A pure Wayland shell for mobile devices like smart phones or small tablets which

• use touch input
• are running battery powered most of the time
• have limited screen space
• have a limited number of buttons
• might be docked to a keyboard, screen and other input devices

Typical devices are the Librem 5 and PinePhone or devices formerly running proprietary operating systems like the OnePlus 6/6T.

The companion Wayland compositor is phoc.

phosh is licensed under the GPL-3.0-or-later licence.

git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/phosh
cd phosh

The main branch has the current development version.

On a Debian based system run

sudo apt-get -y install build-essential
sudo apt-get -y build-dep .

For an explicit list of dependencies check the Build-Depends entry in the debian/control file.

We use the meson (and thereby Ninja) build system for phosh. The quickest way to get going is to do the following:

meson setup _build
meson compile -C _build

To run the tests run

xvfb-run meson test --no-suite screenshots -C _build

For details see the .gitlab-ci.yml file.

When running from the source tree start the compositor phoc. Then start phosh using:

_build/run

or (if you built phoc from source in ../phoc) in one command:

../phoc/_build/run -C ./data/phoc.ini -E _build/run

This will make sure the needed gsettings schema is found. Note that there's no need to install any files outside the source tree.

The result should look something like this:

If you're running a display manager like GDM or LightDM you can select the Phosh session from the display managers menu. If you want run without a display manager but nevertheless start phosh at system boot there's a systemd unit file in /lib/systemd/system/phosh which is disabled by default:

systemctl enable phosh
systemctl start phosh

This runs phosh as the user with user id 1000 (which needs to exist). If you don't have that user and don't want to create one you can make systemd run phosh as any user by using an override file:

cat <<EOF > /etc/systemd/system/phosh.service.d/override.conf
[Service]
User=<your_user>
EOF

All of the above use the /usr/bin/phosh-session script to start compositor and shell under the hood so if you just want to start phosh from the system console once invoke that script directly.

This is handled via GNOMEs infra, see https://wiki.gnome.org/TranslationProject and https://l10n.gnome.org/module/phosh/.

• Issue tracker: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/phosh/issues
• Matrix: https://im.puri.sm/#/room/#phosh:talk.puri.sm

Development documentation including API docs and notes for application developers is at https://world.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/Phosh/phosh.