet: a good #osm based app with online & offline map and navigation support :-(
#mepo is nowhere near being usable, #osmin is not yet in the stable branch of pma that I installed, and my android favorite #organicmaps can be installed as a flatpak, but crashes during launch. Was resorting to #osm and #gmaps in the browser.

Minor issues:
- switching mobile data on/off requires an extra detour through GNOME settings - becomes a bit annoying when you're travelling and want to switch between Wifi & mobile data often
- the current time displayed in the top bar of the screen is obscured by the front camera's notch. You can get a glimpse at it if you drag the top bar down manually, but it's complicated if you need to follow a tight conference schedule

So what was my experience during one week abroad with several scientific conferences:
- I missed the phone's camera (one of the meetings was in Barcelona after all)
- once I missed breakfast because I had set an alarm, but the phone's audio output had switched to "headset" instead of the speakers
- calling, texting and chatting were all working well
- following emails was ok with geary, but for answering mails I ended up resorting to my notebook (geary's UI reacts erratically to touches

Additional apps via flatpak (whether or not any flatpak works or not is a bit of a gamble, but these do):
- Dialect (for translations)
- Cozy (for audiobooks)
- UnCiv (haven't really played it yet, but it might just be usable)
- FS-UAE (I'm a big Amiga fan & the emulator is great! The launcher part crashes on mobile, but FS-UAE itself works and I've been able to start an old game; the keyboard mapping mostly doesn't work with the on-screen keyboard; will have to experiment more)

Apps continued 3:
- Karlender (preinstalled, rather ugly design, but successfully synced my nextcloud calendars)
- GNOME Contacts (synced my nextcloud contacts successfully)
- gedit (works well, set line wrapping to 40 chars)
- evince (no idea why this one isn't installed by default)
- foliate (surprisingly pleasing ebook reader)
- GNOME Calculator (works perfectly)
- ktrip (this one's really cool! Using it currently for my trip back from Spain; doesn't look exciting, but works great!)

Apps continued 2:
- GNOME image viever / Eye of GNOME (preinstalled and all I need)
- Megapixels (removed it; why does it come preinstalled when the camera is not working?)
- GNOME 2048 (it's sad to not have any game on your phone)
- GNOME Console (one of the cooler features of a Linux phone)
- Portfolio (is the preinstalled file manager and okayish enough that I didn't replace it yet)
- GNOME clocks (when setting an alarm be careful to check the sound output device, see under call issues)

Apps continued:
- NewsFlash (haven't tested this one yet, but it's very latest version brings support for #freshrss, which I'm using as feed aggregator so I'm excited about it)
- Lollypop (came pre-installed; still undecided whether I will eventually replace it with Amberol)
- Spot (does the main job of playing spotify, but lacks any additional functionality like downloading instead of streaming and streaming to other devices)
- GNOME Podcasts (works well, but could use more functionality)

Speaking of https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Applications_by_category - which other software from their list am I running currently?
- firefox (works great, handling of multiple tabs could be more convenient)
- GNOME Web / epiphany (I'm using it to replace all kinds specialized apps with Web Apps - a useful feature on desktops, but essential with #LinuxMobile; #pinafore, Carsharing, #moodle of our children's schools, public library access I'm all running as Web Apps)
- Geary for email (I wish there was a better option)

Both clients are in #alpinelinux repos & listed on https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Applications_by_category, which is a *very* recommendable read. You *may* be able to find other software to run on your phone, but in my experience there's usually a reason for why they don't list certain things.
With #flatpak set up you could also install #fluffychat or the latest release of #nheko.
Flatpaks work nicely on the phone so I might replace Moment with FluffyChat next week, and switch nheko to the flatpak to enjoy all latest features.

For chats, I'm using only #matrix at work and privately since quite some time already so a reasonable choice of working matrix clients is my only requirement here: currently I'm using #nheko for work and Moment for private purposes. Nheko is a rather good and well-maintained client. The main disadvantage for me is that it's not supporting multiple accounts. Moment, otoh, has multi-account support, but is rather slow and unintuitive - ok for my not so huge number of privately used rooms.

On a more encouraging note: despite these bigger issues I'm still using the phone as my daily driver atm.
In fact, I took it with me as the only phone on a 1-week trip to Spain. I could place and receive calls to/from home, use mobile data just fine, and successfully connected to wifi hotspots in several hotels and conference centers (in one of them I lost connection repeatedly though and was sometimes not able to reconnect, which didn't happen on my laptop).

Lets continue with other problems - call -related ones first:
- the phone won't wake from suspend on incoming calls/SMS. You seem to get notified of missed calls, later but still ...
- with phosh only, on every reboot headphones gets selected as audio output, even if none are connected. You can switch to using the speakers in Settings, but if you forget, the phone won't ring on incoming calls.

If being reachable via phone calls at all times is a must for you, the above may be serious issues.

@johnno seeing photographer in your profile I need to mention the biggest issue first though: the pocophone's camera doesn't work yet!
So if that's a requirement for you, stop reading right here.

https://momi.ca/posts/2022-04-19-sxmopocof1.html by Anjandev Momi read very encouraging though I chose phosh over Smxo.

Eventually, @jaranta I went for a pocophone f1 from xiaomi, which surprisingly seems to be one of the phones best supported by postmarketos. I found a used one on ebay for just 80€, which seemed like an acceptable financial risk to me. I flashed it with #postmarketos and #phosh (since I'm a gnome user on desktop).