PinePhone – KDE Community edition | Hacker News Reader

PinePhone – KDE Community edition

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253 pointsognarb152 comments

I got my pinephone (Manjaro) last week and tried all OSs there are for it; I really love the idea of having a real Linux device in my pocket (that's why I have the Pandora, Pyra + GPD pocket 1 as well); it is such a difference having full control and being able to change whatever how you work instead of having large corps decide. Also shows, by the 'missing apps' between ecosystems, how much we need replacements for all the proprietary social sites, chat, collaboration etc.

However there is a lot that needs to be done software wise, which made me think that if I want to have a solid Linux device that really fits in my pocket like a phone with actual speech and 4g(5g?) then a lot more people will need to help with this. I don't know how that will happen, but, like I did with the Pandora, with this device I will try to work with the community in reporting and fixing bugs.

For now, this is a device for people who like freedom of their device (well, at least as much as we can get with modern circuits) and who like to tinker. I would recommend it to those people who envision an open source phone in their future; we need to help + stimulate the people trying.

Edit: it is trivial to try all OSs, so whatever you buy, you can switch rather rapidly and take them all for a spin.

> then a lot more people will need to help with this. I don't know how that will happen

I wonder if community crypto-currency tokens could be used for incentive.

See explanation twitter thread here: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1326313315044192256?s=20

Really, community tokens could be the basis for a true guild system. The collective community of token holders would represent collective expertise in a specific craft.

This is a cool idea. It's like stock options for a startup

Pretty much, yeah. If the software is genuinely high quality and useful, or if it at least has potential, then expertise in it is valuable and worth paying for.

That's a cool idea. I'm usually cynical about that stuff, but this could actually work.

If they want to throw their reputations in the trash pushing get rich quick schemes, they probably would already be doing that instead of all this hard work.

By your definition, a job is a “get rich quick scheme”.

No. That’s a get rich slow scheme.

The value does not moon over night but rather the value increases as the product improves and your skills become more valuable. The same as a job.

If you want speech install festival just like you would on desktop.

Sorry! I meant calls, but thank you for the tip ; I did not know that either.

I wonder if making a shell on top of Android (for compatiblity with other devices) would make community larger and get more software contributions. Not sure how technically feasible it is though.

Maybe, though in the worst case there's Anbox emulation.

Wasn't FirefoxOS (the defunct phone one, now there's the KaiOS fork) sort of like that? I believe Gonk took some parts from Android, but haven't dug into it.

Given that example, not sure how feasible the app ecosystem is.

FirefoxOS tried to ride on an Android-base to help solve device-support and being able to focus on the user-facing aspects of the platform.

As a result they were stuck with a combination of the terrible Android-build system and the complex Firefox build-system.

That alone probably wasn't the reason it failed, but it certainly didn't help people who wanted to contribute (like me).

> I wonder if making a shell on top of Android (for compatiblity with other devices) would make community larger

But then it would just be another Google-phone, based on a Google-controlled codebase. We have enough of those phones and "OSes" already.

I respect the Pine64, PinePhone and the surrounding communities for trying to make an actual, real Linux-phone based on a real Linux base.

I even bought a PinePhone myself to play with. It's definitely not there yet in terms a full replacement of my iPhone, but at the same time I can see all the pieces starting to come together: It's a real phone, with an open bootloader, running real Linux (with systemd, PulseAudio, whatever your distro rolls with) and a custom shell made for touchscreen phones.

It's just what it needs to be. It just lacks some polish, that's all.

And the community feels really vibrant, akin to the early Linux hacker-scene you had back in the 90s, where everyone is trying to do their part to help deliver something new and different.

For better, it's like a full deja back to those days. I love it!

Pretty much all Linux installs on Android phones are chroot jails on top of Android. They run at decent speed because everything is native, but they're forced to use Android's kernel and device drivers which are non free, closed and therefore not trustworthy, and cannot protect themselves by malicious Android apps and/or backdoors. I would rather have a truly free and open operating system in which I can set up one or more sandboxes containing all stuff I don't trust (closed apps, Android emulation etc), that is essentially the other way around. The Pinephone ideally is trying to be a step in this direction.

