Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjmellon | Hacker News Reader

I received a Pinephone in the latest shipment, about three weeks ago. I also got the convergence dock to be able to attach a monitor, keyboard and mouse. I am extremely motivated to get off Android on my phone, and yet my Pinephone has already been discarded (and I never even put a SIM card in it).

There are far too many out-of-the-box bugs and glitches to consider this a usable product. For example, the convergence dock will not display on a monitor. Firefox browser displays too wide for the phone screen, so unusable. A dozen other issues on first day.

Even a development board should work better than this, have documentation of the known problems, and have some support mechanism that works.

I don't think better/more expensive hardware is the problem. It's software, caused by lack of users, lack of investment, and too many "competing" distributions of Linux.

View on HN

In the article we are discussing, the gist of your concerns is addressed. The pinephone (and mobile Linux in general) is extremely immature and only really for hobbyists and people developing for it. You expected a daily driver, right now it is a toy for nerds.

Lack of users, investment and too many competing distros were all given in the early days of desktop Linux as reasons why it was simply not worthwhile. The thing is, this phase of development, where some devices exist that only nerds play with for a while, is necessary for there to ever be a mature Linux mobile UX. When you buy one of these devices you're not buying a Linux phone, you're choosing to participate in the process by which a Linux phone becomes a reality. And that process is picking up steam, Ubuntu tried it, many people have run Linux on their android devices with unlocked bootloaders, but pine (and librem and others) have actually created a market environment where things are actually advancing, and in my opinion advancing much faster than desktop Linux did.

> right now it is a toy for nerds

I have some standards for my toys though. If it’s sold as a phone, it should actually work as a phone (even a shitty one).

If they were selling it as a mini linux computer with integrated screen I wouldn’t mind so much.

That's how I'm seeing this - as a mini linux computer with the ability to make calls and send text messages at some point in the future.

Just a linux computer with a cellular modem sounds amazing to me, tbh.

Then buy any of the 3 billion Android handsets. Most average $100 and were out of beta in 08'.

Android handsets aren't really linux boxes. I can't ssh into them, I can't write little python scripts, etc. An actual, general purpose, real foss portable phone factor computer will be amazing as it matures.

There's nothing new here. I remember having those features in the Nokia N900 in 09. I think this product is grossly overpriced for a cheap generic Android phone loaded with a beta Linux distro. In Shenzhen they'll sell you a case of 50 for $400. Save your money or buy a Quest 2.

Except this one is going to run a close to mainline kernel pretty soon and those android phones will be stuck in the last decade, forever.

How soon is other software on it is usable? Kernel really doesn't matter too much if rest is unusable...

It took Google tens of thousands of paid top tier developer hours to make Android useable. I'm betting never. In a year or two there's going to be some nasty passive aggressive apology blaming the woes of the world for why it couldn't happen and these guys will go home with their big sack of money. Seriously you want a shit Android ARM phone loaded with a beta Linux distro? Let's order a lot from Shenzhen and everyone can pay the $50 it's worth.

"It took Google tens of thousands of paid top tier developer hours to make Android useable."

Is that a guess, or a fact?

Then Shenzhen manufactures should open source device drivers.

> I can't ssh into them

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.xnano.andr...

> I can't write little python scripts

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ru.iiec.pydroi...

And those don't even require an unlocked bootloader. If you do unlock, sky's the limit - it really is a general purpose portable computer then.

You can install termux and from there do all the normal SSH, python, linuxy stuff you like.

They have always been honest about what it is for. It is your fault for not knowing that when ordering. A little research reveals plenty of people are using it as their daily phone, but all agree that there are rough edges to fix.

Well, it does work as a phone; you can call telephone numbers with it.

But that's not what you mean when you say "phone" is it? The word "phone" is synonymous at this point with "mini computer."

What if it were sold as a phone with a big caveat, loudly announced, that said "this thing is for tinkerers and developers and is not ready for causal daily use"? That's the thing, it is marketed that way. You bought something you didn't want, you want what it is going to be, and we are all very excited about it and a bit impatient, but we cannot blame the product for ourselves being impatient.

It's not the Pine organization's fault that you have a different definition of "toy" and "phone" than they do - and it's definitely your fault that you didn't read the numerous prominent disclaimers spread all across their site that the PinePhone is not a finished product.

