Ben Smith / Semafor:
A look at the sprawling network of group chats that surged in 2020 as a place for SV leaders to talk candidly, with Marc Andreessen playing a central role  —  THE SCOOP  —  Last Thursday morning, a bit before 10 am in Austin and nearly 11 pm in Singapore, Joe Lonsdale had enough of Balaji Srinivasan's views on China.

Talks from Linux App Summit, Ubuntu Touch coming to Smart Watches, a Nemo Mobile project report, the Liberux Nexx reaches dev board stage, NLnet funding for MNT Reform Touch - and more!

Commentary in italics.

Worth Reading

• Liberux: Our first dev-board has arrived!
• NLnet: 42 Free and Open Source Projects Receive Funding to Reclaim the Public Nature of the Internet MNT Reform Touch, gestures for Plasma (Mobile), Maemo Leste, and funding for Dino and Kaidan. Nice!
• Thefoggiest.dev: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?
  • Hacker News thread

Worth Listening

• gnulinux: Captain it's Wednesday - Folge 132 - Linux auf dem Smartphone - GNU/Linux.ch (German).

Worth Watching

• nokzemedia: Can You Daily Drive a PinePhone? | Hazel Reviews. Nice video!
• NoVaLUG: The Current State of Mobile Linux
• Dirty Plumbus: Easy DIY Raspberry Pi 5 Cyberdeck

Linux App Summit

• Pablo Correa Gomez: postmarketOS: the opportunities and challenges of a mobile-first platform
• Soumyadeep Ghosh: Flutter: A cross platform alternative for the Linux Apps Ecosystem
• Evangelos Paterakis: Tuba: A fork success story

Check the Schedule for more, streams are on YouTube.

Worth Noting

• ShadowJonathan: "The EU is introducing an energy label for phones, together with mandatory requirements for phones sold in the EU;- 5 years of software updates (AFTER they stop selling the device in the EU)- providing important hardware parts (during sale and for 7 years after), including free software (if needed), to every repair shop, within 5-10 business days- batteries have to make 800 charging cycles and still be above 80% original capacityAnd on top of that, phones and tablets need this energy label (which also includes a fall damage durability and repairability score), and abide by the above requirements, from 20 June 2025.(https://energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu/product-list/smartphones-and-tablets_en)"
• linus: "How is Mozilla doing you ask? Firefox VCS has completed the move from their own infra to checks notes oh yeah, GitHub dot com https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox "
• YaLTeR: "Today: added touch support to the Overview. Somehow, the entire thing just worked first try.#niri"

Events

• craftyguy: I'll be joining the next Portland Linux/Unix Group clinic on May 18th to help you maaaaybe revive old forgotten devices you totally have laying around. Come on by!https://lists.pdxlinux.org/pipermail/plug-announce/2025q2/001239.html#pdx #pdxlinux #repair #postmarketOS
• servus: "Chaline Bang: permacomputing & postmarketOS residency!>If my phone is so smart, why am I only doing dumb stuff with it?Chaline Bang is having a short residency in servus.at from 23.04.2025 to 30.04.2025. As part of her ongoing research, she will explore the practice of permacomputing and how to reappropriate a smartphone device with PostmarketOS. Her residency will be accompanied with 2 events open to the public.@chalinebang"

Hardware (enablement)

• mntmn: "i'm very happy to say we officially secured a second @nlnet grant this year, this one is for the development of "MNT Reform Touch", which is currently planned as a 7-inch modular, upgradable OSHW tablet powered by a Qualcomm SoC (probably QCS6490 initially, but will have compat to other MNT Reform series CPU modules). more in the next weeks/months."
• bradlinder: "There's evidence that the first Chromebooks with Qualcomm Snapdragon X chips could be on the way, although so far we're just seeing the X1-P42-100 though, which is one of the lower-performance Snapdragon X chips. https://chromeunboxed.com/finally-snapdragon-x-plus-chromebooks-are-on-the-way/ #Chromebooks #Qualcomm #SnapdragonX"
• Liberux: "🔧 Big news: the first Liberux dev-board is here!After weeks of work, we’ve finally received the assembled PCB and already started booting it up. Our hardware team has spent the last days debugging, testing, and getting the SoC to talk to the PC, and we’re officially entering the bring up phase! 🎉📚 We just published a full post with all the details, photos and videos: 👉 https://liberux.net/our-first-dev-board-has-arrived/#Liberux #LiberuxNEXX #linuxphones #openhardware #opensource"
• MrAshCreates: Comment in The Potential of a Linux-Powered Nothing Phone
• adrianyyy: "sooo our sm7150-mainline kernel (and therefore also U-Boot) currently supports:- Xiaomi Mi 9T / Redmi K20- Xiaomi POCO X3 NFC- Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro- Xiaomi Mi Note 10- Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Lite- Google Pixel 4aand will soon also support:- Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 4G- Xiaomi Redmi Note 12 Pro 4G- Samsung Galaxy A71- Samsung Galaxy A80not gonna lie, seeing people take this and adapt it to their own devices makes me so happy :3"
  • Phoronix: Patches Hoping For The Upstream Kernel Finally Provide Google Pixel 4a Support. Nice work!

