 Hello and welcome to yet another episode of Will Nicola be able to use a daily Linux phone? The answer is obviously no, but let's actually see why. Last time we talked about Plasma Mobile and why it's very good, but I can't actually use it every day. Today we're going to talk about Fush, which is the shell made from GNOME. Now there's actually this implementation to do GNOME shell, the same one as in the desktop ones in the phone, but unlikely I cannot test it, I will talk about it more later. So Fush, I installed it, I tried it out. Let's start with the welcome screen. So the first thing you're greeted by is a login screen, like you have to insert your password before getting the welcome wizard, which is actually something that was, I think, better than in Plasma Mobile where you immediately see the wizard and you're able to set the password within it. But anyway, I just unlock it and I actually don't see the welcome wizard until after I unlock it a couple of times, which is weird. But when I do, it's your classical welcome wizard. It's a bit too wide for the screen of the Penphone Pro, for some reasons, but nonetheless I can use it. It asks me to connect to the Wi-Fi and, you know, these kind of things. Interestingly enough, it does have online accounts, which is something that Plasma Mobile didn't have and that is usually a very strong point of GNOME overall. However, when I actually tried to connect my online account of Google, I couldn't type my username nor password for some reason. I tried to select the text field, I tried to do it many times, I just couldn't type in anything, even though I had the keyboard open. So that was weird. Not at the alt breaker in any way though. Okay, so let's talk about the actual shell. The main page has no home screen in itself. You just have the list of applications as if you had swiped up from an Android device. And that is actually your home screen, which is an interesting concept. Personally, I do feel a bit claustrophobic in it, but I guess it works. You can hold some applications to put them to the top of the list or remove them from the top. And sliding from the top, you get quick settings, which has, you know, Wi-Fi, volume, Bluetooth, that sort of stuff. It has less options that Plasma Mobile has again, but you know, it has the most important ones and tap and holding Bluetooth or Wi-Fi does open the system settings for that section, which is perfect. You do get options to lock the screen and turn off the device. It's very interesting to put there a lock the screen button. You just have the button on your smartphone anyway. But what I would really like to see in that place is a settings icon that just opens up settings. I couldn't actually find one except for the traditional way to open it. Changing the volume works cleanly. You just see the volume changing. However, there is no way compared to Plasma Mobile to access some more advanced settings about the volume. As an example, being able to control the volume of each application or the input and outputs, which is, again, not a deal breaker. But you know, maybe if you hold the volume slider, it could open up system settings with the volume settings. That sort of stuff would be very welcome to see. Whenever you have an application open, you get always at the bottom a keyboard button to always open up and close the keyboard whenever you need it, which is pretty smart, because not all applications will have a perfect implementation of the keyboard system. So I'm all for it. All for it. And also you get to multitask just by swiping from the bottom, and you will be able to see your open applications on the top and then underneath it your home screen slash up launcher, which is, again, an interesting concept because it allows you to get back to the home screen just by swiping from the bottom and seeing all of your apps. But at the same time, without an actual home screen to return to, I still feel very claustrophobic. It's me. I'm used to Android, I guess. And you can just close an application just by swiping it from the bottom. So interestingly enough, at the bottom of the application list, you see a bottom to only show mobile applications instead of all application, which is, again, an interesting concept. I think it's a good idea to only show, you know, the stuff you need, but also give you a target to show all applications. At the same time, I'm wondering how is this distinction applied? How does the system know whether an application is usable in a mobile form factor or not? That's, I don't know. I'm asking you, do you know? Write in the comments. I will give Fosh and Posh Fosh. You do pronounce it Fosh and Malus because there is no easy way to change the wallpaper. Usually you just tap and hold on the background, but you can't do that. It does nothing. I tried a bit and then I just open up settings and then you can change the wallpaper in the appearance. But another Malus is that they actually have two settings applications. One is called settings and one is called mobile settings. I was like, what? Which one is it? Like, I'm using a mobile, I'm using a mobile phone and I get settings and mobile settings. There are two different applications. That is weird. It kind of makes sense because the settings does have some desktop only stuff inside of it. As an example, you can change the virtual desktops and hot corners that probably not useful in a smartphone. However, mobile settings, I think it's not meant to be like actual settings at all. If not for some very specific use cases, the distinction is not clear to me. The wallpaper was in settings though, not mobile settings. So let's talk applications. How hard apps? So most importantly, this is extremely important, there is a chess application out of the box. So how is it? I played a game at the hardest difficulty and it's GNU chess. I lost because it's the computer, but I do have some remarks to me. Most importantly, if you open the pop up for preferences, you just click on preferences, you can customize everything, which is nice, but you cannot close the pop up. There's no way to close the pop up. I started clicking everywhere, tapping, swiping, you just can't close it. You're stuck into settings, which is something that would only happen in Katie Plasma theory. After a bit of research, the only way I found to get back to the application is get to the multitask view where the dialogue is actually considered a different application compared to settings. And then I just close the dialogue and get back to settings, which is awkward to say the least. Some other applications feel more refined for the use case. As an example, the clock application is just fine. You can customize everything. However, in my last video, somebody rightfully asked, okay, but can you actually set an alarm? I mean, you can, but is it gonna wake the device? Fair question. Is it gonna wake the device? And I'm not sure because I just now realized that I forgot to try, but you do have another application, which is called wake, wake mobile, whose whole idea is indeed to wake the mobile phone to set an alarm. So considering that you have the clock up and then the wake mobile application to actually set alarms that wake the phone, I guess that the clock up doesn't wake up the phone. I