Another latest update to librem5:crimson-daily-driverHEADmaster

1 files changed, 79 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/posts/librem5:crimson-daily-driver.md b/posts/librem5:crimson-daily-driver.md
index f56fb87..2de3cba 100644
--- a/posts/librem5:crimson-daily-driver.md
+++ b/posts/librem5:crimson-daily-driver.md
@@ -91,6 +91,85 @@ upstream. It's moving right along! At this point, we're seeing somewhere
 between 2 and 30 package updates per day.
 
 
+### Update 2025.01.04
+
+Well, it's been a little over a month, I figure it's time for another update.
+This is gonna be a big one because, get this, I ran `sudo apt full-upgrade`.
+Brace yourselves. :)
+
+A few weeks ago, I saw a huge list of package upgrades come in through the
+`landing` and `crimson` repos this past month - over 500. I assume this is
+related to what Purism wrote in the [October 2024 Crimson Development
+report](https://puri.sm/posts/pureos-crimson-development-report-october-2024/)
+about package synchronization. Almost all of the package upgrades were blocked
+for various reasons, so I _very_ hesitantly tried upgrading with `sudo apt
+full-upgrade` (the replacement for the old school deprecated `sudo apt
+dist-upgrade`). I got most of the package upgrades, and I now routinely have
+blocked upgrades for about 40 packages, all of which I want: upgrades to phosh,
+phoc, gnome-\*, etc.
+
+Now, _what did that `full-upgrade` do exactly?_
+
+It broke mostly everything. I now have the latest mmsd-tng, which is nice,
+except [a bug was introduced](https://gitlab.com/kop316/mmsd/-/issues/101) in
+the most recent 2.6.2 release which breaks MMS attachment receiving (group
+texts still work, just not images).
+
+It also seems to have broken the audio stack. To be clear, it all still works,
+it's just fully manual to switch between outputs. I tried the full upgrade,
+hoping the updates to callaudiod and pipewire would allow me to switch over to
+pipewire fully, but pulseaudio barely works and I now have to manually switch
+between headset, speaker, and headphones audio whenever I want to use the
+phone, have an alarm clock in the morning, or listen to music, respectively. I
+haven't even tried bluetooth audio yet.
+
+Some apps now scale much worse than before the full upgrade. I suspect that's
+because we've gone from the purism modified versions of things like
+gnome-calendar to the official gnome-calendar, which is waiting on the
+libadwaita and gtk4 changes to bake in UI mobile scaling support. I could be
+wrong though, as I haven't taken the time to investigate if this is actually
+the case or not.
+
+The full-upgrade also removed some packages, like `phosh-mobile-settings`, so
+you'll want to manually reinstall that each time if you want to be able to use
+the calendar. The upgrades also (like above) pulls in non-purism-modified app
+updates, like with Documents Viewer. It is more up-to-date, but no longer has
+the purism mobile modifications, so it shows up as a non-mobile form-factor
+app, so you have to press "show all apps" on the app tray to see it, and it
+lacks mobile UI scaling. There are also some odd pinch-to-zoom glitches that
+cause it to jitter all over and highlight random text. I <del>assume</del> hope
+further libadwaita and GTK 4 updates will resolve many of these issues.
+
+**Battery life** is marginally better from after the initial upgrade, and still
+is worse than before. I get about 7-8 hours out of the phone right now before
+it dies. Turning off the wifi card seems to add a few hours to that.
+
+Regardless though, phone functionality still works. Strictly SMS text messaging
+still works, along with matrix (though that has been a little anemic since
+byzantium anyways).
+
+I might give a try later today if I have time, to remove the landing repo and
+see what another full-upgrade does, since I expect that to do a number of
+downgrades, since landing is the development repo and should be notably further
+ahead than crimson. I will of course post back on how that goes if I get to it,
+but it's Saturday and I've got errands to run, coffee to brew, and birds to
+watch!
+
+
+I know that list is a lot of negatives. To be clear, I'm not saying devs
+working on this are bad or anything remotely like that. I'm just providing
+status updates. Crimson isn't even recommended for alpha testing right now, so
+let's give Purism time and patience and politeness to work on this and keep in
+mind, this is the first real linux phone we've ever seen. The first Apple
+iPhone and Google G1 also had terrible battery life and stability issues for a
+long time. We've just gotta catch up with an industry that has an 18 year head
+start and billions of dollars of funding. Let's be sure in our discourse that
+we are patient and respectful, and moreover, helpful! Keeping perspective is
+essential.
+
+Enjoy the weekend folks!
+
+
 Hacks to get running
 --------------------