Device lock improvements

There were several fixes and improvements in the device lock implementation. Glacier Welcome is started on first boot and allows the initial setup of the device lock code. The devicelock-plugin is a daemon that handles password verification. In addition, nemo-qml-plugin-devicelock provides an API for communicating with the daemon.

Glacier Home detects whether the service is running and locks the device if it is not. The Glacier Settings application includes a plugin that allows users to change the device lock password. The entire device lock flow was reviewed and thoroughly tested.

Moving towards openSUSE

It turned out that Manjaro Linux ships some outdated components, such as Meson, GObject Introspection, Mesa, and others. Because of this, fixing all dependencies just to rebuild Lipstick would require significant effort. Using openSUSE proved to be a more practical approach.

As part of this transition, several packages in OBS (Open Build Service) were updated, including: ngfd, libprolog, libtrace-ohm, ohm-plugin-misc, lipstick-glacier-home, systemd-user-session-target, and nemo-mobile-session, and others.

At the moment, installation is only possible manually. openSUSE provides a concept called patterns, which should eventually allow installation of all required packages and apply additional system settings automatically. Work on this is still in progress.

For debugging, the DEBUG_COMPOSITOR_IS_WINDOW=y environment variable was introduced, which allows the compositor to run in a window.

Currently, the installation process involves installing openSUSE JeOS (Just Enough OS), adding the OBS repository, and installing the required packages. After that, several manual configuration steps are still necessary.

These steps will likely include ensuring that the mce daemon is running, providing configuration files such as /etc/eglfs-config.json, and making sure the correct user groups exist (see https://github.com/nemomobile-ux/arm-profiles and https://gitlab.manjaro.org/manjaro-arm/applications/manjaro-arm-tools/-/blob/master/lib/functions.sh).

In the end, Lipstick was successfully brought up on openSUSE:

Other fixes

There were many important changes and fixes across the stack.

A memory leak in the Glacier Home search plugin was fixed.

Maliit was updated to the latest version, and the Nemo keyboard plugin was adjusted to the new Controls naming and updated to use the Qt 6 version of Maliit. As a result, the on-screen keyboard works again.

Drawer levels were removed from shared controls and from Glacier Settings to make the interface cleaner and simpler. Glacier Settings now also shows the Bluetooth plugin only when the BlueZ daemon is enabled, and the same applies to time settings when timed daemon is not running.

Glacier Weather was split into a daemon and a UI component, and the code was reorganized and cleaned up accordingly. This allows weather information to be updated in the background.

Finally, GeoClue was replaced by a custom implementation called locationd. The new implementation is cleaner and should enable more advanced features, such as support for Mozilla Location Services.

Last but not least, Nemo Mobile was successfully started on the Beresta devkit.

After making couple PRs to sailfishos so that I can get nemo building on opensuse again, and after finishing bunch of my apps I’ve finally decided to sit down and work on the checkbox redesign and here’s the result:

I have nothing much more to add, It looks sweet, I’ve fixed sliding animation as well as added some easing, adjusted timing and size. Off to redesigning button!

As mentioned in a previous blog post, changes to the Kremium API — a reimplementation of the SailfishOS Silica API used by Qt Quick Controls Nemo — have required updates to several Nemo applications. Over the past month, the following apps were adjusted: glacier-filemuncher, glacier-music, glacier-dialer, glacier-pinquery, and glacier-alarm-listener. These apps can now be run again.

A significant amount of work was also done on the lock screen. The related API, glacier-device-lock-plugin, was refined, and the overall user experience was improved. New animations were introduced, giving the lock screen a more polished appearance. A lock screen preview application was created to allow for easier fine-tuning of the lock screen’s look and feel. See the demo video below.

To support this fine-tuning, libglacierapp was updated to allow the QML path of an application to be specified — while still defaulting to Qt resources.

In addition, a new app called glacier-welcome was developed. It is shown on the device’s first start and allows the user to set a device lock password.

Further improvements were made to the scaling feature, which now allows fonts and UI elements to be resized in applications based on Qt Quick Controls Nemo, making them more adaptable to different screen sizes.

pulseaudio-modules-nemo wasn’t compiling because Manjaro has moved to PipeWire. However, there’s a compatibility package called manjaro-pulse that allows the module to be compiled. Since Lipstick depends on pulseaudio-modules-nemo, it wasn’t possible to recompile it until this workaround was used.

