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PinePhone user? Here’s something different to try on your awesome Open Source Linux phone, the super fast and lightweight MATE desktop environment!
Yes, you’re reading that right, it is apparently possible to put the MATE desktop environment on the PinePhone, and surprise, surprise, it runs very well, that if you can get used to the desktop experience on a small screen, of course.
Disappointed by other distributions available for the PinePhone, a YouTube user apparently managed to put the MATE desktop on the mobile device the pmbootstrap installer from postmarketOS, a GNU/Linux distribution designed for phones.
In the video below, you can see the MATE desktop in action on the PinePhone, running the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the Onboard on-screen keyboard.
What’s even more awesome is that the device boots in under a minute and the memory use appears to be fantastic. The user reports that running LibreOffice Calc, Terminal and Firefox with a few tabs eats only about half of PinePhone’s 2GB RAM capacity.
The whole experience is quite snappy, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise because the MATE desktop environment is optimized for low-spec devices like the GPD MicroPC and GPD Pocket. However, not all things work well, such as power management, which works partially and the sound mixer, which doesn’t work at all.
All in all, the MATE desktop on the PinePhone comes as a nice surprise for geeks who want to try something different than Plasma Mobile or Ubuntu Touch.
The user will continue to investigate and test MATE on the PinePhone, and promises to release an image for everyone to try if it’s stable enough for daily use, so stay tuned and subscribe to his YouTube channel below!
Last updated 4 years ago
