@josele13 Hey, thanks for bumping this thread -- I'd missed it the first time around last fall.

Big thanks for Ruben for the boot logos! I feel so much cleaner when I boot my OPO now.

@xekuta747 said in "Desktop" should be background-picture + Icons:

frame

Barring further explanation, I think that's exactly the design goal: to reserve the lower-right ~90% of the screen for pet pictures.

@wq6z8x4u

Sure it has no practical effect, but I updated the splash screen on my OnePlus One, and immediately felt much cleaner!

@totalrando And when you say "optimized," it's optimized for the carrier to be more bandwidth efficient to save them money, at the expense of not being channel agnostic like plain ordinary VOIP (packet-switched voice) would be. So the phone's h/w and s/w has got to dive deeper in the ISO stack for benefit of the phone company, and to the detriment of smaller players like, well, every phone OS other than the Big 2.

It might be a good time for everyone facing a 3G phase-out to consider a plan B, e.g. a VOIP service that provides a local phone number.

@keneda

Not not, but just kinda not for VOLTE service in USA.

UBports pinephone distro worked poory on VOLTE. Not not-at-all, just not well. My last test was over 2 months ago, so more recent experiences should chime in. Phone audio was best described as "chipmunks". You could make and receive a call, but you might not understand each other.

Sailfish OS on pinephone distro worked with "weird" audio on the other end using VOLTE. According to my wife it was "helium voice". Approximately a 1 month-old experience.

PostmarketOS with Phosh frontend has acceptable voice service on US 4G-only carriers. Usable for voice calls when voice service is working. Unfortunately, VOLTE sometimes drops out, and you can't make or receive calls.

I've recently tried an ATT MVNO and T-Mobile with PMOS. Experience with network dropouts are similar.

LG G Watch Urbane (Bass) with Asteroid OS.

@totalrando HD calling is indeed a marketing thing, as you say. And like you, I find the voice performance on the OPO to be completely satisfactory. It's a perfectly acceptable daily driver, other than MMS annoyances like iPhone people sending pics in weird apple-only formats -- what's with that?

But, try this interesting experiment: Look at the notification tray at the top of the screen while your device is unlocked and idle. You probably see the "L" since you're on 4G/LTE and in a good coverage area. (And if not, try it when you are . . .) Now, make a voice call and watch the network indicator while call is in progress and then immediately after hanging up. (I just call voicemail, but humans are acceptable, too for this test.)

@moem

The OPO can use LTE for data, but without VOLTE support in UBPorts, voice calls will still be carried on 2G or 3G (when and where these services still exist).

If you're using the OPO with UBPorts somewhere/sometime that 3G and 4G are coexisting, you can watch it happen: Pull up a web page using mobile data, and you'll see the "L" icon in the status bar on the top. Now, place a voice call and see the "L" replaced with "3G". This is the device falling back to 3G since there's no OS support for VOLTE. End the call and "L" comes back.

T-mobile's announcement of 2G and 3G sunset for their US networks says the T-Mo 3G service ends July 1 2022, and this is the one we care about for the OPO. On that date -- unless you're somewhere T-Mo is still supporting 2G for legacy hardware -- you won't be able to make calls. But depending on where you are, you may get cut off sooner since Big Pink is decommissioning 3G stations as we type and you'll be out of luck . . .

This has already happened to me with an AT&T reseller. 3G service on that network ended Feb 22, but had been degrading before that date. OPO now sits in a drawer unless I need to play Tux Racer.

BTW, UBPorts (and other alternative OSs like Sailfish) will work -- kinda -- for VOLTE-only networks on the Pinephone since that device has VOLTE implemented in hardware in the modem.

@TotalSonic I see the Note 9 Pro doesn't support T-Mo's band 71. How's the voice-call support in suburban basements and parking garages and rural areas? E.g., do you ever miss calls when driving on Interstates between major cities?

