The mobile OS support capability of PinePhone and PineTab is increasing day by day. And to enhance its beauty and run things fluently, it already supports various desktop environments such as KDE neon, Plasma mobile, and GNOME.
In addition, you can now enjoy more features introduced in the GNOME 3.36 desktop environment, which runs pretty well on both PinePhone and PineTab. The latest GNOME brings highly-polished design and performance improvements to smoothen the user experience.
PinePhone And PineTab Running GNOME Shell
Pine64’s, company behind PinePhone and PineTab, smartphone devices are compatible with various Linux distros such as Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish OS, and the latest Manjaro Linux ARM.
Thanks to Martijn Braam from the Netherlands, who posted the testing videos on YouTube running the latest GNOME shell. He used the postmarketOS on his PinePhone and PineTab.
As seen in the video, on PinePhone, a full GNOME launches at a 2x scale using display manager. Icons and application interfaces are refined with new designs and styles. However, some GNOME software still aren’t adjusted to the small screen.
While in PineTab, GNOME shell runs pretty well on the 1280×800 screen without any scaling. You can easily enable features like parental control or rename your favorite application folder in the application overview.
Apart from visual improvements, both devices show common functional lagging, i.e., performance. It takes more than a few seconds to pop up the application after the click.
For the slow performance, you may blame the renowned heavyweight GNOME. Or, it is because Martijn is running postmarketOS from an SD card with 1GB RAM allocation.
Well, slow response and high CPU consumption is an old issue concerning GNOME. But, if you want to look on the bright side, it is still one of the best desktop environments that supports various Linux distros with a good amount of free space.
For all those people who already have the device or are still waiting for their pre-ordered PinePhone, you can download the postmarketOS with GNOME or other desktop environments from here. But if you don’t have the device, you’ve to wait for a while as it is running out of stock.
If you’ve already upgraded to GNOME 3.36, please share your experience in the comments below.
