commit: 1cf5065eb43fcfe4fce266a995861de32bb290b1
parent 10129f957dd1b8d947957b76774401eae41cff85
Author: Drew DeVault <sir@cmpwn.com>
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2022 12:49:56 +0200
Poco F1 review
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diff --git a/content/blog/pmOS-on-xiaomi-poco-f1.md b/content/blog/pmOS-on-xiaomi-poco-f1.md
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+---
+title: A review of postmarketOS on the Xiaomi Poco F1
+date: 2022-08-25
+---
+
+I have recently had cause to start looking into mainline Linux phones which fall
+outside of the common range of grassroots phones like the PinePhone (which was
+my daily driver for the past year). The [postmarketOS wiki][0] is a great place
+to research candidate phones for this purpose, and the phone I landed on is the
+[Xiaomi Poco F1][1], which I picked up on Amazon.nl (for ease of return in case
+it didn't work out) for 270 Euro. Phones of this nature have a wide range of
+support from Linux distros like postmarketOS, from "not working at all" to
+"mostly working". The essential features I require in a daily driver phone are
+(1) a working modem and telephony support, (2) mobile data, and (3) reasonably
+good performance and battery life; plus of course some sane baseline
+expectations like a working display and touchscreen driver.
+
+[0]: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
+[1]: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Xiaomi_Poco_F1_(xiaomi-beryllium)
+
+The use of mainline Linux on a smartphone requires a certain degree of bullshit
+tolerance, and the main question is whether or not the bullshit exceeds your
+personal threshold. The Poco F1 indeed comes with some bullshit, but I'm pleased
+to report that it falls short of my threshold and represents a significant
+quality-of-life improvement over the PinePhone setup I have been using up to
+now.
+
+The bullshit I have endured for the Poco F1 setup can be categorized into two
+parts: initial setup and ongoing problems. Of the two, the initial setup is by
+far the worst. These phones are designed to run Android first, rather than the
+mainline Linux first approach seen in devices like the PinePhone and Librem 5.
+This means that it's back to dealing with things like Android recovery,
+fastboot, and so on, during the initial setup. The most severe pain point for
+Xiaomi phones is unlocking the bootloader.
+
+The only officially supported means of doing this is via a Windows-only
+application published by Xiaomi. A [reverse engineered][2] Java application
+supposedly provides support for completing this process on Linux. However, this
+approach comes with the typical bullshit of setting up a working Java
+environment, and, crucially, Xiaomi appears to have sabotaged this effort via a
+deliberate attempt to close the hole by returning error messages from this
+reverse engineered API which direct the user to the official tool instead. On
+top of this, Xiaomi requires you to associate the phone to be unlocked with a
+user account on their services, paired to a phone number, and has a 30-day
+waiting period between unlocks. I ultimately had to resort to a Windows 10 VM
+with USB passthrough to get the damn thing unlocked. This is very frustrating
+and far from the spirit of free software; Xiaomi earns few points for openness
+in my books.
+
+[2]: https://github.com/francescotescari/XiaoMiToolV2
+
+Once unlocked, the "initial setup bullshit" did not cease. The main issue is
+that the postmarketOS flashing tool (which is just a wrapper around fastboot)
+seemed to have problems writing a consistent filesystem. I was required to apply
+a level of Linux expertise which exceeds that of even most enthusiasts to obtain
+a shell in the initramfs, connect to it over postmarketOS's telnet debugging
+feature, and run fsck.ext4 to fix the filesystem. Following this, I had to again
+apply a level of Alpine Linux expertise which exceeds that of many enthusiasts
+to repair installed packages and get everything up to a baseline of workitude.
+Overall, it took me the better part of a day to get to a baseline of "running a
+working installation of postmarketOS".
+
+However: following the "initial setup bullshit", I found a very manageable scale
+of "ongoing problems". The device's base performance is excellent, far better
+than the PinePhone — it just performs much like I would expect from a
+normal phone. PostmarketOS is, as always, brilliant, and all of the usual
+mainline Alpine Linux trimmings I would expect are present — I can SSH in,
+I easily connected it to my personal VPN, and I'm able to run most of the
+software I'm already used to from desktop Linux systems (though, of course, GUI
+applications range widely in their ability to accomodate touch screens and a
+portrait mobile form-factor). I transferred my personal data over from my
+PinePhone using a method which is 100% certifiably absent of bullshit, namely
+just rsyncing over my home directory. Excellent!
