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pmOS-on-xiaomi-poco-f1.md (9232B)

    

  1. ---
  2. title: A review of postmarketOS on the Xiaomi Poco F1
  3. date: 2022-08-25
  4. ---
  6. I have recently had cause to start looking into mainline Linux phones which fall
  7. outside of the common range of grassroots phones like the PinePhone (which was
  8. my daily driver for the past year). The [postmarketOS wiki][0] is a great place
  9. to research candidate phones for this purpose, and the phone I landed on is the
  10. [Xiaomi Poco F1][1], which I picked up on Amazon.nl (for ease of return in case
  11. it didn't work out) for 270 Euro. Phones of this nature have a wide range of
  12. support from Linux distros like postmarketOS, from "not working at all" to
  13. "mostly working". The essential features I require in a daily driver phone are
  14. (1) a working modem and telephony support, (2) mobile data, and (3) reasonably
  15. good performance and battery life; plus of course some sane baseline
  16. expectations like a working display and touchscreen driver.
  18. [0]: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
  19. [1]: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Xiaomi_Poco_F1_(xiaomi-beryllium)
  21. The use of mainline Linux on a smartphone requires a certain degree of bullshit
  22. tolerance, and the main question is whether or not the bullshit exceeds your
  23. personal threshold. The Poco F1 indeed comes with some bullshit, but I'm pleased
  24. to report that it falls short of my threshold and represents a significant
  25. quality-of-life improvement over the PinePhone setup I have been using up to
  26. now.
  28. The bullshit I have endured for the Poco F1 setup can be categorized into two
  29. parts: initial setup and ongoing problems. Of the two, the initial setup is by
  30. far the worst. These phones are designed to run Android first, rather than the
  31. mainline Linux first approach seen in devices like the PinePhone and Librem 5.
  32. This means that it's back to dealing with things like Android recovery,
  33. fastboot, and so on, during the initial setup. The most severe pain point for
  34. Xiaomi phones is unlocking the bootloader.
  36. The only officially supported means of doing this is via a Windows-only
  37. application published by Xiaomi. A [reverse engineered][2] Java application
  38. supposedly provides support for completing this process on Linux. However, this
  39. approach comes with the typical bullshit of setting up a working Java
  40. environment, and, crucially, Xiaomi appears to have sabotaged this effort via a
  41. deliberate attempt to close the hole by returning error messages from this
  42. reverse engineered API which direct the user to the official tool instead. On
  43. top of this, Xiaomi requires you to associate the phone to be unlocked with a
  44. user account on their services, paired to a phone number, and has a 30-day
  45. waiting period between unlocks. I ultimately had to resort to a Windows 10 VM
  46. with USB passthrough to get the damn thing unlocked. This is very frustrating
  47. and far from the spirit of free software; Xiaomi earns few points for openness
  48. in my books.
  50. [2]: https://github.com/francescotescari/XiaoMiToolV2
  52. Once unlocked, the "initial setup bullshit" did not cease. The main issue is
  53. that the postmarketOS flashing tool (which is just a wrapper around fastboot)
  54. seemed to have problems writing a consistent filesystem. I was required to apply
  55. a level of Linux expertise which exceeds that of even most enthusiasts to obtain
  56. a shell in the initramfs, connect to it over postmarketOS's telnet debugging
  57. feature, and run fsck.ext4 to fix the filesystem. Following this, I had to again
  58. apply a level of Alpine Linux expertise which exceeds that of many enthusiasts
  59. to repair installed packages and get everything up to a baseline of workitude.
  60. Overall, it took me the better part of a day to get to a baseline of "running a
  61. working installation of postmarketOS".
  63. However: following the "initial setup bullshit", I found a very manageable scale
  64. of "ongoing problems". The device's base performance is excellent, far better
  65. than the PinePhone — it just performs much like I would expect from a
  66. normal phone. PostmarketOS is, as always, brilliant, and all of the usual
  67. mainline Alpine Linux trimmings I would expect are present — I can SSH in,
  68. I easily connected it to my personal VPN, and I'm able to run most of the
  69. software I'm already used to from desktop Linux systems (though, of course, GUI
  70. applications range widely in their ability to accomodate touch screens and a
  71. portrait mobile form-factor). I transferred my personal data over from my
  72. PinePhone using a method which is 100% certifiably absent of bullshit, namely
  73. just rsyncing over my home directory. Excellent!