I hear you both. I'm new to Linux, and when the Pinephone said it was for "advanced Linux users" I figured "how hard can it be?". I bought one and 24 hours later decided to pass it on. Turns out they really do mean "advanced"!

> This is the Beta Edition of the PinePhone. The pre-installed Manjaro with Plasma Mobile OS, that ships with this edition of the PinePhone, is a beta software build. This effectively means that while core functionality of the PinePhone still an ongoing effort. Thus, the device cannot considered a consumer-ready product.

It literally says "Beta" for each phone that is for sale.

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

That’s the same as not expecting an ‘early access’ game to not actually be a game.

You go into beta when your shit works to work out the last bugs, not when you have a barely functional MVP.

> I have some standards for my toys though. If it’s sold as a phone, it should actually work as a phone (even a shitty one).

It is sold as Phone hardware with explicit remarks about software being a community effort and that you load it with whatever you like.

Does someone who sells you a PC (HW) promise you that the software you load on it later will be bug-free? Of course not. That’s not a hardware-matter.

Same here with Pine64 and the PinePhone. They’re selling you hardware. And that’s it.

> Does someone who sells you a PC (HW) promise you that the software you load on it later will be bug-free?

No, but if someone was selling PCs with super buggy software that regularly crashes your OS or prevents everyday functionality from working, people would be returning those PCs en masse, even if the hardware maker wasn't responsible for the software at all.[0] Even if you only "sell" the hardware, customers expect the full package to work.

That's not to say I agree with all the complaints here, though; this case is different because Pine64 has numerous disclaimers and warnings on the website, and they are very up front and honest about the viability of the PinePhone as a daily driver.

[0]: Whenever I hear non-techy friends complain about system instability, they pretty consistently blame the computer itself, not Windows or whatever software is likely actually causing their frustration.

> No, but if someone was selling PCs with super buggy software

What you’re clearing missing is that they are not selling you software.

They are selling you open, unlocked hardware to run software on, with no promises/liabilities about the software. Just like Intel, AMD, ARM, MSI, Asus, Kingston and a lot of other hardware suppliers. They even explicitly state this when you buy the phone.

They are explicitly not selling you a combined hardware/software package like Apple does with the iPhone or OEMs are doing with Android.

How can you then complain about this later?

Edit: You might even say that this combined HW/SW appliance-model applied by the rest of the smartphone market is the exact thing they are fighting against.

They are selling HW as HW, leaving users free to run the software they prefer.

I largely agree with the assessment. I am still glad I bought mine, because even though it is gathering dust, I am hoping the purchase contributed somewhat to a better mobile future.

I may have mentioned it before, but default OS is just painful to use ( thankfully, there are other options ). And here is the part of the problem. I am motivated to use it. Right now it still feels so janky, most people won't even get past initial boot process.

I think the message / take away is : developers, developers, developers. Something that quickly evolves by the shared power of a lot of minds. If you are buying it, toss it away and don’t contribute, this will hamper future succes.

Is there a way to sell apps?

Did you develop one? Remember the post you replied to was developers developers developers.

I don’t know. My old phone is still working, and holding out as long as I can. Then I will buy a Linux Phone.

I have one from a year or so ago, and it just collects dust right now. If I understood how utterly unusable it was and how unusable it would continue to be, I would have preferred to just donate to Pine's organization rather than have them send me clutter.

I'll take it off your hands and you can consider that a donation.

> When you buy one of these devices you're not buying a Linux phone, you're choosing to participate in the process by which a Linux phone becomes a reality.

That is very true, and I would add that some of this reality is already in front of us. How many Android or Apple devices can run full featured office suites, graphics and audio manipulation software, development systems etc. complete browsers, electronics simulation software, etc, and I mean the real ones, not cut down mobile versions, all for free? Probably none. The problem with the PinePhone is that it still lacks functionality in those two fields where 99.9% of normal non tech users would want it to excel, that is, calls and messaging. Non tech users want it for calls, SMS, MMS and Whatsapp, period, and they very much prefer a costly Android or Apple phone that addresses those needs although it would be way inferior in everything else, including privacy and security. I think the PinePhone developers are already addressing some of these requirements, so hopefully it's a matter of time, but for most people, being able to run the WhatsApp client at decent speed would be the killer feature. No matter if run sandboxed with Android libraries, under a VM or reverse engineered; WhatsApp compatibility is the #1 feature that could bring the most users on the PinePhone bandwagon.

