Tux Machines

Mobian: bringing Debian to mobile devices

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 13, 2023

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Mobian is a project that aims to bring the Debian distribution to mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. By building on the flexibility, stability, and community-driven development of Debian, Mobian aspires to create a powerful and user-friendly alternative to existing mobile operating systems. The project is actively working on reducing the delta between Mobian and Debian, and its ultimate goal is to be absorbed back into its parent distribution and to make it easy to run Debian on mobile devices.

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Mobian's default graphical environment is Phosh, which is a Wayland-based shell for GNOME specifically designed for mobile devices. The Wayland compositor used under the hood is Phoc. Both packages were originally developed by Purism for its Librem 5, but their development has moved to GNOME.

All essential software for a mobile device is pre-installed in Mobian. There's GNOME Calls for phone or Voice over IP (VoIP) calls, Chatty for messaging (SMS messages or XMPP), the Geary email client, the GNOME Web and Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) web browsers, the minimalist file manager Portfolio, and more.

The user can swipe up on the home bar at the bottom of the screen at any time to bring up an overview of the running applications in the top half of the screen and the available applications in the bottom half of the screen (see the image at right). A swipe up on a window in the overview closes the window. Similarly, swiping down from the top of the screen gives access to quick settings, including screen brightness, audio volume, WiFi, and Bluetooth. This area also shows notifications, for example when updates are available.

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