> Android's kernel and device drivers which are non free, closed and therefore not trustworthy

That's a bit misleading. Android's kernel is Linux which is GPLv2, and thus the device drivers are GPLv2 too. (They could be circumventing the GPL by using shims though.)

I think you perhaps misunderstood me - it's not to replace the PinePhone implementation, but to complement it.

Give users the ability to boot PinePhone software to both try it out (so they see it's good enough to replace their current Android phone) and to make filling up the software gaps easier. All while open hardware continues to be developed.

Right now, PinePhone development requires a pretty expensive buyin with pretty much no ability to see it ahead of time.

> For now, this is a device for people who like freedom of their device (well, at least as much as we can get with modern circuits)

Librem 5 [0] goes further than that: it's OS is endorsed by the FSF as truly free.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5

I wanted to try a cheaper phone first to see how I would like it. Thanks for the heads up.

> it's OS is endorsed by the FSF as truly free.

To meet the FSF's definitions of free, they had to make the (still required) proprietary firmware read-only instead of allowing it to be loadable by the user.

EDIT: see below.

It’s not read-only. You can reflash it if it’s really necessary: https://forums.puri.sm/t/does-respects-your-freedom-certific...

Ah, I stand corrected. But it's still a silly distinction. It's utterly bizarre to me that something that a device that allows everything to be modified from the CPU is considered non-free if any of that code is non-free, but if that same non-free code is used on a chip that's only flashable using a more difficult method, the device can be considered freedom respecting.

unfortunately, librem 5 isn't shipping. it's always a little further out. Hopefully soon.

It looks like it started shipping:

https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-screenshots-snapshot-2020-11-...

Let's hope my 2017 order is fulfilled!

I honestly don't know what I'll do. I might turn into one of those people who stares at his phone all day long. (or ... compiles for his phone all day long... or compiles ON his phone all day long)

Afaik it doesn't have endorsement yet, they are just aiming for it

The OS is already endorsed: https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html.

The device itself has a preliminary endorsement: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/ethical-tech-giving-guid....

If anything, this shows how out of reality FSF is. There's no way mere mortals can afford such a mid-range smartphone for a high-end price.

PinePhone is affordable. Fairphone 3 (much more expensive than PinePhone!) is sustainable, self-repairable (10/10 iFixit), and fair for the workers and miners.

Each of the above have important values, FSF be damned.

The FSF didn’t choose the price, Purism did, because they’ve paid professionals to develop their software, without which the Pinephone might not have existed — all previous editions of it shipped with phosh (except Braveheart, which came with only factory testing software IIRC).

Of course FSF doesn't set the price, that's a red herring. They can endorse whatever they wish though, that's by choice.

Pinephone would've absolutely existed if Purism did not exist because the innovation lies in the usage of FOSS hardware, not so much in UI. Pinephone ships with 13 OSes which all work, and various of these OSes were already in development before Librem 5 was announced. I know this, because I followed some of these OSes since they were born. Android, SailfishOS (successor of Maemo/Moblin/MeeGo), Maemo Leste, postmarketOS, KDE Mobile, Ubuntu Touch, KaiOS, and a whole lot more. In fact, I ran Qtopia on a Sharp Zaurus almost 20 years ago before Nokia invested in mobile Gtk+ / Qt based UIs. Which was a decent UI, considering resistive screens (the world opted for capacative which has an impact on UI choices).

Furthermore, many of the cloud services Purism / Librem 5 announced are mere rebrands. I applaud Librem 5 for being FOSS software and FOSS firmware, but I feel Pinephone and Fairphone both make an important achievement as well (one being affordable for the masses who don't like in say Mass. USA, the other one for being more fair for workers, environment, and longevity (Fairphone were one of first to provide long-term Android support)). Both of which ideals are very much in line with Stallman's philosophies.

> They can endorse whatever they wish though, that's by choice.

This is just not true. They endorse whatever aligns with their goals, which did not change since 1985: https://ryf.fsf.org/. The corresponding price is not their fault, but the fault of current economics (where it's more economical to restrict users' freedom).

