About Phosh

Phosh (a portmanteau of phone and shell) is a graphical shell for mobile devices targeting devices running mainline Linux. It’s entirely Free Software and based to a large extend on the GNOME technology stack including GTK, glib, libhandy, NetworkManager and ModemManager. It’s compositor Phoc uses the wlroots library for Wayland compositors. Our aim is to blend into the respective communities as good as good as possible.

Phosh's Settings Menu

Phosh running the Mobile Settings app Phosh running the Phosh Tour app

The project was initiated by Purism for the Librem 5 phone but is nowadays used on many different devices covering smartphones, tablets and convertibles. It was even seen on laptops. The main development focus is still smartphones though. Phosh is available in all major Linux distributions and developed by a diverse group of contributors. Purism still funds a large amount of designer and developer hours.

Components Link to heading

These are the components making up the phone shell itself

phosh: The Mobile Shell
phoc: The Wayland Compositor
squeekboard: The On Screen Keyboard

Phosh Session Link to heading

The Phosh session (which adds the necessary component to make smartphone actually usable) uses:

calls: The calling application for phone and SIP calls
chatty: The SMS and MMS application
GNOME: Multiple components like gnome-control-center, gnome-setttings-daemon, gcr and more.
phosh-mobile-settings: Advanced mobile settings
phosh-tour: A short introduction
mmsd-tng: MMS handling
feedbackd: Audio, haptic an LED feedback

For a list of what makes up the Phosh session see meta-phosh which expresses the needed components programmatically as a Debian meta package.

For more details about the software stack see here.