erebion

Not exactly. But while UBPorts has a good looking user interface, they don't have many UBPorts apps yet. A regular distribution can often be more useful, but as always it depends on the use-case.

Nope. They look differently and have different functions. PostmarketOS wiki has screenshots: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Category:Interface

Oh, I don't mind questions. :)

Help: A lot via the Mobian Ports ( #mobian-ports:matrix.org ) Matrix room and the postmarketOS offtopic ( #offtopic:postmarketos.org ) Matrix room.

Sources: Not much there yet. As soon as there are official builds for the Pixel 3a, I will start writing docs. I already have a lot of notes on what I had to do. But first I need to have someone merge the Kernel patches, as I don't know C, which makes resolving merge conflicts really hard, it turns out. Once that is done, there are just a few smaller merge requests left and builds will appear magically.

The whole process is not that difficult if there are already Kernel patches available. In the case of the Pixel 3a, I only had to clone the sdm670-mainline repo ( https://gitlab.com/sdm670-mainline/linux-patches ) , compile the kernel (two commands) and get a .deb, which I used with mobian-recipes ( https://salsa.debian.org/Mobian-team/mobian-recipes/ ) to build an image. I then wrote a config file for droid-juicer ( https://gitlab.com/mobian1/droid-juicer/-/merge_requests/4 ) which tells it what files on the vendor and modem partitions it should get, then those are copied to /usr/lib/firmware/updates/.

That was easy as dmesg will just tell you what files it cannot load because they are missing. Just find those, write the config, run droid-juicer, reboot... boom. Display, Wifi, LTE and so on working.

Then smaller stuff like udev rules for vibration and an initramfs hook ( https://salsa.debian.org/DebianOnMobile-team/qcom-phone-utils/-/blob/debian/latest/initramfs-tools/hooks/qcom-firmware?ref_type=heads ) so that firmware files get integrated into initramfs and components start to work early during boot.

The most difficult part would be merging the Kernel patches with other patches and resoving the merge conflicts... At least to me, as I don't know C.

If there are no mainlining efforts for a phone yet, then I don't know what to do, as that requires a Kernel dev.

For the Pixel 4a you mentioned, there is a postmarketOS port. So this should be doable. ( https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Google_Pixel_4a_(google-sunfish) )

That's all not that hard, my main difficulty was finding out what to do. Everything I did so far would be an afternoon of work, if I had just found the necessary information much quicker. Instead I spent two weeks, of which 95 % was finding info, lol.

Just join the Mobian Matrix room, we should be able to help you, even though I know far less than the others there...so far. :p

I do hope that's helpful and I'll happily try to answer more questions. :)

Kernel mainlining effort for the SoC in thr Pixel 4a: https://github.com/sm7150-mainline/linux

Maybe that's just because it's cheap KaiOS devices.

That'd also mean breaking E2EE. I'm fine with bridges in general, but not for systems where people expect communication with me to be private.

A solution would be to run a Signal bridge at home, that way you can keep the keys somewhat secure at least.

Try looking at the postmarketOS wiki, it runs on many devices. Often some components are not yet supported, but maybe you have an older unused phone you can use to try it out.