> Pinephone ships with 13 OSes which all work, and various of these OSes were already in development before Librem 5 was announced.

This is true, but currently most of these OS decided that Phosh is the best environment for good reasons: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque....

> but I feel Pinephone and Fairphone both make an important achievement as well

Not one argues with that. However we also need to go further towards the freedom, so we also need Purism. Hopefully at some point those three companies collaborate to create perfectly free, sustainable, cheap smartphone... Or at least the competition between them can lead us there.

I just received a Pinephone Manjaro Comunity edition. 10€ is given to the project edition. Had I known KDE was next, I would have waited a bit! I already use Plasma on my laptop, it is a great desktop environment.

I replaced Manjaro by Mobian, it works way better for me. KDE Neon did not work too well, unfortunately (it could not turn off the phone screen, and it didn't work correctly with an external screen), but I have hope.

I'd especially like to install Plasma Mobile on Mobian, I really trust Debian's stability and trust KDE better than Gnome on getting UX just right and be more lightweight too.

Phosh is good, but they apparently have decided to remove auto rotation (which I need!), having to tap on the status bar instead of swiping is a bit strange, having to click on a X to close apps instead of swiping vertically is a bit strange too and by the way closing apps is unreliable. They prevent windows from being moved with fingers, which is fine if apps are entirely designed for mobile but this gets really annoying as soon as the world is not perfect, which it is far from being. I have the same feeling with Phosh as with Gnome, that things look beautiful and attention was paid on the appearance, but Plasma overall felt more intuitive and lightweight. I might contribute to the project at some point.

Congratulations on being the next Pinephone's Community Edition!

> 10€ is given to the project edition.

Do you know where this payment goes to? e.g. is it to their OpenCollective or LFX donation accounts?

I have no idea, sorry.

Pine64 has mentioned that they plan on selling the backplates individually with the proceeds going to the respective projects. So hopefully you'll still be able to do so.

I tried Neon briefly on my PinePhone. Plasma Mobile is QML-based, and is less polished/working than Plasma Desktop. Performance is no better than Mobian. I don't think you get draggable title bars on Plasma Mobile either.

Indeed, this is matches my observations. Things will hopefully improve rapidly though.

Plasmashell on the desktop is also QML-based as far as I know.

> having to click on a X to close apps instead of swiping vertically is a bit strange too

The phosh update of today allows closing apps by a vertical swipe! Fantastic!

I'm one of the Plasma Mobile developer and I would be happy to answer questions.

Any such plan for KDE edition for Purism Librem 5?

Some Plasma Mobile developers have receive a Librem 5 phone but afaik there is no KDE edition planed for the Librem 5 yet.

No "Edition" but Plasma Mobile is supported on PureOS/Librem 5 and it's possible to switch to use that in place of Phosh should you want: https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Development_Environment/Bo...

I am not sure how up to date Plasma Mobile is in these repos though. It's been a while since I tried it out.

Any reason why Firefox is not prominently advertised instead of Angelfish?

One could guess it's because Plasma Angelfish want to be well integrated into the rest of the KDE ecosystem (works well with Plasma, has KDE wallet integration and all that jazz). I think Angelfish is based on webkit (via Qt) as well, for better or worse.

Anglefish has been build specially for Plasma Mobile and use Kirigami (the framework powering most of the PlaMo apps) and QtWebEngine (based on Blink).

Firefox sadly doesn't give us any ways to just use the web engine and do our own UI on top of it. It's a bit sad because Firefox is my preferred web browser on the desktop.

Hi, thanks for taking questions.

What is the state of the phone call/sms/mms support in Plasma Mobile on Pinephone?

Also : will the CE edition be some sort of Neon mobile, or will it be based on PostmarketOS or something?

Yes it works! SMS and MMS are supported via the application Spacebar. The application got a lot of improvement last months. https://www.plasma-mobile.org/2020/11/12/plasma-mobile-updat...

Calls are also working fine.

The only "exception" being one carrier in the USA does not seem to work with ofono (the underlying framework) yet, but that issue was also with the previous UBports edition.

