Is GNOME ready to tackle the SMARTPHONE ? A tour of Phosh on the PinePhone

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A lot of work has been put recently into making the various Linux desktop environments more able on mobile form factors. Let's see how these efforts are panning out, starting with PHOSH, the GNOME mobile shell, and its applications.

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What is Phosh
Phosh is GNOME shell, re-jigged for mobile. It's developed mainly by Purism, for their Librem5. It's open source, used by a lot of distros that you can flash to and SD card and use on the pinephone for example.
I'm trying this out on the baseline Pinephone model, with Manjaro Phosh, but you could also try phosh on Fedora, Debian, Manjaro, postmarket OS...
Obviously it's manjaro, so expect more apps than the default, and a specific icon theme, which I changed so it would look more "vanilla".
It's only one of the available mobile interfaces for Linux mobile devices, you could also get Plasma mobile, Ubuntu touch, and a lot of other.
I'll only talk about Phosh, not the battery life, the use of hardware, etc... as it is dependent on what you'll run it on: pinephone, Librem 5, or maybe something else in the future.

The shell
Phosh takes the concept of GNOME shell, and moves it to a mobile form factor. Basically, you've got this arrow at the bottom of the screen, which brings up the activities view, combined with the app grid.
You'll see all your running apps, and the ones you can launch as well, on the same screen. It's a simple enough interface, although it might not scale all that well when people have the option to install tons of applications. There is a search feature, obviously, which only searches through applications, you won't get the full system search you can enjoy in desktop GNOME here.

Up top, you get your standard indicators, with the cellular icon, which is not enabled here as I haven't moved my SIM to the pinephone, the wifi, bluetooth, time, and battery.

Clicking in that black area up top displays the settings shade, with quick settings, much like on Android. You can't customize these, but you'll get the essentials: rotation, do not disturb, flashlight, and docking mode, as well as volume and brightness sliders. If you have notifications, they'll be displayed underneath these sliders.

To dismiss this shade, just tap on the top of the screen again.

In the activities view, you get a horizontally scrolling list of your recent apps, and a favorites bar. These favorites can be customized with a long press on the app's icon, which also display the various options for this application, just like right clicking an icon in GNOME's dock.

Underneath that, you get your app list, sorted alphabetically.

Now, it ships with a bunch of default applications, which manjaro supersedes with more stuff, just like on the desktop version of the distro. You have the basics: a text messenging application, a phone dialer, a contacts app, a calculator, a calendar, a clocks application, everything you'd expect to get on a phone.

These apps are all responsive, which means that they are, in fact, the desktop GNOME apps, that just know how to behave when opened on a phone screen.
All the features are still there, but things are moved to a hamberger menu, or to tabs, displayed on the bottom instead of being on the top of the app, as they are positioned on the desktop.

Some apps have not received that mobile treatment, though. The calendar, for example, is the full desktop app, whish is displayed with very small text, and touch targets, and is barely usable.

The file manager manjaro ships is called portfolio, so it's not the GNOME FIles app, Nautilus. I tried older versions of Phosh where Nautilus was included but it wasn't adapted for mobile at the time.

If you need more applications than what your distribution ships, you have GNOME Software, which works fine, even though you can feel there are still some hiccups.

This means that you'll get to install any desktop app on your phone as well, like GIMP, Inkscape, or Libre Office.
Why would you want to do that on a phone? Well, because this shell turns into a full desktop shell once you plug the phone to a display. You then get the full GNOME experience, with the desktop shell, and all the apps you've installed spring to their full size.


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