20250722-sxmo.txt

I don't recall the last time I talked about my Pinephone. But anyway,
I finally got annoyed with PostmarketOS (Phosh) saying I should
upgrade but not having a simple upgrade path that I decided to reimage
it completely.

I am very much a Debian fan, so I looked at Mobian. Biggest "hurdle"
was it REQUIRED Tow-Boot. No shade at the dev(s) of that, but it's
ridiculous that you need to download extra software just to flash a
mobile OS. Shame on Mobian devs for not being able to "escape"
Tow-Boot. (Maybe a bit hypocritical of me since I use Jumpdrive and
rpi-imager to flash to the Pinephone).

With that down, I decided to go back with Postmarket, but this time I
was going to use a different DE. Plasma seemed OK. On my distros, I
try not to have any DEs at all, although some tasks are much simpler
with a DE. Anyway, I install it; relatively straightforward. Now is a
good time to remind readers that the Pinephone has 2 whole GBs of RAM.
With 99% of DEs/OSes developed in the past 10 years, it's going to
suck. Surprise, surprise: KDE Touch sucks ass on it. Not totally KDE's
fault, but I do find it a bit irritating that this is an "official"
PMOS image created for it...and it runs like shit.

It looks nice, no qualms there, but it is SLOWWWW! So I'm about to go
back and download the Phosh image, basically expecting a version that
is mostly the same but may have a few quality-of-life improvements.
Then I see this weird string: sxmo-de-sway. I spontaneously decide to
download it (Can't be much worse, right)? And I install it. I also
download the Phosh image at the same time. Since it's my second time
in the past half-hour or so flashing an image, I basically go through
the motions and install the weird sxmo one...and forget what I
installed. That was a real dumb moment.

The flash finished and I booted up the phone. It has the same
bland-ass background image that Phosh and even KDE had... but it comes
up with a boxed 1 [1] in the upper left... What? Cool, that looks like
dwm. I can live with that. Then a menu comes up, very DWM-esque. Hmm,
that's weird. Where's the "real" app drawer? And then it hits me: this
is what sxmo-de-sway is: it's fucking minimalist GUI on a Pinephone:
exactly what this underpowered goof machine can handle. I'm pumped.

Without really knowing what I'm doing, I stumble around the menus. It
really is a totally different way to navigate: there are simple swipe
gestures, not explained, and the volume rocker acts as up/down while
the power button acts as select...usually. I'm still getting used to
the controls as sometimes, especially after wake. But anyway, I do a
Uutuub search...in a dmenu popup. While I've seen this once or twice
before in a few videos, I've never seen it myself. It's amazing. I can
search and watch YT videos without the damn YT nonsense and zero
after-OS-install setup.

Sxmo is freaking awesome. Unfortunately it's not really being
supported on many other phone distros. I think Arch ARM might also
support it. But it's in an official PMOS image. I really, really love
it because minimalist is basically how this phone becomes viable: it
can't run Firefox well nor can it run VLC. MPV is the anwser (also
preinstalled on the sxmo release). I had it on Phosh, too: the only
video player that ran somewhat decently. I know the Pinephone Pro
addressed a lot of limitations of the Pinephone and the Pinephone
isn't really supposed to be a daily driver, but it still sucks from a
hardware standpoint.

In other news, I had a drive die today. I'm half-bummed, half-mad
because I have a drive that's literally 10 years older with the same
capacity that is still chugging. Fucking ridiculous. And this dead
drive is completely cooked. It fails to load in GParted, something I
don't think I've ever seen before. Really annoying. I'm also dealing
with a mild sickness, but it's still really annoying hacking up a lot
and not great missing work.