+
+Telephony support also works pretty well. Audio profiles are a bit buggy, and I
+can often find my phone using my headphone output while I don't have them
+plugged in instead of the speakers, having to resort to manually switching
+between them from time to time. However, I have never had an issue with the
+audio profiles being wrong during a phone call (the modem works, by the way);
+earpiece and speakerphone both work as expected. That said, I have heard
+complaints from recipients of my phone calls about hearing an echo of their own
+voice. Additionally, DTMF tones do not work, but [the fix][3] has already been
+merged and is expected in the next release of ModemManager. SMS and mobile data
+work fine, and mobile data works with a lesser degree of bullshit than I was
+prepared to expect after reading the pmOS wiki page for this device.
+
+[3]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-broadband/ModemManager/-/merge_requests/823
+
+Another problem is that the phone's onboard cameras do not work at all, and it
+seems unlikely that this will be solved in the near future. This is not really
+an issue for me. Another papercut is that Phosh handles the display notch
+poorly, and though pmOS provides a "tweak" tool which can move the clock over
+from behind the notch, it leaves something to be desired. The [relevant
+issue][4] is being discused on the Phosh issue tracker and a fix is presumably
+coming soon — it doesn't seem particularly difficult to solve. I have also
+noted that, though GPS works fine, Mepo [renders incorrectly][5] and Gnome Maps
+has (less severe) [display issues][6] as well.
+
+The battery life is not as good as the PinePhone, which itself is not as good as
+most Android phones. However, it meets my needs. It seems to last anywhere from
+8 to 10 hours depending on usage, following a full night's charge. As such, I
+can leave it off of the juice when I go out without too much fear. That said, I
+do keep a battery bank in my backpack just in case, but that's also just a
+generally useful thing to have around. I think I've lent it to others more than
+I've used it myself.
+
+[4]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/phosh/-/issues/552
+[5]: https://l.sr.ht/TOL9.png
+[6]: https://l.sr.ht/6SQX.png
+
+There are many other apps which work without issues. I found that [Foliate][7]
+works great for reading e-books and [Evince][8] works nicely for PDFs (two
+use-cases which one might perceive as related, but which I personally have
+different UI expectations for). Firefox has far better performance on this
+device than on the PinePhone and allows for very comfortable web browsing. I
+also discovered [Gnome Feeds][9] which, while imperfect, accommodates my needs
+regarding an RSS feed reader. All of the "standard" mobile Linux apps that
+worked fine on the PinePhone also work fine here, such as Lollypop for music and
+the Porfolio file manager.
+
+[7]: https://johnfactotum.github.io/foliate/
+[8]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince
+[9]: https://gfeeds.gabmus.org/
+
+I was pleasantly surprised that, after enduring some more bullshit, I was able
+to get [Waydroid][10] to work, allowing me to run Android applications on this
+phone. My expectations for this were essentially non-existent, so any degree of
+workitude was a welcome surprise, and any degree of non-workitude was the
+expected result. On the whole, I'm rather impressed, but don't expect anything
+near perfection. The most egregious issue is that I found that internal storage
+simply doesn't work, so apps cannot store or read common files (though they seem
+to be able to persist their own private app data just fine). The camera does not
+work, so the use-case I was hoping to accommodate here — running my bank's
+Android app — is not possible. However, I was able to install F-Droid and
+a small handful of Android apps that work with a level of performance which is
+indistinguishable from native Android performance. It's not quite there yet, but
+Waydroid has a promising future and will do a lot to bridge the gap between
+Android and mainline Linux on mobile.
+
+[10]: https://waydro.id/
+
+On the whole, I would rate the Poco F1's bullshit level as follows:
+
+- Initial setup: miserable
+- Ongoing problems: minor
+
+I have a much higher tolerance for "initial setup" bullshit than for ongoing
+problems bullshit, so this is a promising result for my needs. I have found that
+this device is ahead of the PinePhone that I had been using previously in almost
+all respects, and I have switched to it as my daily driver. In fact, this phone,
+once the initial bullshit is addressed, is complete enough that it may be the
+first mainline Linux mobile experience that I might recommend to others as a
+daily driver. I'm glad that I made the switch.
