PostmarketOS updates: new homepage, pmbootstrap v3, sensors, libcamera

The compatibility matrix and devices pages is annoyingly lacking of details. I checked several time if I could find a phone that would be compatible and most devices have no or "partial" support for camera and GPS which would be requirements to use a phone as a daily driver.

Problem is partial is waaay to vague a word without details on the device page. For instance, I would need only a camera for quick QR code scans, or taking pictures of informations I don't want to note as I am one of those luddites who still like to carry a camera around. No need for full feature list of most smartphone these days (panoramic mode, selfie modes, HDR, pixel binning whatever).

It's possible to run postmarketos in a proot within termux on android if you'd like to try it out or just want a nice touch enabled Linux UI on your phone/tablet. There are some incomplete instructions for an older version of postmarketos on the termux subreddit, I'm currently working on an updated and cleaner version.

Postmarketos is great, far from perfect but making calls and sending sms worked well for me on an op6. My dream is thunderbolt support so I can dock and just use a phone instead of laptop, not sure if any postmarketos phone supports that yet though

I fear that this project, just like almost all other similar ones, just spread a false sense of a "sustainable, privacy and security focused free software mobile OS".

Almost all mobile devices, and surely all smartphones and tablets, require a large number of so-called "vendor blobs" (or just a single huge one) needed to operate almost all the hardware: wifi, Bluetooth, baseband "modem" and even GNSS receivers and touch input.

Those vendor-provided, undocumented and closed source software all need to run with high privilege levels, aka root. Thus they can do, intercept and inject almost anything within the device with no user interaction or authorization.

So, IMHO, all those projects simply give users "more power", but only as far as the vendors allow for. While an unknown amount of power is used by some other third (or fourth or fifth) party silently and undetected.

A small example.

That super secure auditable open source communication application does use strong cryptography, but still needs to use those blobs for unencrypted human-oriented I/O.

Whatever you type, scan display and record will need to get in through those blobs in an unencrypted (or maybe backdoored) blobs to get to and from the user or before getting through the encryption mill.

Have you ever heard about those spying or surveillance Trojans? Those are them!

How can we trust that? Simply we cannot. We just pretend it will be a fair play in a game we don't fully know.