  75. Telephony support also works pretty well. Audio profiles are a bit buggy, and I
  76. can often find my phone using my headphone output while I don't have them
  77. plugged in instead of the speakers, having to resort to manually switching
  78. between them from time to time. However, I have never had an issue with the
  79. audio profiles being wrong during a phone call (the modem works, by the way);
  80. earpiece and speakerphone both work as expected. That said, I have heard
  81. complaints from recipients of my phone calls about hearing an echo of their own
  82. voice. Additionally, DTMF tones do not work, but [the fix][3] has already been
  83. merged and is expected in the next release of ModemManager. SMS and mobile data
  84. work fine, and mobile data works with a lesser degree of bullshit than I was
  85. prepared to expect after reading the pmOS wiki page for this device.
  87. [3]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-broadband/ModemManager/-/merge_requests/823
  89. Another problem is that the phone's onboard cameras do not work at all, and it
  90. seems unlikely that this will be solved in the near future. This is not really
  91. an issue for me. Another papercut is that Phosh handles the display notch
  92. poorly, and though pmOS provides a "tweak" tool which can move the clock over
  93. from behind the notch, it leaves something to be desired. The [relevant
  94. issue][4] is being discused on the Phosh issue tracker and a fix is presumably
  95. coming soon — it doesn't seem particularly difficult to solve. I have also
  96. noted that, though GPS works fine, Mepo [renders incorrectly][5] and Gnome Maps
  97. has (less severe) [display issues][6] as well.
  99. The battery life is not as good as the PinePhone, which itself is not as good as
  100. most Android phones. However, it meets my needs. It seems to last anywhere from
  101. 8 to 10 hours depending on usage, following a full night's charge. As such, I
  102. can leave it off of the juice when I go out without too much fear. That said, I
  103. do keep a battery bank in my backpack just in case, but that's also just a
  104. generally useful thing to have around. I think I've lent it to others more than
  105. I've used it myself.
  107. [4]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/phosh/-/issues/552
  108. [5]: https://l.sr.ht/TOL9.png
  109. [6]: https://l.sr.ht/6SQX.png
  111. There are many other apps which work without issues. I found that [Foliate][7]
  112. works great for reading e-books and [Evince][8] works nicely for PDFs (two
  113. use-cases which one might perceive as related, but which I personally have
  114. different UI expectations for). Firefox has far better performance on this
  115. device than on the PinePhone and allows for very comfortable web browsing. I
  116. also discovered [Gnome Feeds][9] which, while imperfect, accommodates my needs
  117. regarding an RSS feed reader. All of the "standard" mobile Linux apps that
  118. worked fine on the PinePhone also work fine here, such as Lollypop for music and
  119. the Porfolio file manager.
  121. [7]: https://johnfactotum.github.io/foliate/
  122. [8]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince
  123. [9]: https://gfeeds.gabmus.org/
  125. I was pleasantly surprised that, after enduring some more bullshit, I was able
  126. to get [Waydroid][10] to work, allowing me to run Android applications on this
  127. phone. My expectations for this were essentially non-existent, so any degree of
  128. workitude was a welcome surprise, and any degree of non-workitude was the
  129. expected result. On the whole, I'm rather impressed, but don't expect anything
  130. near perfection. The most egregious issue is that I found that internal storage
  131. simply doesn't work, so apps cannot store or read common files (though they seem
  132. to be able to persist their own private app data just fine). The camera does not
  133. work, so the use-case I was hoping to accommodate here — running my bank's
  134. Android app — is not possible. However, I was able to install F-Droid and
  135. a small handful of Android apps that work with a level of performance which is
  136. indistinguishable from native Android performance. It's not quite there yet, but
  137. Waydroid has a promising future and will do a lot to bridge the gap between
  138. Android and mainline Linux on mobile.
  140. [10]: https://waydro.id/
  142. On the whole, I would rate the Poco F1's bullshit level as follows:
  144. - Initial setup: miserable
  145. - Ongoing problems: minor
  147. I have a much higher tolerance for "initial setup" bullshit than for ongoing
  148. problems bullshit, so this is a promising result for my needs. I have found that
  149. this device is ahead of the PinePhone that I had been using previously in almost
  150. all respects, and I have switched to it as my daily driver. In fact, this phone,
  151. once the initial bullshit is addressed, is complete enough that it may be the
  152. first mainline Linux mobile experience that I might recommend to others as a
  153. daily driver. I'm glad that I made the switch.