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Comment by buildbot | Hacker News Reader

I can’t wait for pinephone to succeed- hopefully this more powerful hardware + faster ram will help to address latency issues in the UI. Right now it feels like your brain is literally slowing down when interacting with a normal pinephone compared to an iPhone. Not a fair comparison at all I know.

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Isn’t that silly? I could run linux (with GUI) just fine on my Pentium 3. This phone is like 8 times faster just based on clock speed, not to mention memory. How can it not drive a UI without lag?

The problem is that it's not 1-1 with X86, especially in regards to graphics capability (The GPU is really the weak link on the current PinePhone). The GPU for example uses Tile-based rendering, which requires software optimizations to work best... Plus the GPU is just plain slow. It's a first generation ARM Mali graphics core intended for OpenGL ES 2.0 afterall.

I’m sorry. I’m not quite sure what everything you said meant, but my P3 didn’t have any GPU at all, so it seems like it shouldn’t matter.

I find it hard to believe a ARM CPU would need significantly more cycles to perform the same operations.

It’s certainly interesting that input latency seems to have taken a back seat in almost all modern systems. I have a touchscreen windows NT computer with PS2 ports, both the keyboard and touchscreen have noticeably less latency than any other device I have. However, it’s really slow when actually opening a program!

PS2 has always had much lower latency. Also IIRC the old windows prioritized input handling over pretty much everything else, so it makes sense that even when it is taking a minute to open a website the mouse handling still feels smooth.

Because your pentium 3 GUI linux had a GUI designed around pentium 3 era hardware. All the linux phone GUIs seem to be designed around the latest in special GUI effects and animations and transparency. For some reason all the people who know how to design UIs for linux are incapable of understanding hardware requirements.

Check out sxmo.org if you're going for a minimalist UI. But the big feature that's missing on these old-style UI's (while it is in, e.g. Phosh) is smooth animations w/ direct 1-to-1 feedback, which is critical for usability w/ modern capacitive touchscreens and quite hard to achieve without GPU acceleration.

I've used a N900 and I don't see what massive difference there is between its resistive touchscreen and a capacitive touchscreen when it comes to user experience. The N900 achieved good feedback using the vibration motor and extremely basic animations. I don't think you realistically need more than what the Hildon UI gave you when it comes to a good user experience. The Hildon UI targeted much older hardware (albeit with proprietary graphics drivers). It should be possible to replicate the performance of the Hildon UI with the lima drivers if an explicit focus was placed on ensuring that above-all the UI was responsive rather than being pretty.

Lightweight X11 Desktops like Fluxbox or FVWM work pretty well on the Pinephone, I'm posting from Fluxbox right now infact.

Also the main bottleneck is really the slow RAM and not the CPU.

Yes. It seems a more powerful cpu was the most requested improvement to the original Pinephone. I'm glad they listened.

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