Is there auto call recording? Or on the roadmap.

In Europe, at least in my home country, law mandates some kind of beeps or warnings when recording calls.

Yes, and you, as an user would be breaking the law. But as far as I understand there is no law that would prevent phones from having this function.

That's awesome. Great job!

This is great news.

Biggest question: Can I send SMS, on this phone, from another computer?

The biggest reason I ditched my iPhone for Android was the excellent implementation of in-browser messaging, to and from my phone, on any computer with a web browser.

I don't need to be able to text from "any computer with a web browser", but if I could send SMS from Win / Mac / Linux machines that I owned, that would be a huge incentive for me to give this platform a shot.

There is KDE Connect. You can easily respond to texts from that.

Barring that, sending a text is a simple one-liner in the terminal. Worst case, you can just run the command via ssh or whatever other workflow you may want.

Beautiful. Thank you so much.

You can use KDE Connect[1] for send SMS from a Win / Mac or Linux machine. This also works with Android.

[1]: https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

This is fantastic. Thank you so much!!

I hadn't heard about the new support for MMS, that's fantastic news! It's such an important part of group messaging in the U.S. that not having access to it was a huge blocker for me in terms progress towards daily driver status.

Interesting. My Understanding is that MMS is non-fuctional:

https://sr.ht/~anteater/mms-stack/

But I am admittedly more familiar with the Phosh stack versus the KDE stack. Are you then using ofono and that is providing a working MMS support for the Pinephone?

(Sorry I am not trying to be confrontational, it would be amazing if MMS works!)

I hate to say, I just tested it and MMS doesn't work on plasma Mobile (PostmarketOS with Plasma Mobile 5.20.3)

MMS doesn't work with modemmanager, it sounds like the OS this ships with uses ofono instead which has MMS support.

So I cannot speak to ofono, but modemmanager largely does support MMS, with two exceptions:

- The APN for mobile broadband needs to be the same for MMS (modemmanager does not have support for multiple APNs yet), and

- "transfer-route MT messages" aren't implemented (which some carriers use for MMS, but it is not clear for me to how).

The larger issue is that there is no stack on phosh to support any of this. I proposed a couple of ideas of how such as stack would work on their git site, but I don't have the time to impliment it.

From what I saw with scapebar, it does not have native support to send picture messages (MMS), does not recieve picture messages, and did not have a way to send a group message (MMS). I am admittedly not familiar enough with ofono to know what works or how it functions in the stack. However, there is MMS support in the patched ofono stack below:

https://sr.ht/~anteater/mms-stack/

Which carrier?

Why not develop on snapdragon 865 soc and 6-8 gb Ram?

I bet it would run really better.

Because it's quite hard to get more modern and powerful processors to work with a mainline Linux kernel and because of this, these processors are only working with Android.

Because no one has released an open source phone with these specs?

> If you are interested in developing, you will be getting early access to an ambitious Free Software mobile platform and you can help contribute to Plasma Mobile and get a headway designing new apps that you can test and deploy right now.

Any link to this? How do I make a simple hello world in Plasma Mobile :)

We have a bit of documentation:

* Plasma Mobile dev documentation: https://docs.plasma-mobile.org/

* General Kirigami documentation: https://develop.kde.org/docs/kirigami/

* API documention of Kirigami: https://api.kde.org/frameworks/kirigami/html/

The documentation could be better, so if you have any trouble don't hesitate to ask questions in our Matrix channel: https://webchat.kde.org/#/room/#plasmamobile:kde.org

Hi! What is the state of running regular Android apps on Plasma? I heard of Anbox, but does this actually work? I'm interested in running my bank's app on PinePhone.

I can't speak for Anbox support on Pinephone, but regarding your bank's Android app it probably uses Google Safetynet, which I don't think Anbox has support for, or will ever support. Without Safetynet the app will probably not function, or will function with limited features.

To add to my sibling comment's remark about SafetyNet, you miiiight be able to make something happen with Magisk or some other form of SafetyNet spoofing but that's a very deep rabbit hole. Also potentially a legal gray area. The sort of configuration that no dev of anything involved would be willing to support! Still, all hope might not be lost. YMMV.

