Hello, so yeah, I'm going to talk about fossil little bit, primarily the things that
have been going on during the last year, and yeah, I have been daily driving, like in
its first phones with Foch, since basically shortly after Foch's them in 2020, I'm a
member of the Mobion team, Debbie and Maintainer, I developed a software and contribute
to the Foch and Norm Ecosystem, and I maintain Norm Calls and Chatti.
Okay, so I assume most people already know what Foch is about, but maybe by a show of hands
who hasn't heard Foch yet, okay, I will definitely, it's very small minority, but of
course I will explain shortly what it is. So it is a graphical shell, target small by devices,
so that means specifically smartphones, but also like tablets, so it definitely needs to
be touch friendly, since that is like what you'd expect when you're also coming from other
devices, and I mean you have a touch screen, so that's the only real way you can interact with it.
It is a pure whale and shell, and it's written in GTK. Also, it relies a lot on
like existing genonteknologies, which we'll see in a bit. Apart from the actual shell, there's
the compositor, which is called Foch, so basically the Foch stands for Foch shell, Foch is the
phone compositor, and Foch is based on WL routes, on the WL routes library, and apart from like
Foch being, it's not only just like this one project, but we kind of consider it to be a bit
broader in scope, and originally it was written for Foch, but it quickly got adopted to
other phones as well, and not only their distribution, but many more, and the idea behind what we
consider, like the Foch project is to make Linux mobile ecosystem in general work better,
so that means whenever we find some pieces that are missing, say in mode manager or in other parts
across the stack, we'll try to improve them. So yeah, this is roughly what it looks like these days.
One of the things you may already notice is that we got rid of not got rid of, but we don't
only have the black backgrounds, but we actually support the desktop backgrounds that you've set
up in the control center. In the middle you'll see like the how it looks like when you have some
applications open, and on the very right how your lock screen may what it may look like.
You notice on the lock screen that there we don't have the desktop thing enabled yet,
there is some work still to be done on that end, but you can expect that to change like within
I don't know, some time frame, not too unreasonable time frame.
Okay, and so what does the stack look like? As I said earlier, we have like a lot of
known components, so like gnomesession, gnomesetting steamer, then we have things like network manager
for configuring your Wi-Fi, more the manager for your modem. There's IOS sensor proxies for your sensors,
and yeah, like lots of other things you'd usually also find on your desktop or laptop.
And of course, we are building on, usually on top of the Linux kernel.
So, I've talked about fashion, very, very briefly, but there's also a lot of other components,
and it can be a bit hard to like draw the line, and I don't think anyone really has
froritively drawn a line somewhere, but like I would say the main components you expect on
it for system are apart from the shell and the compositor, some keyboard that may be squeak
bought, which was like the originally written keyboard, it might be for Fash OS case stop.
Then you have feedback D, which is like the demon that deals with
haptic feedback, LED blinking, but also plays like some sounds, and usually you also have like
first mobile settings as one of the more core components, which allows you to set up
lots of different bells and whistles that you can adjust for Fash, and which are
either very, very specific to Fash itself, so that it wouldn't make sense to have them in
a GNOME control center, or it might be things that, well, it was just like easier putting it in there,
and which might end up getting sent up to GNOME control center.
Some of the lesser known things, and this is just like to give you some idea of what
some people, like how broad some people might come to understand the term Fash,
we have of course the Fash tool, which is just like an application that is supposed to give you
introduction in how it is supposed to be used, then Fock and Frock does, who here knows what Fock is,
okay, so that's not so many people, this is based on on greed, like a login manager,
and it was basically how it came about is, we had problems like with unlocking the
key ring, like the login key ring, because at the very beginning you have Fash B started directly
as a system D unit, for example, and it came, like the idea was okay, we want
something else to act as a login manager, and it started off as kind of like ripping some
code out of Fash, like from the lock screen, and then making it a stand-alone thing that would
work on top of free the Frock with the R, is the newest contender in that line, and it's basically
trying to do the same thing, but, and this is where the R comes in, it's like written in rust,
I'll get to that, and it's like that, and it's like using, it's sharing more code with the actual
Fash code base, and then there's some other things, like the lip Fash thing that this is the
like a library that came out of wanting to share more code between the the the breeder,
and the actual Fash shell code base, then there's some other things, like XG desktop portal,
there's a specific portal, we have our own adaptive file chooseer, and then there's like
other applications as well, not wanting to bore you too much, but Fash has been around for
very long time now, like the very first tech release was in September of 2018, and since then we've
had a total of 78 releases, and in the last year we got a total of 13 stable, or since January
24, 2024, yeah we got 13 stable releases, and we have lots of translations available.
One of the things that changed during the last year was that the release cadence changed from monthly
to every six weeks roughly, that is both to give us a little bit more time, and like to finish
up things, polish up things, but also we feel that like the basis solid enough that we don't need
to like move so fast, okay, and yeah there's like lots of other things that have been going on,
so here's a couple of different new quick settings that you can access from the top bar,
on the very left, this has been asked for very often, like keeping your phone from going into
suspend, this caffeine plug-in in the left, like the whole selecting, connecting to Wi-Fi,
has been like overhauled, this works like with arbitrary many things, and has been like very nice
quality of life improvement, and also there's like this hotspot total that you can set up.