In a previous blog post, the Kremium package was introduced. It is an open-source, drop-in replacement for the SailfishOS Silica library. Kremium has a strong dependency on the Qt Quick Controls Nemo component, and it aims to make recompiling SailfishOS packages for Nemo possible. To support Kremium, some changes were made to Qt Quick Controls Nemo to simplify its usage. However, these changes broke compatibility with some Glacier apps, which now require fixes. Specifically, the Theme object has been moved to import Nemo, which is not included everywhere by default. Additionally, the syntax for accessing sizes has changed from size.dp(5) to Theme.size(5). The glacier-settings package has already been updated to reflect these changes.

Phone calls and messaging were handled through the Telepathy framework. It is complex and difficult to understand, and porting it to Qt6 would require a significant amount of work. Additionally, it currently doesn’t work well with Nemo. As a result, all related components have been dropped in Nemo. This was somewhat expected and has been suggested for quite some time, so it shouldn’t come as a big surprise.

GitHub Actions are used for continuous integration. A new repository group has been created at https://github.com/NemoOnManjaro/. Commits to this group should immediately trigger package builds, which are then published to the https://img.nemomobile.net/manjaro/ package repository for each branch. This setup is intended to accelerate package updates.

Nemo boot and initial setup were demonstrated on the Orange Pi 3B v2.

A number of packages were updated, including sensorfw, mlite, libngf-qt, and libphonenumber-nemo. Colors and icons in glacier-settings were fixed, and the Glacier Web Browser was rebuilt using the new WebEngine. Content rotation handling in glacier-home was reworked, and glacier-device-lock was fixed—the issue was partly due to the path where files were installed. The glacier-packagemanager build was previously broken but should now work; it is one of the packages required for image rebuilding. The Maliit on-screen keyboard was also fixed.

The software industry moves incredibly fast, and many technologies quickly become obsolete. Our efforts in Nemo have focused on migrating our software stack to Qt6. Previously, we introduced the compatibility package qt-old-features, which provided an interface for compiling Qt .pri files for some components. Recently, we encountered an issue with CONFIG+=stack_protector_strong, which was resolved by Michal.

In Manjaro, there are additional challenges. With the new version of GCC, some warnings have been promoted to errors. Other components are also evolving—for example, PulseAudio is being replaced by PipeWire, which has become an obstacle in building Lipstick, as our compositor still depends on PulseAudio.

We’ve been working on updating upstream components. Our patches to libngf-qt and libusb-moded-qt have been merged. The NemoMobile fork of the Lipstick compositor has been rebased to the latest upstream version, along with nemo-qml-plugin-systemsettings. Additionally, Lipstick’s tests have been fixed.

Glacier Gallery relies on Tracker Miner with its SPARQL plugin and, consequently, QtDocGallery. Besides compilation issues, Manjaro has replaced the Tracker packages with a different solution. These components are complex, and Sergey has suggested moving away from them.

Michal faced challenges with glacier-devicelock-plugin, discovering that the plugin was being installed to the wrong path. He submitted a fix for that.

One of NemoMobile’s ultimate goals is to support running Sailfish OS apps. A major obstacle is the closed-source Silica API. Sergey has developed a compatibility layer called Kremium, named after the Russian translation of “Silica.” It has already been demonstrated to run the harbour-gpsinfo app.

We have created a Mastodon account with the nemomobile.net RSS feed. This should allow for adding comments to articles in the future.

For some time I’ve been wanting to jump ship from SailfishOS, and Nemomobile was seemingly the answer i’ve been seeking. Nemo mobile is alternative mobile OS similar to SailfishOS, so much so that until recently you were able to install Nemo gui on sailfishos because they shared the base. To this day SailfishOS base is called nemo and many elements in SailfishOS are called Nemo.

Okay Nemo it is but why redesign it?

Now that this is out of the way (I REALLY hope I don’t have to explain why) what is the plan? Well general plan is that we want nemo to be looking great and feel great, port all my apps to it and make compatibility layer for sfos apps. Waydroid or whatever android apps thing is current at the day you’re reading it should work fine as well and all the plasma mobile etc apps should work too, so if all goes well we should have highest app compatibility of all OS’s, but frankly, my apps is all I need and most people want (not my words).

As first step we wanted to make design of entire OS but that turned out to be too much to handle. Oh and when referring to us I mean me and my designer gregguh@telegram. So we settled on changing small elements first, like basic building blocks, starting with switches shown above, after which we’ll crawl our way up and slowly redesign entire operating system.