Probably way easier to just fire up the web browser in that case.

Anbox "works" on the Pinephone, but takes ages to boot (several minutes), is really slow and eventually crashes the phone, in my experience (tried on Neon and Manjaro). I haven't managed to do anything useful with it.

I wonder if we'll reach a point where Anbox runs okay on the Pinephone, it seems super heavy. Anbox emulates a complete Android system after all...

It would be great if Plasma Mobile would look into supporting JetPack Compose which has been ported to Linux Desktop by JetBrains.

Even if I want to learn QML there is only so many things I could do in a day even if I want to. Plus JetPack Compose brings huge developer base to Plasma Mobile.

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/compose/

If it works on desktop linux and has an UI that adapts on small screens, there is an high chance that it already works on Plasma Mobile.

Is there any integration with Plasma desktop, e.g. Calendar or Notes sync, or notifications display on desktop when phone is connected to PC?

Great to see that, congratulations to everybody involved.

Is the hardware of Pinephone considered stable?

How is the development on such platform, the same a on Desktop GNU/Linux? Do we have a permission system similar to Android? Can we launch easily background application and awake the phone when needed (for notifications)? Is there a documentation on the packaging system?

How long can the battery last at the moment (with mostly idle phone)?

Thanks!

> Is the hardware of PinePhone considered stable?

There has been some hardware improvements between the braveheart edition and KDE Community edition. For example the convergence functionality was added. Afaik the Manjaro and KDE edition will be using the same hardware.

> How is the development on such platform, the same a on Desktop GNU/Linux? Do we have a permission system similar to Android? Can we launch easily background application and awake the phone when needed (for notifications)? Is there a documentation on the packaging system?

The development for Plasma Mobile is similar to the one on the desktop. You can ever develop completely on the desktop or ssh in the phone and compile there. Packaging system is the same as on the desktop and depends on the distro. Flatpak also works as cross distribution solution ;)

KClock uses Powerdevil (the kde power management deamon) to wake up from sleep. There is also the KDED infrastructure: https://api.kde.org/frameworks/kded/html/index.html.

> How long can the battery last at the moment (with mostly idle phone)?

Good question. This varies a lot by the software used and the distributions. At the beginning it was less than 2 hours but with a lot of improvements in the kernel, there was reports varying from 12 to 16 hours idle time. This will probably improve further with more improvements in the kernel and in the hardware stack.

I hope this answers all your questions.

> I hope this answers all your questions.

yes thanks a lot! I'm considering getting this phone to port the XMPP client I'm working on on FOSS mobile OSes.

Did you already checked Kaidan[1] out? It's an XMPP client specially build for Plasma Mobile.

[1]: https://www.kaidan.im/

yes I'm aware of it, I'm deeply involved in XMPP community (XSF member) and have met Kaidan devs a couple of times (it's a promising client BTW).

My client (Salut à Toi) predates Kaidan by years and is not focusing only on instant messaging, also it's not the same technology stack and the mobile frontend uses Kivy, which is well adapted for touch screen.

Hi! Do the Plasma Mobile developers also provide a distro for the Phone? Is it KDE Neon (Ubuntu) based?

What kind of collaboration is there between the various developers for the PinePhone? There seem to be a lot of Kernels with different patches for HW acceleration, IC power management, modem operation etc [1]. Do you apply these to your kernel?

[1] https://xnux.eu/log/#020

Yes it's called Plasma Mobile

Plasma Mobile is the desktop and related components (open to correction). There are apparently different distributions (based on Arch, Ubuntu and others [1]).

My question is what the Plasma Mobile PinePhone ships with and if it maintained by the Plasma Mobile team themselves. The Plasma Mobile says that the Ubuntu Neon based one is "official" with confusing double quotes. The blog [2] says that image has been rebased on Ubuntu 20.04. Is this what the KDE PinePhone ships with? If so, what kernel does it use and are the patches I linked to previously included?

[1] https://www.plasma-mobile.org/get/ [2] https://www.plasma-mobile.org/2020/11/12/plasma-mobile-updat...