More Software News

Distributions

• pmOS_devices: #postmarketOS now boots on Jolla C2!https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/tree/master/device/testing/device-jolla-c2 #linux
• postmarketOS pmaports issues: Create generic qcom-laptop port
• postmarketOS pmaports issues: Graphics stack regularly implodes and leaves user stranded with black screen on Allwinner PinePhone

Apps

• LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Interstellar
• nima: Game console Emulation on #LinuxMobile :D
• schmiddionmobile: "Pipeline versions 2.2.0 until 2.2.2 were recently released, reloading your feed seven times faster.Pipeline now fetches your subscriptions from multiple Piped instances in parallel, bypassing rate limits and spreading load. It also automatically refreshes a list of currently working Piped instances on every startup, such that you don't have to manually search for working instances anymore. Overall, this lead to an improved loading time for my personal feed of a factor of about 7."
• schmiddionmobile: "Flare version 0.16.0 was released. This release adds supports for stickers.As the last post about Flare is already over a year old, there were 19 other releases in the meantime. None of them is specifically noteworthy (which is why they were not announced), but together they squash a lot of bugs making Flare overall more reliable and usable. If you already tried Flare once, but ditched it due to reliability issues, now is the best time to try again."
• camiloh: Pix new version is coming with automatic text detection in images. Pix animates the found text and then you can copy or save it to a new note etc.#mauikit https://youtu.be/ZzWqgVPOOZY?si=wMWqlAjLo8Eh5zwh
• seshpenguin: KRetro has been (finally) ported to KF6 thanks to @sungsphinx !(I'll probably start working on it again)#kde #linux #mobilelinux
• chergert: Manuals on libfoundry
• l_prod: "A while ago I learned that Balatro is made in a fun game engine called #love2d, which turns out to be quite the cross-platform beast.This of course meant I had no choice but to run it on my #linuxmobile phone running #postmarketos and #plasmamobile Runs at a locked 60fps on my OnePlus 6T and plays really well besides needing some persuasion to accept screen rotation!No movie magic, no translation layers, no virtual machines."
• jmlich: More small steps for #Amazfish. Browsing steps history with calendar. https://github.com/piggz/harbour-amazfish/pull/492trying to fix notifications:https://github.com/piggz/harbour-amazfish/pull/491reworking pairing:https://github.com/piggz/harbour-amazfish/pull/490
• VolkerKrause: "On the way to the #KDE Plasma (Mobile) Sprint in Graz, and putting the final touches on the @openrailwaymap support in Itinerary's live view."
• jumplink: "Tried out Highscore (formerly GNOME Games) on my OnePlus 6T via the Flatpak developer builds under GNOME Mobile — and wow, it runs beautifully on a touch-based mobile form factor! 💜🎮Without a physical gamepad, it shows a virtual one on screen. But as soon as I connect my 8BitDo Micro controller, it switches seamlessly — virtual gamepad disappears and I'm playing with real controls. Just works™.🔗 Code: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/highscore👾 Maintainer: @alice #GNOME #Highscore #RetroGaming"

Gnome Ecosystem

• This Week in GNOME: #197 XML Parsing
• chergert: Using Foundry to Build/Run
• Georges Stavracas: Boatswain 5.0
• Tobias Bernard: The Elephant in the Room
  • Allan Day: On Elephants
• nekohayo: "Very excited by the upcoming #GNOMESoftware release, as it solves the high RAM usage issue that occurred while in the background (it will now shrink back to ~100 MB instead of growing to multiple hundreds of MBs of RAM due to memory heap fragmentation): https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/issues/941#note_2417546Coming to you in #GNOME 48.2 near the end of May! 😎Thanks to Owen Chiaventone (a total newcomer to @gnome !) for profiling and providing a patch to solve the issue, & @pabloyoyoista + @pwithnall for reviewing & merging!"
• martijnbraam: Oh nice"Fork of GTK to restore OpenGL ES 2.0 support"https://github.com/kkofler/gtk

