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Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

I unfortunately must disagree. I have had a Pinephone for over six months and I really dislike using it, in spite of my looking forward to getting a nearly completely libre phone. First of all, the UI is much less responsive than my old Nokia N900 that uses 12-year-old technology. On Phosh, it takes about five seconds just to show the screen where you can turn wifi on or off, for example.

Battery life is also a shambles; I thought about using my Pinephone at least as a music player, streaming the music to my Bluetooth headphone amp, but it often happens that playing a single album with the screen off completely depletes the battery.

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I tried the purism phone and it was fine. Really, it was snappy and responsive and h/w accelerated.

What I did notice is that gnome isn't dialed into phones (so to speak). For example I tried setting the date/time and you have to press +/- on the hour and minute to get to the time you want. The popup for month had a long list of months, but it put jan-mar off the top of the screen.

Well, it is a community project and product. Remember: Nokia was a market leader back when the N900 came out, and they had developed Maemo for years with the 770 (2005), N800 and N810. The appropriate point of comparison IMO would be the OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner, and while that was fun the PinePhone is already doing a lot better.

BTW, if you miss Maemo, try Maemo Leste (https://leste.maemo.org, if you want to get a glimpse before trying see https://linmob.net/videos/#maemo-leste).

Maybe maemo with modern ofono (derived from mer?) Would work on pinephone.

Maybe megous has a better idea, but I believe bt requires keeping the wifi radio powered as well? Is there something that could be done at the driver level to separate the power domains?

Maybe using mpd and disabling the UI when you don't need it will help. Most of the gnome players use gstreamer and trigger constant events in their UI.

For what is worth, I am using MPD instead of any of the GUI-based music apps. It doesn’t matter: the battery quickly drains anyway, and the audio even stutters. How is it possible for this phone to have worse performance at playing music than my iPod Video from almost 15 years ago?

Note that Maemo is a decade-old codebase that has bitrotted, so running it on the PinePhone isn't a reasonable solution.

I wonder why the video makes it seem otherwise... Did he just cut every time he performed a UI action? :P

Your experience sounds more like what I would have expected at this stage - we'll get there though!

I have found that the UI is sluggish when one first boots up the Pinephone, and the experience seems to vary greatly between distros. My experience on Mobian is the same as the video (with the exception of start up).

Creator of the video here - I don't do cuts like that. Fedora felt quite good in terms of performance which in part may be due to the very new kernel and their use of F2FS.

Now if they can get that app scaling dialed in a bit more, then I can see myself using Fedora (I currently use mobile.danctnix.org, BTW).

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