Comment by O1111OOO | Hacker News Reader

Comment by O1111OOO | Hacker News Reader

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> For the vast majority of people, the Librem 5 and Pinephone are probably not worth even considering. The GNU userspace and associated “mobile” paradigms within it are very much not ready for daily use.

> Linux phones are definitely not yet ready to be daily drivers

Despite the author making this point twice and some of the negativity regarding Purism's pricing - I still feel very good about the state of Linux phones and the incredible work these two entities are doing. We can't lose sight of this.

It wasn't too long ago that the mere mention of a Linux phone was pure fantasy. We now have two companies (and two passionate communities) that are helping move Open Source Linux forward. I'm still very excited about how things are developing and the trickle down effect it will have as we move forward.

> One of the neat things about the Pinephone is the ability to boot and use a variety of Linux distributions on the hardware itself. It’s as easy as loading the distro onto an SD card, and then booting the phone. You don’t even have to flash anything to the internal eMMC in order to run it!

This is such a killer feature for me - while also providing a modern-ish platform for the various distributions and app developers to test their wares. It's probably the biggest single most important thing about the PinePhone right now.

No more unsuccessful rooting, flashing and possibly bricking. No more nagging feeling that you are merely renting a device and are constantly at the whim of a corporate overlord (which never ends well).

I think, like the author, I'm a bit more excited about the flexibility of the PinePhone but acknowledge the importance of the work Purism is doing to try and bring a First Tier Linux phone to market. We all benefit from this.

> It’s as easy as loading the distro onto an SD card, and then booting the phone. You don’t even have to flash anything to the internal eMMC in order to run it!

FWIW while the Librem 5 can't run the bootloader straight from the SD card, the kernel can use the rootfs from SD card just fine - I have multiple distros installed on SD card there this way.

The Librem 5 also supports booting via fastboot (uuu), which personally I find to be a more convenient option for emergency fallbacks than having to juggle with SD cards like you have to do on the PinePhone.

FYI - the reason why L5 doesn't boot straight from the SD card is that the SD card reader is on the USB interface behind a hub, because both SDIO interfaces available on i.MX8MQ are already taken (one by eMMC and other by WiFi).

This is good info, I didn't know this!

Shame though, because among all the Pine devices I have (Pinebook Pro, Pinephone) I've gotten very used to booting from the SD card to swap things out.

Have you written / do you have any links to documentation for how to use fastboot?

For info on Jumpdrive and many other things, see the FAQ: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...

My Nokia N9 proved to me that a Linux-based phone without having to be an entirely different world like Android is possible — and I’m stoked to see Librem and the PinePhone take this even further!

We’ve come a long way since the OpenMoko :)

As did my Nokia N900 more than 10 years ago.

The move towards functional linux phones are moving forward and with noticeable steps, and when my libre 5 phone arrive it will be interesting to see how close they have gotten. That said, my expectations are low when it comes to the base set in daily use:

1) managing 3G/2G network. There seems to be quite a few hacks in the telecom infrastructure and I have long suspected that mobile phone operating systems are simply expected to handle each unique occurrence. I expect calls will occasionally fail, especially for answering and calling, but also in transitioning between networks.

2) Bluetooth audio support for calling is already known to be broken. I can only hope it will be fixed some time in the future, but I suspect different devices for handing handsfree calls will have their own hacks which won't be supported.

3) As the article alluded to, the GPS software has a bunch of hacks to address short comings. I am expecting there to be both long delays at finding signals and strange jumps in accuracy. Since my personal interaction with a GPS tend to be in moments where delays will be very noticeable, like when you entered the car and waiting for the map to show where to go before starting the car, delays and inaccuracy will be noticeable in such use.

4) For music it will need to interact with other devices, especially over Bluetooth, and I strongly suspect each manufacturer has it own hacks in how to do track progression, rewind/forward, play lists and so on.

5) Android app support. Here I have some hope that Anbox will work. I am however worried that a lot of apps will break in strange ways when run in a emulator from missing dependencies or strange hacks.

