I don't mind if it cannot connect to a big screen as I have built a kind of laptop at home from my smartphone. What I done was I took out everything from a laptop shell but kept the screen. Purchased a controller (vga + hdmi) to the screen, a usb vga adapter for screen mirroring and a usb hub for the keyboard and mouse. Then I squeezed everything into the laptop shell including a wireless charging (only the thin coil without its house) + a keyboard from an old 10" tablet.
Then I can plug the screen into the main (or a battery pack with 12V / 3Amp output), connect the usb hub to the phone (S7) and slide the phone into the shell onto the wireless charger. And voila, my phone is my laptop and my laptop is my phone. I don't need big screen or whatsoever.
I even got the MS Visual Studio Code installed and ran on the full ubuntu 18.04.
I have done this about two years ago but the concept still works, but collecting dust on the shelf.
The only downside was: on my S7 I could only run Linux on top of Android in a chroot (with the Linux Deploy app) and there were a few limitation:

• no 3d acceleration as I had to connect to the chroot with VNC
• I could not make cups working with my network printer (probably this was kernel related as I got it working on my Galaxy S2 with a similar setup, but the S2 was much slower and it had other limitations)
• on newer Android roms I lost sudo (root only worked if I sshd into the chroot as root)

So finally I abandoned the project and started looking for something native. Then I found UT why I purchased my Nexus 5. Then because I didn't like UT I ended up with Sailfish and I love it. Unfortunately PM doesn't install anymore in multirom, so cannot try. (I have tried it on my Galaxy S2, but that is far from the one for the Nexus 5.)

It would be cool to use this custom laptop shell with the Nexus 5 but I think the main issue would be the slip port. (On the S7 I needed to install an Adroid app be able to mirror the screen to the usb vga adapter, but obviously this won't work on Sailfish.)

I don't have video out on the Pro¹ either, although the hardware should be there (through USB-C). I heard that elros34 managed to have video output on a SFOS port on the Photon Q, so there is hope and it may already work for some devices, but don't know who has the motivation and skills to work on that on the Pro¹.

sailfish_ubu_chroot with xfce4 does not rotate either; or it does, but it will just fill the top part of the screen and will be cropped on the right due to non-matching ratios. This is a non-issue on the Pro¹ though, since I only use Ubu chroot with the keyboard open (I almost never have to touch the screen with it, I mapped everything I need to custom keybindings). However I remember seeing a post by n950 here in this thread that showed chroot and a desktop environment in portrait mode. I don't remember which device he was using or how he did it, but I believe n950 is still an active user here. [Edit] Or maybe that was Jakibaki?

Performance on the Pro¹ is nice, but I don't know how it would be on older devices. I remember Easydebian was a bit too slow on the N900, and I haven't really tried chrooting with devices whose performance was somewhere between the N900 and the Pro¹. I did on my Jolla C and I think it was acceptable, but I barely used it due to the lack of hardware keyboard, so can't really say.

I followed the instruction on the github.
When I finally ran the: 'ubu-start.sh xfce4',
I got: 'Invoker: died: could not locate program "qxcompositor" to launch.

Are you sure the installation of qxcompositor was successful? You need to run ./ubu-install.sh as devel-su.

Yep, I know, otherwise I get an error saying something like: "run me as root"
I will retry.

Wow! It works!!!
There is no keyboard so am not sure how I can type anything. But it is cool! It started in landscape. Oh my, now I won't sleep too much tonight.

Yesterday I got this working. The missing qxcompositor package was the issue.
I have a few questions for someone who can answer :

• How can I get an onscreen keyboard?
• Can I start in portrait mode at the top half of the screen while I am using the keyboard at the bottom?
• If I can, will the whole screen be squeezed into a portrait wide window or it will be with full width and I need to scroll if I need to access the right part of it? (I prefer the latter as the screen remains viewable.)
• How can I right click? (I do not use any hw mouse or keyboard.)
• Sometimes is it really slow, or this is only on my device for a reason? (How this opens up the programs is sometimes slower than a Debian Jessie installed into a chroot with LinuxDeploy on my Galaxy S2-i9100.)

Thanks.

I am using it with a device with a hardware keyboard, never played much with it with my previous non-hwkb device, precisely because it felt too limiting. However, if you are still interested, I guess you could try installing Onboard in XFCE, and placing an icon in the task bar to access it easily, or maybe it can even pop-up automatically when you place the cursor in a text field, I am not sure.

Portrait mode is possible because I saw pictures of it in this very thread (see my message above), but I don't know how to do it. I recommend you send a PM to the person who posted the screenshot, or ask directly to Elros34 or Preflex.

It should fill the whole screen if you achieve the same result as what was shown in the screenshot.

I haven't found how to right click in XFCE. I can work around this because I have a hardware keyboard and can Alt+F to open the file menu in all applications, but it is not ideal. I suppose right click emulation (with long press) is possible in other DEs, but I failed to find how to do it in XFCE. Please do share here if you find anything.

It is not slow on the Pro¹, so probably just a hardware limitation with your device. CPU or RAM, or even disk speed. Mosen has been running benchmarks on the Pro¹, maybe he can comment in more details.

No idea how to get the keyboard installed, without a keyboard, but i used xvkbd via apt-get to type @ since it is missing in my 3rd-level-less hwkbd layout.

On Performance, the Nexus 5 is roughly 4 times slower in storage access than the Pro¹.
Nexus 5 is 4.7Mb/sec read speed and Pro¹ whooping 18.73Mb/sec according to sysbench.
Jolla Phone was only 1.14Mb/sec.

Memory speed is only a bit faster on Pro¹:
Pro¹ 403.3 Mb/sec
Nexus 5 375.23 Mb/sec
Jolla 1 195.15 Mb/sec

Calculating prime numbers up to 2000 with two cores:
Pro¹ 3.77sec
Nexus 5 5sec
Jolla Phone 9sec

Now half that time for nexus 5 with quad core and 1/4 the time for Pro¹ with octacore should give a rough idea why xfce lags on Nexus 5.

Someone could actually carry back the code that I wrote for Flatpak support. In particular, support for change in orientation and Sailfish keyboard.

For Sailfish keyboard, chroot environment needs https://github.com/sailfishos-flatpa.../input-context as a plugin inside chroot. For build scripts, see https://github.com/sailfishos-flatpa...-maliit-plugin as an example. In addition, the host (qxcompositor in your case), will need to provide orientation info to the keyboard as well. This is done via DBus P2P connection as described in https://github.com/sailfishos-flatpa...ainerstate.cpp . On start of chroot, corresponding environment variable (FLATPAK_MALIIT_CONTAINER_DBUS) needs to be communicated to chroot, so the keyboard would be able to change the orientation as needed. Its all bit tricky, but doable. Current limitation - works for Qt apps only. Feel free to extend it to Gtk - I will be happy to adopt that later

For orientation, its way easier. Its mainly small changes in qmlcompositor and QML. don't remember exactly what, but code is small and it should be easy to find again.

I will better work on other things, but wanted to let you know about that option

i have a problem with option menues in apps. even when the app is rendere ok, the buttons and dropdowns in settings menu are way to large, so most of the settings are out of the screen and not reachable. i am not sure, if this is because of missing style in sfos or wrong dpi setting, may be it is only a missing environment variable?