I think you might be confusing the Linux distribution with the desktop environment. "Plasma" and "Plasma Mobile" are examples of the latter, while "Ubuntu" is the former. One can switch desktop environments with a Linux distribution to customize its look and feel - e.g. if I install Ubuntu on my PC, I can choose Plasma (KDE's offering), Gnome, or XFCE to be my desktop environment. OTOH, I could also choose to install Arch Linux - a different distribution - and still choose between those same options (or more, I only listed 3) for a desktop environment to customize it.

I don't think the parent is confusing these notions. I don't know what distribution will be pre-installed on the KDE community edition, but the KDE project provides pre-built images based on Neon, which is Ubuntu with up to date KDE things on it. Plasma mobile also runs on Postmarket OS and Manjaro, and also Arch I think.

When I briefly tried Neon on Wednesday, it was based on Ubuntu 20.04 and the 5.7 kernel if I remember correctly. Mobian is using kernel 5.9. I hope the pre-installed distribution will have an up to date kernel with latest patches. I also hope that it will be possible to install the latest versions of Plasma Mobile on Mobian in the near future too.

>I don't think the parent is confusing these notions.

I'm not (I've even maintained distro spins). I am at a loss how anyone could read my question and think otherwise ;).

> I hope the pre-installed distribution will have an up to date kernel with latest patches.

That's precisely what I want to find out. I've seen so many blog posts and forum threads about different PinePhone builds. It's like the best and worst of Android ROM development from the XDA forums.

Different people seem to be hacking on different thing (which is fun) and many are attempting to get things upstreamed but the development seems to be all over the place. It's not clear what builds have safety features like the Power IC limits enabled for example.

>I think you might be confusing the Linux distribution with the desktop environment.

I'm definitely not ;). Please reread my comment. If you know the answer to the question, please let me know.

How do you see this develop in the future, especially concerning the convergence aspect of it - the ability to hook it up to a monitor and use it as a real desktop computer. Please provide your own personal and unofficial opinion.

The Pinephone supports convergence, but there is still a lot of work needed on the software side. The under-laying technology "Plasmashell" is able to run different view modes: the traditional desktop mode, the mobile mode and the smart tv mode (https://plasma-bigscreen.org/). The missing link is the possibility to switch the view at runtime.

Now while I think the feature is cool, I'm not sure how useful it is. I don't really see myself using it and would prefer in almost all the case using my thinkpad with a good processor and plenty of RAM. This might change with future versions of the Pinephone getting more powerful with the time. For the moment, I'm happy to have the convergence of the applications with Kirigami, so that I only need to develop them once and use a similar interface on both my phone and laptop. And having KDE Connect to share stuff between my phone and my laptop.

Alright, thanks.

For me the desktop capability of it is the most exciting thing. There are lots tasks i can do that don't require powerful cpu and lots of ram. I can even see myself developing in certain cases where i can just remote into a dedicated workstation - seeing what games mobile phones can run, it's not hard to imagine one can run a thing like vscode in client mode.

Yes, it works quite fine. Even web browsing is not too horrible if you really need it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdKNugT-mTQ

Enough for HN browsing, for sure. Even on a 1440p display.

It can be very useful if you use all HW acceleration Allwinner SoCs can give you to make PinePhone into a portable movie player. :) Hook it up to a TV via HDMI port in a hotel and play anything you like. It can achieve quite some performance that way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyRm8kccyG4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHOgVmxH_dA

Other side of Allwinner SoC business is making TV box SoC (H* series of SoC), and it shows on A64 too.

It can do video playback at 60FPS HW scaled to larger 1440p displays, for example. Including audio over HDMI. This is already working with current gstreamer and kernel.

No questions, I just wanted to say "thank you" for your work.

Thanks so much for all your great work!!!

Is Plasma Mobile up to running on tablets now? I got an MS Surface Go 10 months ago and at the time Plasma Mobile didn't support auto screen rotation, so for now I'm running Gnome. (I'd like to switch.)

Is there any setup of Plasma Mobile that supports VoLTE?

Hi, thanks for your work on Plasma Mobile.