Phosh

• agx: #wlroots is putting out release candidates for 0.19.0 and I'm running my #phoc branch targeting that on my laptop since today and it didn't crash yet (https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/phoc/-/merge_requests/599). That's a pleasant surprise. 🎉 I've also uploaded the wlroots RCs to #debian #experimental just in case.#phosh
• #phosh: In case you're using a @frameworkcomputer 13 Laptop and want to use the power LED as status LED for #feedbackd (to be notified aboutnotifications in #phosh, etc) you can use this #udev rule: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/agx/feedbackd/-/merge_requests/176/diffs?commit_id=c2e1817012df6ed7ea85b84680e4bac3b9fcae48There's a warning as the LED claims to be multicolor but it's not. That warning will go away with the next #feedbackd release.
• #phosh: Do you know what is really cool and handy of #Linux phones like the #Librem5?You can save files, like tickets directly from your computer on your #phone, for example in the #Phosh #ticketbox directory.The #GNOME save dialog allows to save to another device, like your Linux phone if it is accessible over ssh / sftp.#mobilelinux #opensource #FOSS

Plasma Ecosystem

• Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: multiple major Wayland and UI features
• Carl Schwan et al.: This Month in KDE Apps
• Planet KDE: Integrate QML Window's Background with the System's Color Palette

Sxmo

• pocketvj: "tired of searching for unit conversion like Fahrenheit to CelsiusorFeet to Meter ?no worries, there's a #sxmo userscript for #linuxmobile which helps you on this 🤓#pmos"

Sailfish OS

• adampigg: Have implemented -just- enough of the 'ZeppOS' protocol to get message and call notifications onto the Amazfit Balance from Amazfish! Thanks to @gadgetbridge for the reference implementation and the helpful devs there for answering my questions :)
• flypig's NewPipe log: Day 48
• flypig's NewPipe log: Day 47
• flypig's NewPipe log: Day 46
• flypig's NewPipe log: Day 45
• flypig's NewPipe log: Day 44
• flypig's NewPipe log: Day 43

Ubuntu Touch

• fredldotme: "@deathmist and I are working on something special, and I would like to invite you to join the effort:https://gitlab.com/ubports/porting/community-ports/android13/google-eos/google-eosThis is a repository containing build files to create a bootable image for the Pixel Watch 2 and 2 LTE.Yes, Ubuntu Touch on a Smartwatch.Since this is uncharted territory on the Lomiri side, I would appreciate input from you, directly here in the comments, what you'd like to see and how you would like to help." @deathmist and if you read this and think "that sounds like a big effort woah", that's because it is. And every helping hand is appreciated.

Nemo Mobile

• Nemo Mobile UX team: Nemomobile in March and April 2025. Nice report! Kremnium sounds cool!
  • Lemmy.ca - linuxphones: Nemomobile in March and April 2025

Kernel

• Phoronix: Deferred THP Insertion Nearing The Linux Kernel To Help Avoid Memory Waste
• Phoronix: The Linux Kernel's SHA-256 Code Being Improved Upon For Easier & Performant Use
• Phoronix: Linux 6.15-rc4 To Fix The Kernel Crashing For 32-bit Systems With Too Much RAM
• Phoronix: Raspberry Pi HEVC Decoder Linux Driver Updated For Mainline Kernel Attempt

Non-Linux

• honeyguide: "Some more great progress by @tobykurien who is porting #FreeBSD to the #PinephonePro in the project sponsored by us: After getting #X11 running a short while ago, he now implemented #touchscreen support. 🥳"

Stack

• Phoronix: Newer Arm Mali GPUs Now Advertising Vulkan 1.2 Support With Mesa's PanVK Driver
• Phoronix: Mesa Falling Back To Its Multi-File Cache Due To Performance Reasons
• Phoronix: GCC 15.1 Released With COBOL Compiler & Many Other Improvements

Matrix

• Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2025-04-25

Thanks

Huge thanks to Plata for the nifty set of Python scripts that speed up collecting links from feeds by a lot.

Something missing? Want to contribute?

If your project's cool story (or your awesome video or nifty blog post or ...) is missing and you don't want that to happen again, please just put it into the hedgedoc pad for the next one! Since I am collecting many things there, this get's you early access if you will ;-) If you just stumble on a thing, please put it in there too - all help is appreciated!

If you can imagine to put this collection together (it's mostly deleting irrelevant stuff, after scripts have collected it), please get in touch via email (see below)! It would really help to have someone else taking on the responsibility for this collection every once in a while!