All of these things, whether you want to have them or not, you can configure it inside of
flush mobile settings, so basically we have lots of new plugins, all of these plugins they also
are built against this lip flush library that I've talked earlier about, and you can
enable this able them, one of the things that I particularly like is like the dark mode,
toggle, and nightlight, which is kind of nice, and you can also like if you notice on the very
left there's these little anchor things, you can drag and drop those to like change the order
in which they appear in the quick settings, then some of the like blocks, like I have talked about
quick, like the quick settings, now we have also like plugins for for the lock screen,
one of the things that's kind of old already, and you may already notice, but the one of the
left is like called the ticket box plugin, which allows you to specify a folder, and if you put
some PDFs in there, you can open them up without having to unlock your phone so that it's very
convenient like when you're traveling, and on the right you got some upcoming events,
another newer addition to the whole plugins on the on the lock screen is the so-called launcher
box, which shows you, or which makes use of the launcher entry debas protocol where you can like
gets information, like some progress in this particular case, how far your electric vehicle
is charged along, and this application that you see right here that's called for easy.
Okay, then there has been like polishing up all over the place, I'd say, one of the things that
I've put up the example of this, the whole notifications are much nicer than they were last year,
for one we have flowed this fancy, like fade in and fade out animations, or not fade,
sliding in sliding out, but also like the way multiple, if you have multiple notifications,
how they are like they're more clearly separated, and some of these things.
One of the nicer things that has happened a couple of months, or like one and a half months,
or so ago, is that we have now some cell broadcast support, the more than manager bits have
been merged into the main branch, but there has not yet been made a release, so
so flush will build without those bits for now, unless you happen to have a recent enough
more than manager, flush itself will give you like a, oops, okay, will give you these dialogues to
inform you of, like the particular, I don't know, presidential alert, or what have you that
has been broadcast, there still needs to be somewhere, or there's still some work done to be
done on, I don't know, chatty, and to get like the historical data,
and thanks to an Lnet on this part for funding that particular work, okay, I'm going to, oh,
sorry, I'm going to go there, but we can now, because some of the nice things were, we have now
excellent color support, desktop forgetting it, this is the file chooseer that I've talked about,
which is like a part of the XDG test, flush portal, desktop portal, flush, when you connect to
Wi-Fi, flush will now detect the presence of captive portals, and will open your browser for you,
on the squeak part size, there was, I think a lot more stuff, but we have a lot better, like,
handling of different sizes that was always a bit of a pain, electron apps kind of work, a lot
better now for the, sorry, need to go back, and this is a bit fiddly with doing it,
doing the presentation from the phone, well, okay, as you can see, we have a lot better,
nicer, like, number layout, and word completion is also something that has landed on the
flush OSK stop side, fidd back D now supports, sorry, fidd back D now supports,
like arbitrary RGB colors for your like LED blinking instead of only the
named colors, we have support for hardware patterns on poor complex forms, so you have less loads,
or, I don't, first of all, less load on the CPU, but it would also like continue blinking during
during suspend, and skip that one, okay, in terms of mobile settings, there's also like
the favorites, which you can now direct and drop, I think we can safely skip this,
there has been a lot of work on like not, top notch notch support, it's, I think it's a bit
hard to see, but you can see these little perpally things in the top, which are basically,
yeah, representation of where the notches are, and so flush will avoid putting you eye elements
there, so for example, you can see that the clock moves to the right hand side,
okay, and if you want to get involved, there's multiple ways you can go about that,
code contributions, of course, always welcome issues are mostly welcome, and you can of course,
like test the latest codes, there, we can skip all this as well, the one of the,
maybe this is something to show, under the, I enjoy, okay, so what I wanted to show, but it kind
of, you're kind of messed it up, is you can run flush nested within your,
or whatever session within your running system, and it will basically check that page over there,
and this is one of the things that makes it very, very nice to like work on, on flush itself,
because you don't need to leave, you like your system, this definitely needs to be set,
if you want to test the latest and greatest, there is another blog post which I highly recommend,
we basically have these nightly repositories, which you can set up for your,
if you're running a deviant-based setup, you can put them in your sources, what it is is basically,
you take the latest main branch for like flush-fuck and all of these other components,
and merge requests which are as good as done, before they get merged, they get put into like
this next branch, and from there, these nightly packages are getting built, there's lots of work to
be done in the future, and yeah, I, I don't know if we have time for questions, I don't know where,
okay, yeah, one person, okay, I'm gonna, okay,
the question was whether they have been any recent performance improvements and not that I can think of,
like, but I kind of have to say, if you look at how flush performs on the original pine phone,
and that is very weak hardware, I think it performs very, very nicely, if you just look at the shell,
sorry, what was the second part of the question?
okay, at the, the second part of the question was whether there were
areas that could improve performance, one thing that comes to mind would be GTK for default,
at least, I mean, I don't know too much about all the nitty-gritty details,
but yeah, that is something that comes to mind, okay, sorry, okay, and with that, thank you.