Android has an Hardware Abstraction Layer (Android HAL) that acts as a unique central clean definition of what the hardware provides and how to access it. It makes it easier for Android to remain HW agnostic and for HW vendor to be compatible with Android.

Is there a similar effort on Linux ?

Plasma Mobile works fine on a mainline Linux kernel with a GNU userspace so there is no need to create an additional abstraction layer.

There is a project called Halium that allowed in the early days to run plasma mobile on top of the Android userspace, but we stopped working on it when all the plasma developers got their Pinephone and this was easier to work with.

I don't have enough background, but I recently read that some distributions could be a fire hazard due to the lack of proper temperature regulation:

https://xnux.eu/log/#017

https://xnux.eu/log/#018

If this was the case, is that still a concern and which distributions/systems address this problem?

I believe all those concerns were put to rest once the modularised design of the phone was taken into consideration.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24596248

Not at all. The specced hardware charge controller has no thermal circuitry and only disables the battery at a 6 amp current draw.

I'm not a power electronics guy but can a charging circuit realistically be a fire hazard without an initial overcurrent?

It seems like good redundancy to have thermal cut-off but theoretically a fire would have to be preceded by a massive overcurrent anyway, no?

A chip can only detect current that's running through it or a sensor. A breached or shorted cell has a massive overcurrent between two parts of the cell and hence can only be detected by heat

> A breached or shorted cell has a massive overcurrent between two parts of the cell and hence can only be detected by heat

But that's not an error which can be caused by badly written software (i.e. like a Linux kernel).

So there's theoreticly no increased risk with running different "home-brew" OS builds on this phone due to software-related aspects of those builds.

Shorted cell is game over regardless of software, most probably.

Heat can accumulate. You just need to operate near the safety cutoff limit and over the battery spec for long enough.

Anyway, there are layers of protection. More the better.

"All those concerns" is a bit too much optimistic. There are several concerns, and while there were some ideas put forward, and some patches applied to non-mainline Linux trees, all of those are untested. Values for the NTC were taken from some random datasheet on the internet in the hopes most 10kOhm NTCs have a similar R-T characteristic (they don't), and that the random datasheet I picked matches NTC that's in the battery.

Just to give you a perspective on the level of quality of existing solution.

It's better than before, though.

It's probably not a fire hazard any more than other regular smartphones. Battery usually only gets somewhat warm when charged at "fast charging" current.

My kernel has some patches that enable battery thermal regulation in the power management chip. Battery gets too warm/cold, charging stops.

Would you be willing to share these patches? I'm interested in this.

https://megous.com/git/linux/log/?h=axp-5.10

- regulator: axp20x: Enable over-temperature protection and 16s reset function

- power: supply: axp20x_battery: Setup thermal regulation (experimental)

EDIT: I'm the author of the quoted articles on xnux.eu, just to be clear.

Making this is a huge win for freedom, open source and keeping our digital life more secure.

This will be my next phone!

Probably something to be on a lookout for future releases: it would be better for a regular user if all core applications were named by their function, e.g. Megapixels -> Camera, Kalidori -> Calendar, Angelfish -> Web Browser, etc.

The package names and process names won't change, so this just hides important info. Your browser hangs, you go into htop, you realize you're not sure what it's called. Same with installing them or uninstalling them. I do not think this is an area where you should dumb things down.

This thing is exactly what has been really infuriating on recent ubuntu releases. When a program misbehaves, I have no idea what the actual process is called

Any recommendations as to the best way to support this / other Foss phones ? This obviously includes how to get a phone but i assume there is other ways?

A lot of ways :D

* Donate: https://kde.org/community/donations/

* Develop new mobile Linux applications or port existing Linux desktop application to mobile devices

* Help us write our monthly blog: https://www.plasma-mobile.org/blog/. We are quite bad at getting a new blog post at least once a month.

* Design mock-ups

* Translate the applications to your native language

Good news. But I'd love to see something in a smaller form-factor.

