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Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

You are happy with a phone that won't run an authorized Signal app, takes 5–10 seconds just to open the screen to turn wi-fi on/off on Mobian, and whose map apps are all barebones tech demos compared to OSMAnd on Android? I have a PinePhone too and occasionally hack on it, but I wouldn’t call it a "reasonable" smartphone yet when the software is still so half-baked and, unfortunately, it hasn’t succeeded in attracting very much of a dev community (as the existing devs sometimes complain).

Maybe I’m so disappointed because I remember the Nokia N900. Now that was a reasonable Linux smartphone, except for the blobs.

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> phone that won't run an authorized Signal app

This is a fault of the Signal developer, not of the Pinephone.

> takes 5–10 seconds just to open the screen to turn wi-fi on/off on Mobian

It's the beta release. It's gonna be faster with GPU acceleration AFAIK.

> Maybe I’m so disappointed because I remember the Nokia N900. Now that was a reasonable Linux smartphone, except for the blobs.

But how much time passed after the release until it became a reasonable smartphone? Give Pinephone some time.

> This is a fault of the Signal developer, not of the Pinephone.

Whoever’s fault it is, is immaterial. The PinePhone is still lacking as a phone for at least those who use Signal.

> It's the beta release. It's gonna be faster with GPU acceleration AFAIK.

Can you cite that? The problem is that Mobian's stack is based on a lot of GNOME libs that have not been optimized very much and run slow even on desktop, so GPU acceleration won’t help much. Before you mention the other available OSes on the PinePhone, UBports is obsolete, bitrotting tech.

> how much time passed after the release until it became a reasonable smartphone?

The N900 was a reasonable smartphone immediately upon its release, at least in terms of being responsive and having core apps and functionality that people expected at the time. Nokia had a larger team of developers working on Maemo than there are working on PinePhone OSes.

> Whoever’s fault it is, is immaterial. The PinePhone is still lacking as a phone for at least those who use Signal.

You can run it in Anbox.

> Can you cite that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26569666

> You can run it in Anbox.

Anbox is not considered a reasonable standard solution for running anything on the PinePhone due to its resource requirements. Also, that citation you give supports my claim above.

I understand that you are running a single-issue advocacy account here on HN, but over the last several weeks you have been really embarrassing your own cause with these attempts to sweep major flaws under the carpet. Yes, the PinePhone may offer the prospect of someday being a reasonable libre phone alternative (assuming it isn’t a stillborn project, as I fear), but you keep painting a rosier picture of it now than is warranted.

You are right that I advocate for the GNU/Linux phones. However I advocate for Librem 5 more, and it should be performant enough for most use cases, including Signal in Anbox.

Otherwise you are right and Pinephone is too slow for such things. But, again, this is a fault of Moxie and imo effectively shows that Signal is not free software (no freedom to run).

> It's the beta release. It's gonna be faster with GPU acceleration AFAIK.

No it won't. A (the?) big problem with performance is that we're running desktop applications on a slow-ish mobile device. (all of it: slow CPU, slow GPU, slow RAM, slow flash etc.) To get a good experience you need to throw more (i.e. faster) hardware at it and re-architect and strip down key applications. Or write new ones from the ground up designed for mobile devices and the resource limitations that come with them.

The 'beta' label is an attempt to set expectations re: the state of the distros right now. When they change the label to 'final' people are still going to be complaining about performance.

I mean its two different things: Nokia a mega corp (at the time) and Pine64 (a few hardware enthusiasts + small overworked dev community).

I get your frustrations and as a PinePhone owner myself I would not consider it anywhere near usable as a real Smartphone replacement.

However after installing Arch it is pretty snappy and has certainly sparked some new hope in me. I really recommend you to check it out.

For Signal there is (or will be) Axolotl [-1] which looks promising and when it comes to developer support both KDE and GNOME devs show some support for it. E.g. GNOME recently announced libadwaita [0]. Give it some time and check out the Arch release for PinePhone: [1].

[-1]: https://github.com/nanu-c/axolotl

[0]: https://aplazas.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/blog/blog/2021/03/31/...

[1]: https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch

> mobian

It’s hardly fair to blame pine for gtk issues when they’re shipping kde by default. I can install non-working software (even broken android) on any jailbreakable phone.

Phosh gets way too much attention on the pinephone, it's not a good DE and it's very slow. You can run normal Linux X11 DEs with no compositing and they are very fast. I use FVWM and most things open very quickly, Firefox takes a couple seconds.

All people like me want is something that lets us run tmux and the rest of the apps we run on our thinkpads and the Pinephone does that very well.

Out of curiousity, what distro are you running?

I guess it's SXMo.

That was my guess too. I've tried SXMO a couple of times but ended up going back to Phosh. Its probably me, but I could not figure out the UI of it.

I actually like SXMo very much and I wish I could choose it sometimes during the booting. I don't use it daily only because it relies on postmarketOS and not Debian.

I understand that.

I've tried pmOS a few times. I really like pmOS and they have a great community (I'm more active in the pmOS Matrix channel vs the Mobian channel), but unfortunately relying on muslc vs glibc can be a bit of a pain (mmsd has some sort of incompatibility due to this), and muslc precludes a lot of packages mobian has without manual patching.

PMOS (the same install the phone came with) you can just replace the session file and use a different WM.

Okay!

If I may ask, I tried using SXMO a couple of times, but I never got used to it. Do I just need to stick with it for a little bit and it gets better, or what are your thoughts?

How can you use a smartphone mini screen with tmux? Is it usable?

It works reasonably well, as long as you don’t “over-split” your screen.

It's not the DE that makes things fast or slow (although disabling composition may indeed help with making GTK3 apps run faster on the PinePhone, but that's mostly because GTK3 renders in software and it bottlenecks on PinePhone's RAM bandwidth).

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