Seemed interesting until I read that Phosh pulls in GNOME - gnome-settings, gnome-session etc. Seems like a very strange bundle to bring in for an extremely power constrained device, where every % of increased battery drain is noticed by the user

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gf000 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Why? What's particularly heavy in these gnome tools?

Like the particular programs are no issue, but the whole UNIX-userspace as done in the mainframe era and still is. Like you definitely need cooperative program suspend/resume like on Android for any kind of sane battery life, but that's unfortunately completely missing in case of GNU/Linux.

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tim-projects an hour ago | parent [-]

Gnomes' a massive memory hog

I was looking at this and thinking maybe it would improve a cheap android phone. But now I know it's running gnome I won't even consider trying

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gf000 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> maybe it would improve a cheap android phone.

Not in a million worlds. Android is by far the most optimized OS (as a whole, including user space, graphics stack everything) for mobile devices. It's almost like the most widely used mobile operating system has had quite a bit of dev hours spent on it.

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freedomben an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do you have any numbers? The last numbers I remember seeing, had XFCE around 500 MB and gnome around 700 MB. I'm trying to find some current numbers, but it's a pretty tough thing.

Without any different numbers, I think saying a massive memory hog is a little hyperbolic. Applications in use, especially browsers, are going to dwarf the desktop environment anyway. Having the polish is well worth it to many people, myself included.

I would definitely like to see less memory requirements for the various desktop environments, but at the end of the day I don't pay for any of this

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gcr an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Every desktop environment is a massive memory hog. Do you really want something minimal like xfce on a touchscreen?

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zzril an hour ago | parent | next [-]

SXMO is pretty minimal in that regard, but it doesn't force you to use the touchscreen. Can also navigate through menus via the volume buttons...

	▲	gf000 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Even that will be a massive energy vampire compared to android, that had top notch engineers working on it for close to 2 decades...

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tim-projects an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I've been using openbox for over a decade. That's completely false. Xfce is not a memory hog. And it's not minimal either it's fully functional.

Gnome is a bloated mess of a thing and I hate it. Why would anyone want their desktop to use over 1gb of ram. I have a 32gb laptop and I still loath the idea of throwing away memory on such a bloated awful thing.

Running gnome on a phone. Yeah... No

	▲	ChocolateGod 41 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It doesn't run GNOME Shell, which is the main memory hog of GNOME. It uses some GNOME services, namely so it doesn't have to invent it's own. None of these services are memory heavy and all have a purpose (e.g. managing Bluetooth)
	▲	Striving7340 38 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Phosh is not based on gnome-shell and nobody cares if you want to run openbox on your phone.

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Striving7340 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Phosh is not based on gnome-shell and has its own settings and apps, but it does use parts of gnome, no reason to reinvent the wheel.

> Seems like a very strange bundle to bring in for an extremely power constrained device, where every % of increased battery drain is noticed by the user

I'm sure you can make your Frankenstein version that would be 10% as usable and secure as phosh by removing everything but for most users, 100mb more ram and 1% more battery drain for an OS aiming to be a daily driver is something that's worth it.

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realusername 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It works kind of okay for recent devices as phones are very powerful nowadays, Phosh on a <2015 device is much more painful though.