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News Roundup: Hardware-accelerated video on the PinePhone, themes on the Librem 5

It’s been a busy few weeks in the Linux phone space (and a busy few weeks outside of it, which is why I haven’t had time to write much – but follow @linuxsmartphone on Twitter for more timely updates). Here’s a roundup of some recent news. Phosh 0.12.0 released [Purism] Updates to this open source, […]

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News Roundup: Hacking the PinePhone keyboard accessory, Phoc updates, and a new convergent web browser

Pine64 is making a keyboard accessory for the PinePhone. When it goes on sale later this year, it will let you basically turn a PinePhone into a tiny Linux laptop. But first, developers need to create software that lets the two devices talk to one another. The company has started sending prototypes to developers, and […]

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News roundup: Updates for JingOS and Phosh, notes on PinePhone keyboard hacking

Developers at Purism have released a new version of the Phosh user interface for Linux phones, bringing bug fixes, usability improvements, and several other changes to this phone shell used by multiple smartphone Linux distributions including some versions of postmarketOS (which recently celebrated its fourth birthday, by the way). Meanwhile, the folks at Jingling have […]

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Lilbits: IFA trade show is cancelled, Internet Explorer is discontinued, and 1Password comes to Linux

The IFA trade show is the latest international conference to be scrapped in the wake of the global COVID-10 pandemic. Organizers of the annual event which usually takes place in Berlin in the fall have announced they’re skipping 2021 and hope to be back with their next event in September, 2022. But IFA isn’t the […]

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It makes no sense that Mac apps don’t run on iPads, now that they have the same chips

Reviews of Apple’s new iPad Pro tablets with Apple M1 processors are in, and unsurprisingly reviewers are praising the speed, performance, and displays of the new tablets – particularly the 12.9 inch model, which is the first to feature mini LED display technology for more vivid colors and deeper blacks. But now that Apple is […]

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Lilbits: Rocket Lake-S, Piunara Raspberry Pi CM4 carrier board, and Linux for old NVIDIA Tegra devices

You can buy a desktop (or even a laptop) computer with an Intel Rocket Lake-S processor starting today. But should you? The first round of reviews are in, and it seems like Intel managed to pull off some performance gains in single-core performance despite sticking with 14nm. But depending on what you’re asking your computer […]

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Roundup: Librem 5, Precursor, Fedora, Gentoo, Nemo Mobile, and GNOME 40

Developer Martign Braam, who created the Megapixels camera app and many other Linux apps for the PinePhone, PineTab, and other mobile Linux devices, recently wrote an article asking whether folks who are buying Linux phones really want Linux phones. As I’ve mentioned, folks who are looking for an Android or iOS-like experience with access to […]

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Open Source phone news roundup: FreeBSD, Google-free Android, and Ubuntu Touch

The next version of Ubuntu Touch is scheduled to launch on March 10, and the folks at UBPorts are looing for testers willing to check out the latest features, bug fixes, and more. The developers of the ExpidusOS smartphone Linux distribution that uses the Xfce desktop environment have outlined a roadmap for the next six […]

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Linux smartphone news roundup: Xfce for phones, browser and camera updates, and more

There’s a new Linux distribution for smartphones that’s the first I’m aware of to be based on the Xfce desktop environment, but while the first pre-release builds of ExpidusOS for the PinePhone are now available for download, there’s still a lot of work to be done to make it into a usable operating system. It […]

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PinePhone news roundup (1-24-2021)

It’s been a busy week for PinePhone hardware and software developers. If you’ve been following LinuxSmartphone on Twitter you may have noticed that developers have made progress in making several different Linux distributions more usable, while other developers have been working to bring open source firmware to the PinePhone’s modem. The PinePhone KDE Community Edition […]