Honestly, I wouldn't expect much from GPS on the Pinephone (at least the 2GB version): the only maps apps available are extremely bare-bones, little more than tech demos compared to Android software like OSMAnd or Maps.me.

Also, while Anbox has been used in some cases so hackers can say "See, I did it", I don't think Pinephone users are actually going to be using Anbox on an everyday basis. It is too RAM-heavy and too taxing on the Pinephone’s weak processor. People expect to be able to near-instantly switch between apps (e.g. between Signal and Firefox), and that is probably never going to be possible on this iteration of the Pinephone.

With regard to music and Bluetooth, however, already Mobian on the Pinephone gives me the same functionality with my Bluetooth amp as my Android phone. No complaints there.

The PinePhone is _so close_.

Some suggestions, as a user, to get it over the edge:

1. Every app in the Manjaro distribution that ships pre-installed should at least fit on the screen; many apps have popups that do not.

2. Dialing should never cause a reboot; calling voicemail has crashed the phone for me.

3. Either give up on having a camera or make it _fast_.

4. Some kind of loading indicator for apps would be nice.

5. Either don't allow X apps to be installed or make the X wrapper work; I can install gtk emacs but it doesn't run.

> Every app in the Manjaro distribution that ships pre-installed should at least fit on the screen; many apps have popups that do not.

Sounds like an issue you should bring up with the application authors. These are usually easy fixes.

> Either give up on having a camera or make it _fast_.

We've already seen demos of the camera running at 60fps. Why would you want people to "give up" on a perfectly achievable goal?

> Sounds like an issue you should bring up with the application authors. These are usually easy fixes.

The application authors are mostly unaware. The Manjaro ARM team is using libhandy to port desktop applications on a case-by-case.

They are also in charge of what applications are preinstalled; IMHO, they shouldn't be preinstalling any applications which do not _at least_ fit on the display in every popup and window they open.

> We've already seen demos of the camera running at 60fps.

It displays at 60fps, but I still can't seem to get it to take non-blurry photos of my kids.

Camera framerate may have been fixed, but just opening the camera app on Mobian takes a few seconds. People are used nowadays to their camera app opening near-instantly, so they can capture fleeting moments.

I've pushed a Megapixels update that makes the app launch a bunch faster and the camera preview is a lot smoother too

It's really great, thank you for your hard work Martijn!

Would love a phone w/out a camera. I do not know why they are seen as necessity.

I use a fancy Sony mirrorless camera for photography that is meant to be kept and looked at in the future. However, it is pretty obvious why cameras on phones are necessary even to people with good cameras: when communicating with people over a messenger app like Signal or Whatsapp, one quite often has to send them a quick pic to get their opinion. (For example, today I didn't know which kind of olive oil my partner wanted me to pick up from the supermarket, so I just sent a picture of what was available on the shelf.)

Sure, I could have lugged my full-size camera along and then sent it over to the phone via wi-fi, but using a real camera in a supermarket is going to get you some unpleasant attention from staff.

A fantasy that exists since OpenMoko, released in 2007, 13 years ago, just as long as the iPhone exists in the market.

Sailfish OS, MeeGo and Maemo have been proving it since 2009. I've been running linux on my phone since 2012.

The Nokia phones had closed binary blobs that required a custom kernel version (so e.g. the Nokia N900 is forever stuck on kernel 2.6), as well as modems that were not isolated from memory. Also, many UI components on Nokia’s OS and Sailfish were closed-source. Yes, they used a lot of Linux-associated software, but the reason why the Pinephone is getting such buzz is that it is both completely open and also it runs a mainline kernel that can be upgraded at will.

> Yes, they used a lot of Linux-associated software

That's a bit of an understatement. It's not 'a lot'. Everything running on those phones is a GNU/linux application. The fact that there are binary blobs and that the UI was closed source doesn't take away from that. The post I was replying to was complaining about linux phones, not about "open hardware/open source" phones.

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