For now I’ve managed to port nemo to openSUSE so that I can work on it on my computer without hassle build.opensuse.org/project/show/devel:NemoMobile. So I’m going to start work soon as the design is in already.

This is more of a beginning of the series. I’ll document every struggle and process of redesigning entire OS going forward so stay tuned.

Glacier Home

The home screen now features a reworked search bar, transitioning from a hardcoded system to a plugin-based interface. This change reduces dependencies by removing the hardcoded contact list search, which previously required nemo-qml-contacts-plugin and other libraries. As a result, Glacier Home now has fewer mandatory dependencies. Additionally, the interface for controlling music players was transitioned from Qt MPRIS to Amber MPRIS. The calculation of home screen icon sizes was also fixed.

Qt Quick Controls Nemo

Qt Quick Controls Nemo, the set of UI components designed specifically for Nemo Mobile, was also improved. Fragment shader issues in the Nemo Icon, which had affected color adaptability since the migration to Qt6, were resolved. The computation of component sizes in Qt Quick Controls Nemo now relies on settings values, enhancing customization and ease of use.

Glacier Weather

The Glacier Weather application underwent rework as well. The OpenWeather API was moved into a module, allowing for easier use in other projects. This modularization simplifies integration and makes the API more accessible for developers.

The porting to OpenSuSE is being continued. Glacier-settings has been successfully started by Michał in OpenSuSE. Currently, there are 103 working packages in the OBS repository.

The fixing of issues in Manjaro-based images is also ongoing. Most of these issues are related to the transition to Qt6 and the move away from telepathy-qt. For example, the Qt6-based mlite package was renamed to mlite6, and dependencies were updated accordingly. The entire development can be found on the Manjaro GitLab. The builds are being done against the Manjaro unstable branch. New image builds have even been made possible.

Work has been done by Sergey on the maliit keyboard, and it has been possible to run and use the Telegram client with the on-screen keyboard.

The Bluetooth dialogs in Lipstick are being reworked. This includes the OBEX agent for file transfers and the authentication agent, which should allow for entering passwords or simply confirming actions.

Lipstick and some other packages are now utilizing logging categories (Q_LOGGING_CATEGORY), which allows effective filtering of debugging messages.

Previously, the application was crashing when it was closed; now it is correctly terminated. The fix comes from the AsteroidOS project. Thanks!

In previous builds, the Lipstick compositor experienced crashing issues when setting the top-level window.

Progress has been made in porting the Maliit on-screen keyboard to Qt6, moving the project forward. As a result, the on-screen keyboard now successfully appears.

Following the resolution of issues with the compositor and on-screen keyboard, development of the user experience can now resume. Furthermore, the qt quick controls in Nemo have been enhanced with keyboard navigation support.

For a period of time, there were issues with the Non-Graphical Feedback Daemon (NGFD), which handles the sound notifications for incoming phone calls or messages. The crashing of NGFD has been addressed in previous fixes, and now the correct configuration file for PinePhone has been provided, resolving the issue.

We were fortunate to showcase the results of our work at FOSDEM, Europe’s largest open-source event. Nemomobile was featured as part of the Linux On Mobile stand, alongside other mobile Linux platforms such as postmarket OS, Sailfish OS, Ubuntu Touch, AsteroidOS, and others. It was a pleasure to reconnect with old friends and engage in discussions about future development. Currently, Nemomobile remains in a very raw state, resembling more of a toy project or sandbox for experimenting with new ideas.

After the holiday break, work on Nemo’s development resumed. Our goal remains upgrading everything to Qt6 and preparing a functional image.

We’ve made updates to the Lipstick compositor, incorporating the latest changes from the SailfishOS tree. The new version has been tagged as 1.2.

Additionally, the glacier-home settings plugin have been modified to utilize the new Qt Quick Controls Nemo. Furthermore, numerous packages have been tagged in Git, ensuring they are ready for building with Qt6.

The first highly experimental images, built with Qt6, can be found here: https://img.nemomobile.net/2025.05/ and https://nemo.mlich.cz/images/Manjaro-ARM-nemomobile-git-pinephone-23.12.img.xz

For those interested in experiencing Nemo on Qt6, a YouTube video has been provided to offer insights into its functionality. You can watch the video:

OpenSuSE based builds are also transitioning to Qt6, with the qt6-based Lipstick available in the Open Build Service.

Nemomobile will be part of the Linux on Mobile stand at FOSDEM.