@applee @Kunai Kodi is available for SFOS, and source is available so porting it to Ubuntu Touch should at least be a possibility.

https://openrepos.net/content/krnlyng/kodi

It's nice, and it supported media formats that the default media player couldn't, as well as being SMB friendly so I could browse my home media collection in bed without waking up the kids by watching a movie in the living room on the repurposed PC kodi box/TV/stereo system. For my use case, a raspberry pi isn't really a good fit.

@ManuelBoe Oooh! I'ts got "Magegetic Charging" . . . and I see there are also versions shipped with Linux.

Somehow it's a tiny bit fun that Ubuntu Touch and AsteroidOS are known enough to be faked. Although, "faked" is a bit of a strong word in this case.

@TotalSonic I see the Note 9 Pro doesn't support T-Mo's band 71. How's the voice-call support in suburban basements and parking garages and rural areas? E.g., do you ever miss calls when driving on Interstates between major cities?

@MrT10001 I certainly don't mean to sound ungrateful to the porter and their efforts in this space, but I'm ultimately happy in an ironic way that an upgrade to focal wasn't available earlier. I'd already had to retire my OPO from daily use due to the 3G shutdown here, and I think I may just keep it on 16.04 now till the day it dies as a host for the various apps that are unlikely to be rebuilt for Focal and beyond. It's kind of a time machine for checking the Open Store.

And TBH, TuxRacer, TuxDungeon and TuxHunter have some real "waiting for the dentist with child" utility, and I think I'd be kicking myself if I'd unsuspectingly lost those to a distro version upgrade.

@Enrico13011978
It's best to be very gentle here. I've reverted to a flip-phone to avoid bad feelings.

Very interesting. Looking at the "Secret Perk" on Indiegogo, I noticed this:

"Special offer for users outside the EU or EFTA states with a special discount for the compensation of the customs duty. Compatibility with AT&T is planned for USA. See project description."

Is there any "project description" other than the project page? The FAQ section there shows that the device supports two 5G bands (out of 10 on AT&T) and two 4G bands (out of 6). This would probably be inadequate for good mobile coverage on that network. I can't ask questions in the project discussion without first backing the project, so does anyone know more than I can read there?

I tried Winebox with the (vague) caveat from the open store that it only works on ports where it works . . .

. . . well, I get an error about kernel support, so I guess it doesn't work on OP6T port. The message that winebox gives is:

Please contact your device maintainer to enable binfmt_misc functionality for this device.

Is there anything I could have missed installing, and if not, is this the forum to ask the maintainer about the status of the kernel? Of course I already JFGI and that didn't get me anywhere.

I've got an OPO (bacon) still running Xenial. I didn't know Focal was available on this device until now -- I thought it wasn't gonna happen, and hadn't checked lately.

But the OPO is no longer a phone here in the US, so I use it as a tiny tablet. I've got it set up how I like it, and I really don't want to find out what apps I like don't translate to Focal. Sometimes I let my kid play games on it while waiting for the dentist or whatever, and I suspect not all of those will have made the transition.

LG G Watch Urbane (Bass) with Asteroid OS.

@keneda @AppLee

I guess abbreviated my statement a little too much leading to the impression I was a bit dimwitted. What I should have added was: "if your carrier kicks you off for lack of VoLTE support on your device -- and they did, then you don't get data or SMS either because you don't have service at all . . .because they kicked you off. Then you're really in a bind."

Fortunately, I realized that I had an alternate phone I could put the SIM in to get the telegram code by SMS to the number I had originally used to register.

@rocket2nfinity Well, nuts. Gotta use telegram to work on getting 4g volte on ubports, and need 4g volte to get signed in to telegram . . . . oops, circular dependency detected. . . . may have to participate by fax or something . . .

Wait . . . I think I got logged back in . . . maybe . . . I hope

Got working somehow . . . . yay . . . . I'm now on the telegram group and ready to help getting ubports working on VOLTE any way I can . . .