Portal v2.6.0

Portal v2.6.0

Portal now has an app store with Flatpak, Linux apps can use the tablet's cameras and microphone, and scrolling and video are smooth in every browser. There are also a lot of crash, freeze and input fixes.

Camera and microphone

• Linux apps can use the tablet's microphone and cameras. The microphone shows up as "Portal Microphone" and is the default input, so video calls in Firefox, voice chat, pw-record and anything else that records audio just work.
• Front and back cameras show up as normal video devices (/dev/video*) and as PipeWire cameras, so browsers, ffmpeg and other camera apps find them. Video runs at full frame rate (about 27 fps at 1080p in Firefox) and pictures stay upright when you rotate the tablet.
• Android asks for microphone or camera permission only when a Linux app actually starts using one, not at startup. If you say no, apps get silence or a black picture instead of an error, and Portal tells you how to allow it later.
• The camera turns off as soon as the app or browser tab using it closes, and the microphone and cameras are released whenever Portal goes to the background, so Android's privacy indicator goes away.
• Plasma's volume meters no longer keep the microphone open in the background.

Apps and Flatpak

• Discover, KDE's app store, is included. It installs Debian packages and Flatpak apps from Flathub, and shows updates for both in one place. Fresh installs get it on the panel; existing installs get it in the background after updating, in the app menu.
• Flatpak apps run with their normal sandbox (bubblewrap), the same way they do on a desktop Linux install. Portal now emulates the parts of Linux namespaces and mounts that bubblewrap needs.
• Flatpak apps run on the GPU. Portal installs its own graphics driver for Flatpak during setup, so apps like Zen are hardware accelerated from their first start instead of drawing everything on the CPU. Existing installs get the driver at their next start.
• Installed Flatpak apps now show up in the launcher and search, and Discover's Launch button works.
• Admin prompts (installing from Discover, System Settings' admin pages, pkexec) work without a password, like sudo already did.
• Installing global themes from the KDE Store no longer freezes System Settings with "Not Responding".
• Discover no longer freezes for a minute or more the first time it shows apps when a large icon theme is active.
• Discover's Updates page no longer gets stuck on "Fetching updates".
• Flatpak installs no longer fail with "Corrupted file object" errors.
• Fixed GTK4 apps (Flatpak or not) closing right after they start, Electron Flatpaks failing to start their sandbox, and Qt apps that use shared memory (such as Deskflow) saying they are already running or never opening a window.
• Games and apps built on GLEW (HyperRogue and about 50 other Debian packages) no longer show a black window on Wayland.
• X11 apps that render on the CPU no longer show up as blank white windows.
• ps aux, uptime, htop and similar tools get the system information they need.

Performance and smoothness

• Qt and KDE apps such as Dolphin, Konsole and Kate now animate and smooth-scroll at the screen's full refresh rate instead of a fixed 60 Hz, which juddered on 90, 120 and 144 Hz screens. It keeps working when Android changes the refresh rate after an app has started, as per-app refresh settings on OnePlus and OPPO devices do.
• Zen and other Firefox-based browsers, including Firefox installed from Flathub or as a download, now render on the GPU. Before, they fell back to software rendering and dropped frames, especially on YouTube.
• Debian's Chromium now uses the GPU instead of crashing back to software rendering.
• Less CPU use while playing video and using network-heavy apps: Portal no longer intercepts every socket send an app makes.
• The desktop no longer drops to 20 fps, or spins a CPU core, when the connection to the display is interrupted, and recovers on its own.
• Less background work while the desktop is idle (the logout watcher and Portal's own logging).

Graphics

These driver fixes also reached 2.5.0 through the updater.

• Fixed moving content leaving trails ("ghosting") in portrait at some display scales, caused by large wallpapers uploading as black.
• Fixed windows being slowly cut away from the bottom-right edge while a tray popup or other repainting window was open (most visible with the Cloud Dark rice).
• GPU waits now time out when they should instead of blocking for the whole job, and running out of GPU memory no longer crashes apps.

Browsers

• Firefox tabs no longer crash on devices where Android blocks reopening shared memory (Galaxy Z Fold5 and others).
• Fixed Firefox aborting with "Unexpected error 9 on netlink descriptor" and content tabs crashing right at start in rare cases.
• Fresh installs ship Mozilla's own Firefox in the Debian image, so setup no longer has to download it, and Firefox ESR is no longer included. Existing installs keep their setup.

Keyboard, mouse and controllers

• Tapping a text field again brings the Android keyboard back after you dismissed it.
• Folding a keyboard folio behind the tablet counts as no keyboard, so the on-screen keyboard appears.
• Disabled keyboards no longer count as connected.
• The keyboard no longer stops typing after an earlier session left its input engine running, and Plasma's Virtual Keyboard tray toggle can no longer switch it off for good.
• Chromium and Electron apps open the on-screen keyboard when you tap a text field on Wayland.
• A controller that no game is reading, or an input method that stopped responding, can no longer freeze Portal.

Display

• The Galaxy Z Fold cover screen gets its own interface size instead of reusing the inner screen's, and Portal remembers a size for each screen.

Setup and updates

• A runtime download that ends early (for example behind some proxies) now resumes instead of stalling setup.
• When a setup step fails, the error shown now includes the command's last lines, so the cause isn't cut off.
• Portal checks for new versions of itself, its graphics driver and ChatGPT every 30 minutes instead of every 6 hours. Debian package lists are still checked every 6 hours.

Stability

• Fixed a memory leak that grew every time Portal's window was recreated.
• Fixed a crash when the desktop window had no size yet.
• Fixed the mouse cursor code closing a file it no longer owned, which could break unrelated parts of Portal.
• Fixed the audio service leaving processes running when it failed to start.
• The recovery screen no longer loops if its dialog can't open.
• Copying something very large on Android no longer clears the Linux clipboard.

Other

• The release debug APK is now the real Debug build: a separate app with its own data that installs beside the normal one, instead of a debuggable copy of the normal app.

Files:

• Portal-2.6.0.apk: the app (install this one)
• Portal-2.6.0-debug.apk: debuggable build, for troubleshooting only
• Portal-2.6.0.aab: Play Store bundle, not for direct install