forgot to test it, whoops. How is the wake mobile application if you want to wake up in the morning, which is pretty important, I think. Well, I mean, you can set the time. You do not have any kind of customization that you have in the clock up. I cannot set anything really except for wake me up at this hour. And I tested it and it works. It's very loud and requires you to log in before being able to turn it off, which is annoying, but I mean, it's surely gonna wake me up. Another very good application is the sound recorder. I was just able to click record sound, do some sounds and then play them back and it worked perfectly. So thumbs up for that. And then I went to the app store to see if you know there's, I needed more applications for my daily life. So the app store looks nice. It still prompts me to install Blender, which I still think is weird for a mobile phone. However, that might actually be Manjaro. We'll talk about that later on. And I managed for the first time because this wasn't working in Plasma Mobile to install an application through the software center, which is nice. Yay, I did it. I tried to install a mastodon client. However, I could not find any mastodon client from GNOME like JDK. So I installed as a test token on the same one as last time from KD and it worked just fine. However, I did a bit more research about JDK. There is a new one that is in development. There's a old one, which is no longer developed since years. I installed it. I had to reboot the phone for it to show up, but it did work. Not an amazing experience. I think that GNOME is a bit lacking in the mastodon apps clients category, but that shouldn't matter because we can just use the browser, right? I mean, there's a browser. Here's the thing. The browser is Firefox, which I thought was weird because you cannot build in Firefox mobile. You have to just use Firefox desktop. And I thought Firefox desktop wasn't going to work that well on a mobile phone. Surprisingly enough, the UI is actually pretty compact and clean. You can see that it's not meant for a mobile phone. As an example, the tabs are just weird. But I mean, it works. I'm surprised, except it doesn't because I cannot interact with any web page in any means. I just tap and everything is lost, which is quite a deal breaker. How do I say this? Being able to interact with a web page is the whole point of using a web browser. I have no idea what's going on. I tried something different, like this kind of things. I couldn't get past around it. So I just can't use the web browser, which means I can't use half of the things I need, actually, which is pretty bad. I did want to test web apps as normal apps, but I'm not sure if Firefox supports that. I thought it was a GNOME web, and I can't interact with web at all anyway. What else? I tried the console application because I had to install some flatpacks to try to work around these issues. And it was not as good as an experience compared to Plasma Mobile console, in my opinion. Firstly, the selection of buttons to always show on top of the keyboard is a bit weird. I would really like to see a tab in there, which is pretty important. But also, it's impossible to select text, which is super annoying. I would like to just copy, paste that directory and access it, but nope. And the keyboard is just so unreliable. Like on Plasma Mobile, I type something that something gets typed. This time, nope. It doesn't, like, detect multiple clicks on the same button. It loses some clicks. It's painful to use, to be honest. I'm sorry to put it like that. Another thing that could have been solved by the browser is the fact that there is no application to watch videos or listen to music streaming. Plasma Mobile had that out of the box, which I think is super nice. I can understand not having this out of the box, but apparently there is no way at all to have a mobile application in GTK to do that. So no music and videos for me, I guess. Yeah, I mean, my list of notes to talk about literally says at this point, given how barely anything I tried worked, I'm not even sure what else to try out. So that was applications. I honestly gave up after that. There is a serious lack of clients for various tasks in the GTK world, apparently. Mobile world, at least. And Firefox is not working. The experience is pretty bad, so it didn't work. So let's switch to the last part, which is thoughts on the projects and some gotchas that you should know about. Firstly, again, this is Fosh or however you pronounce it. This is not actually Gnome. There is various videos showcasing the fact that you can put Gnome into a mobile phone with some merge request and it just works very nicely. You get a super duper awesome gestures and everything. I couldn't test that because it requires to be a developer that is able to know which merge request to apply. And, you know, it's still in development. So hopefully when it comes out, it's a very nice experience. But currently, I can't know. This was, however, not Gnome. It's Fosh, which is a different show. I've also been told that some of the issues that I experienced could be due not to Gnome or KD Plasma, but due to Manjaro, which is setting up things and doing some work and maybe they are also to blame. As an example, the set of applications shown by default in the app center could be a fault of Gnome for including Blender. However, I couldn't actually find any working image stable besides Manjaro's. So sorry. One thing I was very surprised by is the lack of applications. Usually when I talk about Gnome, one thing that I really respect about Gnome is just how many different applications to cover different use cases they have. However, when you are talking about mobile phones specifically, I think that a Plasma mobile effort has made an incredible amount of work and there is just like dozens of very good Plasma mobile applications that cover a lot of different use cases all done in Korygami with a very consistent style. And the cool thing is that those mobile apps are coming well adapted to the desktop. You won't even know they were initially designed for mobiles. So I think any other Plasma is doing an incredible job and maybe I'm biased, but I would say that the work on Plasma mobile is currently working better compared to the work on Gnome mobile or Fosh or Gnome mobile applications. We have to keep in mind that mobile phones are incredibly tough. Actually, it's basically you have to redo everything you did for the desktop in a completely different form factor. So it's very normal that this is taking years and years. Completely normal actually. And I think it really shows how much work and how good of a work is being put in by both the KDE and Gnome teams. And it just so happens that I particularly like what the KDE team is doing. I think it's still not a daily usable thing for me, but a very good option. However, there is one thing I didn't talk about at all, which is Ubuntu Touch. Ubuntu Touch has been in development for quite a while. And you know, maybe I should try that out. So I've done KDE Plasma mobile. I've done Fosh. I cannot do Gnome on a mobile phone because it's not out yet. I can do Ubuntu Touch. Interested? Not interested? Let me know. Drinking game, one shot for each time I say mobile.