I was going to make some smart ass comment about browser version numbers being ridiculous anymore (after Firefox 3.6 I stopped keeping track), but then I saw it
touchpad & touchscreen gestures, swipe-to-nav
Hot diggity damn. This might make me less likely to revert to Chromium every new install, if Firefox works well with touchscreen at last. I’ll have to check this out on my Pi 5 on Ubuntu.
Update: the 30 fps limit I’m experiencing with Android appears to be only with this display. I checked with another display I have at work that is 1920x1080 and Android renders at 60 fps. It doesn’t change the game performance any, but I wasn’t expecting it to–at least the 30 fps jank is gone through the rest of the system.
I tried it out for a bit and it’s ok, but I couldn’t get my preferred desktop touch environment to auto start on boot (KDE Plasma), and there aren’t as many apps/games available for Linux. Android was built for primarily-touchscreen use, and has a larger developer base, so I’d really like to get it working better.
The first and third commands made things load up a bit quicker. Thanks! Second command seems to have been removed. I wish I could figure out what’s limiting the system to 30 fps on this display…it OUGHT to be able to handle 60 fps at this resolution
I was thinking the same thing. Maybe there’s more to the “.LITTLE” part of all those big.LITTLE chips, and stuff that normally gets thrown on the small cores is sucking the big ones dry on this CPU. I wish I knew more about Android and optimization along those lines.
It could also have a lot to do with the GPU. Even with my overclock, I could only manage probably 15-20 FPS on Asphalt 9. Honkai Star Rail installed but is unplayable (everything is pink and/or not rendered at all). Not sure what other games to try to get a feel for its capabilities
Average every day use is fine if you can get past the jank feeling of <= 30 FPS, though. Browsing, YouTube, Spotify, etc. all good, even split screen / PIP.
My experience: Android on Raspberry Pi 5 has finally reached low end tablet performance, almost acceptable!
I flashed it on mine, and have a 10.1" 1024x600 15" 1920x1080 touchscreen hooked up to HDMI/USB. I installed MindTheGApps to get Google Play and install stuff.
Really wanted to check out Genshin Impact but Play says not compatible. Asphalt 9 is a stutterfest. High end games and web pages will make it suffer. At least it can just about handle angry birds 2 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I overclocked to 2.8 gigglehertz CPU and 950 MHz GPU and it’s a little better, it’ll multitask ok, but still I was hoping for something more from the $60 computer.
Maybe I’m expecting too much of it.
[edit: The display I originally chose to use was causing Android to limit to 30 fps; I switched to another and Android can render at 60 fps. The overall jank is gone, making me much more pleased with Android on the Pi 5, but it still can’t handle certain games]
Me still trying to figure out how to get it to auto start / auto login on boot on my fresh new Raspberry Pi 5 without locking up at a flashing cursor screen: 😩
Good luck getting all the developers to rewrite their apps. The only reason you had any apps was because it was based on Android so it was little to no effort to port. Going plain ol’ embedded Linux is basically the death knell of your developer story. Source: been there, had no third party apps, switched to Android
I have an iPhone through T-mobile and I don’t have to pay extra for my hotspot. Kinda hilarious, though, I only get 20 gigglebytes of high speed hotspot, which my 5g can blow through in as little as 3 minutes 45 seconds as of the latest speed test (712mbps). After that, it caps it at 600kbps. They have no problem with me using hundreds of gigglebytes directly on the phone, for some reason, I don’t see why they have to limit hotspot.
It’s kind of hilarious they didn’t just build this into the options app. But WebUSB gets a bad rap for no good reason.
WebUSB’s only sin is that it’s being spearheaded by Google. It’s a useful technology that means theoretically you only need to write to one platform - the web. Let the browser deal with the different USB APIs for each OS (please god google save me from libusb). It’s safer because of the browser’s sandboxing, the permission dialog, the much greater likelihood they’re using good standard TLS instead of rolling their own encryption, the list goes on.
Personally, I’d rather visit a web page one time to set it up and then forget about it, than to have to install Yet Another Thing™ that ends up running in the background, always checking for updates, reporting analytics back to the mothership, and constantly sucking up just a little bit of my CPU time even when I don’t have any Logitech devices connected. (Sound like any other Logitech software you know of?)
