I’ve been using SFOS for a few weeks now on an Xperia 10 iii. Simultaneously, I’ve been trying to get a OnePlus 6 as close to a daily driver as possible using postmarketos. I’m using SFOS as a daily driver because pmos is not quite there yet (battery drain, no working camera). However, there is one thing which is way better in pmos: the browser, i.e. desktop ESR Firefox with a mobile configuration. https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/mobile-config-firefox
As on SFOS, DRM (widevine support) is lacking, there is a workaround however. You can basically use container based solution (distrobox + podman + fedora + widevine installer + user agent) and use a standard Firefox. This solution works for me. https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Widevine
Would it be doable to somehow combine the two approaches on SFOS to get real Firefox working with the mobile config and widevine enabled? This would allow people to use streaming services in their browser. Right now, I’m unable to access public television in my country due to the lack of DRM support in browsers on SFOS (native + android).
Calls only work on pmos + gnome-mobile (stable branch). A few tweaks are necessary to improve audio quality. And you’re going to miss calls when the system is suspended. In a few days time I’m going to post a YT video explaining the whole process of setting up the OP6.
In my opinion, setting up SFOS was almost as time consuming. But the system is reliable. Using pmos is great fun and I love it but it’s a bit like driving a vintage car. You need to pull out all the stops to get it going and keep your eyes on things to keep it working. Using it as a daily driver made me feel like some kind of phone nurse . When it comes to the browser and multimedia stuff, pmos is streets ahead (native Kodi + Firefox) though. The pragmatic choice for me was SFOS nevertheless.
I don’t have time to test this right now but it might be possible with an Arch Linux ARM container in the Harbour Containers application. Arch Linux is only operating system with working sound.
You’ll need the version from Chum testing which includes my PR to fix setup script for a graphical session.
Desktop Firefox runs in here and it’s capable of playing videos.
I also tried setting things up in an arch linux container. When I want to start an X session (xfce) I get a black screen with a warning: “unable to contact settings server”. I don’t know how to solve this…
If you were, you might have to set the user agent in Firefox to something like: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 14541.0.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/142.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Hmm, that sounds like the issue I thought I fixed, it should be in chum testing. But you can try editing the installation script manually on your device to incorporate these changes.
I did eventually get it to install (needs to be /usr/lib instead of /usr/lib64 apparently), however I did not try changing the user agent. I will give that a shot!
EDIT: you can also try to fix up your existing container with the instructions I posted here
This should be a lot faster than fixing the setup script and creating a new one.
Thanks a lot. I’m going to wait and let you have a go at this first (user agent). This is starting to get a bit too complex for me . I’m just an average tinkerer.
. When it comes to the browser and multimedia stuff, pmos is streets ahead (native Kodi + Firefox) though. The pragmatic choice for me was SFOS nevertheless.
. I’m just an average tinkerer.
