Oneplus 6t Postmarketos

[Mauricette Atencio]

Recently, I tried to upgrade the modem firmware on my pinephone and failed.As far as I know, the modem on my pinephone is broken.I have a developer edition of the pinephone pro but the mainline kernel doesnt even have reliable charging working 1.

On the look out for a replacement device, I saw the poco f1 and oneplus 6 have gained support for calling in postmarketOS.Since I am tired of dealing with pine64 hardware and the Librem 5 is too expensive, I decided to pick up a poco f1 for 150 Canadian dollars.So how is the experience?Overall very good and I have been using it as my daily driver for 2 weeks.

PostmarketOS gained support for calling in the stable branch after I got my poco f1 and the distro has prebuilt images for the poco f1.However, I like customizing my install via pmbootstrap and followed the wiki to find out which panel my device had and made sure pmbootstrap installed the right image.Overall, installing postmarketOS+Sxmo with full disk encryption was no issue.

I used rsync to copy my $HOME directory and /etc/apk/world from my pinephone to the poco f1.The notch was a bit annoying but Vitali64 told me I can add bar gaps 42 0 to my sway config to make sure the notch doesnt cover up UI elements.Ideally, we will have gap support preconfigured for users in Sxmo via our deviceprofiles 3.

Calling support for devices other than the pinephone is supported in the git head of sxmo-utils when callaudiod and pipewire is installed.I installed the git head of sxmo-utils and ran apk add callaudiod pipewire.

Calling does work with a caveat - sending DTMF tones doesnt work.As such, you cannot interact with robocall systems.This has been reported to upstream 4 and someone in the SDM845 mainlining postmarketOS chat said they will eventually fix it.

Aside from the slight echo the caller on the other side will hear, call audio is perfect on the poco f1 and much better than the pinephone.However, the audio on the speakers is too low when playing media from firefox/mpv.I am not sure whether this is cause of a bad configuration on my part and I will have to try out phosh to test.

If you want to help support the SDM845 mainlining effort, see the postmarketOS wiki page _Snapdragon_845_(SDM845).We are very close to the days when we can buy cheap phones like we do cheap Thinkpads off ebay and install a privacy respecting OS.