I agree. This project is fantastic. The only reason I haven't bought a pinephone is because the size. I hope the PineCom idea ends up being a size I can see carrying around.

something like the size of the xz1 compact would be ideal for me

I would happily pay an extra $100-$200 for them to get a better processor, wifi, and bluetooth in there if it were possible. All the performance of everything running just looks so slow. I really do want to support these things, but even opening up a text editor took seconds on videos I've seen.

Better optimization will help, Librem 5 has better hardware but has (to a lesser extent) similar issues far as I know.

Unfortunately it's a bit more than $200 extra, but: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/.

SD card interface vs eMMC makes a difference in startup speed. eMMC is basically 4x as fast.

Though I think many GNU/Linux desktop apps are not well optimized for startup speed. And it shows on slower HW.

It would be nice to have an option to hide those navigation buttons, and replace them with gestures, like SailfishOS does.

If i click through i can't order it though ? The web shop only has the manjaro version. Am I missing something?

Turns out my browsers mangle the landing page of the pine64 site. Pre-order opens December. Just Fyi for anyone else that wondered what avail immediately means.

Definitely my next phone! Congrats!

Love the idea of that phone! And would love it even more if:

- it had 3 USB-C ports

- out of which 2 were USB 3.1 standard with alternate mode HDMI capable of FullHD resolution

- it had processor that achieves in geekbench 5 somewhere between 1.5k - 2k points multicore at least

I know, I know - need to wake up ;-)

Well there is a Convergence Edition which allows you to output over HDMI.

Both 2GiB/3BiB RAM editions allow you to output over HDMI.

It's clear that closed source device makers will never want to prove that there are no HW backdoor, or even monitoring chip in their products, but for a device like this one, is there a will to provide such guarantee?

If you want hard proofs consider Precursor: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor.

For anyone who uses Apple Pay: I had trouble at the pine64.com website using Apple Pay (kept getting “invalid shipping address“), but when I checked out via their normal CC checkout it worked fine.

Does pine phone record calls? Seems like most new phones have this disabled and I am looking for a phone that can record calls.

Nothing prevents you or someone else to write such application.

The HW allows any combination of recording, playback - to/from modem and to/from speaker/mic at the same time. It's possible to implement a lot of interesting features that way, like DTMF menu system on incoming calls, with or without monitoring of the other side, etc.

I have it documented here:

https://xnux.eu/devices/feature/audio-pp.html

So it's certainly possible.

Sweet!

Two simple questions.

How long does the battery last, while largely sitting on my desk not being used?

Can it make and receive calls and texts?

Will this work on the "brave heart" beta edition that came out last year?

Anybody know, or have a decent guess at, the price?

$150. $200 for Convergence Edition that uses an upgraded board with more RAM and eMMC, plus some accessory goodies. This link [1] is for the Manjaro edition, but all of the community editions have been priced the same.

[1]: https://pine64.com/product-category/pinephone/?v=0446c16e2e6...

How about offline Netflix? Spotify?

It's going to be up to Netflix to release an app for this platform.

great!

I will be getting this!

I wish one day it would include a super high quality camera like Samsung then it would be perfect.

The camera will certainly getting better with the time. Martijn Braam, a postmarketOS dev is already doing a very good job improving the software side of the problem with his Megapixel application: https://blog.brixit.nl/pinephone-camera-pt4/.

For me it's the LCD screen versus an AMOLED that is a big blocker on mobile devices.

But as I understand for now this will probably mostly be used by hackers and developers themselves, not as a daily driver for lambda users who are conscious about freedom and privacy yet, so the hardware choices make sense.

Definitely needs a better camera before I could consider it. A jump to 20MP, and then perhaps forking OpenCamera rather than developing one directly for Pine might be a good way forward.

Does Pine have any recommendations for auto-cloud backup of photos, to replace Google Photos? (Photos is one of the killer apps for me - I could live without the cloud features, but the seamless cloud sync is a major feature.)

I haven't used plasma-mobile yet but in UBPorts you can sync your photos with your Nextcloud instance. Another option is Syncthing.

Operating systems for the Pinephone use the same software packages as desktop ARM Linux. So if it runs in the Raspberry Pi, it will run on your phone. Nextcloud is a nice option for seamless cloud sync.

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