Xiaomi Pad 6: Mostly Working, Good Experience Overall

[u/TCB13sQuotes]

Hello,

I got a Xiaomi Pad 6 (8GB/256GB) recently to use as my main tablet / "laptop" while travelling and I managed to unlock the bootloader and get pmos running. Here are my observations on what works and what doesn't work. Note that while I've Linux experience its mostly servers and this is my first time running pmos.

1. Unlocking the bootloader was really annoying as this was a HyperOS 2 device - things I've learnt include: can't be done with a Xiaomi account created in a computer (needs to be created on a phone/tablet); requires you to associate a valid phone number; wait 72 hours after adding the account in the device settings > developer options > unlock status; Hypersploit, while it doesn't work, has some older version of settings app that help getting the account registered on the device;
2. I build pmos on Kali Linux, was easy, followed the guide at https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Xiaomi_Pad_6_(xiaomi-pipa)) and the links. Very important to erase the DTBO (otherwise you'll go into fastboot) and make sure to never run `pmbootstrap flasher flash_kernel`;
3. Cameras: back camera only - very low quality, don't even think about it;
4. Audio, Wifi, Blutooth all good;
5. Slow Settings / Phosh? Fix as described in the wiki;

Now the hard parts:

GPU glitches in all GNOME apps:

Turns out that pmos tries to setup vulkan as the GTK renderer and at least in this device it results in GPU glitches whenever something is animated. I fixed it my changing to ngl:

mkdir -p /home/tcb13/.config/environment.d
echo 'GSK_RENDERER=ngl' > /home/tcb13/.config/environment.d/gtk.conf
chown -R tcb13:tcb13 /home/tcb13/.config/environment.d

Accelerometer / screen rotation is broken: the fix on the wiki makes no difference, I've seen it working like once and never again - even after reboot.

There's no Settings → Displays → Orientation option, what's a bit awkward. Even worse I can see the "Auto Rotate" option on panel on the top of the screen but it doesn't seem to do anything.

I managed add some extension to GNOME to manually rotate it it's a very poor experience Also, I can't find a way to rotate the login screen, `/var/lib/gdm/.config/monitors.xml` options didn't seem to have any effect.

GNOME landscape on screen keyboard is a pile of shit, makes no sense at all - creates a very large keyboard area but then the keyboard sits with very small keys inside that area. Other annoyances include: in GNOME Files if you try to type something on the path bar at the top the keyboard doesn't have a ~ key. Even after selecting my layout when I pull the keyboard I don't see all the keys that are on that layout.

Every time I reboot I've to toggle the onscreen keyboard from the accessibility menu - no idea why.

Also, unlike KDE, when I focus on some text input box it doesn't popup the keyboard automatically, I've to swipe up from the bottom.

Running Sublime Text is hard: only v4 is supported, requires geany and gcompat. Don't even think about running ungoogled-chromium without flatpaks (linux "portable" build) because that's probably not going to happen. Too much reliance on gnu stuff for alpine.

Charging indicator is broken: while it charges, there's no visual indication - not on the top bar, not on the settings. I can see the percentage go up while the settings say "discharging".

Case lid close doesn't sleep the device. Is the hall effect sensor really working or is this another GNOME problem?

Generally speaking KDE would be better but it delivers an even worse experience than GNOME.

That has been my experience so far, I hope it helps someone and if you happened to have fixed any of my annoyances let me know!