this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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postmarketOS

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Hi folks! Yesterday, I joined the club and installed PostmarketOS+phosh on my "new" OnePlus6. Besides a usb-c (power only) cable that cost me an hour to troubleshoot, everything went smoothly.

Well, nearly everything. What I cant figure out at this point is how to install and get software. I'm on the latest stable release which might have been a mistake but I'm usually quite cautious at first.

So my problem is pmos came with 16 apps preinstalled and the software app only shows these when I open it. Can someone confirm or deny if this is normal? I asked around in 5 different places for stuff in the last 16 hrs (yes, I did sleep in between) and I know a lot of stuff now but this I could not figure out. :D

I know I can install flatpak, which I did but it never shows any results at all which I find unrealistic. I put in the repo like it is shown in the wiki and I have internet. Something else must be wrong.

I'm an admin by trade and I do some software development as a hobby so feel free to assume I know how to use the command line. I'm only a full time linux user for maybe half a year.

Anybody got ideas what might be wrong?

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[–] linmob@lemmy.ml 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

This is ... a bit false. Flatpaks do show in GNOME Software on other distributions, and while not every app on Flathub supports aarch64, many do. I somehow managed to not have a with postmarketOS stable and Phosh here right now (I misplaced my PinePhone that runs that combination), so I can't say if it would work for me. It definitely works on other distributions, though; but there's always the added difficulty of imperfect app metadata making it a game of luck to recognise a mobile friendly app as such.

That said, you can always install packages from the terminal, flatpak (flatpak install ...) or apk (apk add ...) or otherwise. To find apps to look at, maybe LinuxPhoneApps.org can be useful.

[–] ag10n@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

My statement is true , that flatpak is arch agnostic but primarily supports x86.

I never said it didn’t or wouldn’t work; if you’re not seeing your apps it’s not because they don’t exist, they aren’t built for aarch64 and target x86

https://discourse.flathub.org/t/how-to-provide-binaries-for-both-aarch64-arm64-and-x86-64-regular-64-bit/3521

[–] linmob@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I was referring to "Flatpak [...] is currently only working as expected on x86_64" is ... if not false, then far too easy to misunderstand. Flatpak works just as well on aarch64 for (at least) hundreds of apps. The software that's not available on, e.g., flathub for aarch64 (but is available for x86_64) in most cases is not available (in compiled form) for aarch64 at all — because it is proprietary with vendors not caring about aarch64, or ... just is electron-based ;-}.

It's not Flatpak, it's the entire aarch64 software ecosystem that's lacking here. Stating "Linux on aarch64 has less available software than x86_64, which is especially so for proprietary software" would have been a far better statement.

[–] ag10n@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Without any further configuration, might as well as add that to your edited paraphrased quote.

The op said it wasn’t working, I’m only agreeing with him that it doesn’t work as expected.

Your lengthy explanation of flatpak doesn’t seem to be postmarketos related.

[–] linmob@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Without any further configuration, might as well as add that to your edited paraphrased quote.

Please correct me, but AFAIK, necessary configuration of flatpak (e.g., configuring remotes) depends more on the distribution than the architecture (as long as the architecture is supported at all, that is - so x86_64 or aarch64 AFAIK).

Your lengthy explanation of flatpak doesn’t seem to be postmarketos related.

Sure? https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/merge_requests/4820 And does it hurt to mention differences in software support between x86_64 and aarch64? I would see your point if I had talked at length about Snaps. ;-)

[–] ag10n@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

got it, because the project supports flatpak, you feel like you need to explain it. yes, if the op configures flatpak to use a repo that has aarch software then flatpak works as expected. glad that could be cleared up.