I had a Pixel phone that I wanted to reflash back to the standard factory image. Did I have to download a special program, reboot the phone into bootloader mode, and perform an ancient ritual sacrifice like I do with a Samsung phone? No, I just had to visit the right web page and click “yes, allow this page to fuck up my phone”. No lingering software left over on my PC, at least once the browser cache goes away.
Same with many Arduino and ESP32 projects, by way of WebSerial. If the page you’re reading doesn’t have to send you off to some other program and can just, right there in the web page, flash your device with the software it’s telling you about, that’s a good thing.
The web is becoming the application platform of choice. No App Store guardians to reject you from it. No 30% cut to the man. The list of reasons to have to install a program to your native OS is shrinking. Even 3d games can be done entirely in the web now. Rejecting WebUSB/WebSerial just means developers have to keep writing stuff for every OS (if you’re lucky).
I have a Galaxy A13 as a test phone for work. Not great, but great for the price. The UI is fine. Cheap Android phones have gotten a lot better recently.
I have a Galaxy Tab S8 for myself. I like the 120hz screen and the design, it feels solid and pretty. Good speakers. I also have a Galaxy Tab A7 Lite that I got for free from T-mobile. I like the size
Got a couple of Galaxy Tab S5e at work for testing purposes as well. Currently both of them have been hacked up to install Android Automotive and one of them is in my car serving as my infotainment system. Pretty sweet.
I wish Samsung would allow unlockable bootloaders on their US phones/tablets with cellular radios in them. I want to hack up my A7 Lite to install Android Automotive so I don’t have to hotspot to the S5e anymore.
All good points. I fully agree, and I deserve it for living on the edge of technology like this. (The cavemen probably burned a few eyebrows off before figuring out not to touch the fire)
Worth noting, I didn’t mean to use snap, it was that “apt install chromium-browser” transparently installed it as a snap and I wasn’t paying attention at the time.
In general I don’t really care one way or another between apt, snap, or just plain downloading the source and doing a good old fashioned build from source like the old days. I just didn’t know to expect this certain installation method to lock out a certain browser feature I needed at the time. Now I know, so I won’t use snap for that (or maybe ever, I’m debating whether I just uninstall it). I wonder what fell out of my brain to make room for that, though. :D
I am pretty sure the no display sleep thing is down to whether I had a VirtualBox machine as the active window when I left it, so my “fix” is just to make sure I click some other window before I leave the desk. I have had fine experiences running VMs in Windows, nothing to report. I even do crazy stuff like pass through USB devices to the guest machine and all (that seems to work regardless of what host OS I run it on).
I do run into things on Windows and Mac sometimes, to be completely fair. Just fewer and further between. Maybe that’s just because there’s fewer things I can do on them, though. (Can’t build embedded Linux or Android images on them)
It’s worth a whole post of its own. Shame I had to drown it out with the other crap.
I wasn’t trying to use snap, but the apt package did a sneaky and installed the snap for me, as I found out when I hit the about and realized my Chromium was a snap package. They decided to move it to a transition package a few years back and I missed the memo.
Fair point that 20.04 is ancient. However, I have tried 22.04 and some stuff I tried to build with Yocto Project could no longer build, so I left my main machine at 20.04. Or was it the AOSP build that failed? I forget by now. Urgh. So much crap I’ll have to test when switching. :(
To keep this post short and sweet, I laser focused on the one issue that most recently grinded my gears. I can get rid of snap, but then, what’s going to happen next? That’s all I’m saying, really. There’s no perfect story, even my Mac drives me bonkers at times (yes thank you I know I removed the drive without ejecting). But yeah, should really try something different than Ubuntu at some point, or start fixing some of the stuff that bugs me instead of banging my head on the wall about it. I used to fix stuff. Even contributed some code to a few open source projects over the years. I’m just always trying to deal with something else at the time I run into these things and don’t have the patience to engineer my way out of it in the heat of the moment. I’m a whiny baby and I’d rather it just be fixed for me.
I whine about something something Ubuntu. I should probably switch to something else. But I decided to spend my time typing words instead.
I’ve been itching to jump onto KDE Plasma. I work with Qt/QML a lot, which means I’d be right at home to tinker around with things. Actually recently developed an embedded Linux demo unit which used a small part of KDE Framework 6. Good stuff.
I hear Mint is pretty good
Regrets aplenty after some of the things I’ve drank, but none of them are about Debian.