Similar experience with a new PinePhone last week but different conclusion.

PinePhone is our only hope. It's still in Beta, months or years from being consumer ready. And that's just where it needs to be from a development standpoint. Don't rush.

That said, reading your comment I also wonder about having too many distros of Linux going after PinePhone. I had an SD card with I believe 14 distros. Doesn't that mean the core development is divided 14 times? It seems like combining together strengths would be beneficial.

>Doesn't that mean the core development is divided 14 times?

Honestly I don't think personally that it hurts things as much as one might expect. There is a lot of work from each distro that benefits all of the others. For example the Mobian dev was one of the first to really tackle the issue of battery life and their work benefited all the other teams.

That being said it might be better to have a few larger dev teams, but as long as their works contribute back to the community there is always benefit to the whole.

I'd second your assumption. Geary, MegaPixels (the camera app), Phosh (one of the few window managers), the modem firmware, and more are mostly shared between all the distros. Doubly so for upstreamed SoC firmware, battery efficiency improvements, and more that I'm sure I'm overlooking.

Frankly, it makes me question anyone who says desktop Linux is divided because we have options - at this point, it's more like there's no large corporate backer with a vested interest in making the desktop experience mainstream.

SteamOS?

Good catch, thank you. While Steam currently prints money AFAIK, they're simultaneously 30 years behind Apple and Microsoft (as far as being the driving force of a desktop) and the reason Steam (and gaming on Linux) has come so far, so fast recently.

Asking for clarity since I'm one month into my Linux journey: Are you saying that most of the distros are really just more surface level changes rather than deep "divisions"? I've been struggling to understand.

They ship different things out of the box but can largely use the same exact software. They may update at different rates and thus have different versions of things. They are not entirely different operating system like Mac OS vs Windows.

Mostly. There are a half dozen different desktops to choose from. Same for ways to package software. Most of what a distribution does is make some choices and configure it. Most distributions learn from each other in some way. Most distributions fix things upstream so that other distributions can take advantage for their useful changes.

Most distributions are derivations and arise because some skilled people wished some core functionality would be different.

And other distributions started from scratch, but obviously don't want to do really everything on their own, so they took other software.

The result is that a lot of established software is shared.

> Doesn't that mean the core development is divided 14 times?

I don’t think it’s quite that simple. A lot of these competing mobile distros are using and working on the same libraries and porting desktop applications to mobile in similar ways. The biggest differences are usually the desktop distro that they’ve made their base and their desktop environment of choice. It’s common to see enhancements to an application or even core functionality like battery utilization or suspend improvements land in one distro and then be quickly adopted by others. As someone who’s mostly a bystander, the outliers seem to be the people working on the distros that aren’t ports of desktop Linux, like Sailfish, Nemo, and Ubuntu Touch. Of the main desktop-Linux-ports cluster the biggest divide seems to exist between launcher/DE development. Developers are split between the Gnome-based Phosh interface and the Plasma mobile interface. But a similar dichotomy exists on desktop. I’ll also throw in an honorable mention of sxmo and its wayland port, which I consider the equivalent to the underdog tiling window managers on the desktop; which is to say its only option good enough to consider using.

good to know, appreciate the clarification! Glad to hear the work is cumulative.

> I’ll also throw in an honorable mention of sxmo and its wayland port, which I consider the equivalent to the underdog tiling window managers on the desktop; which is to say its only option good enough to consider using.

It’s a funny thing indeed.

sxmo seems to be the only option not focusing on competing with Apple and Google on a “good enough for mainstream” ux.

I mean Phosh is nice and all. Having frameworks for contacts and calendars just like in Gnome is nice. Pulseaudio working just as on the desktop is great too. But the total experience still leaves the impression of a very subpar iOS/Android copy.

sxmo though, that has decided to not compete with Apple and Google on what they do best, but rather do their own thing and re-envision what a Linux smartphone should/could be.

And I like it. I like it a lot. It’s by far my favourite Linux smart-phone experience so far.

I just need a better phone to run it on, and the Pinephone Pro could be that phone.

New phone or not, I’d also appreciate if sxmo managed to rebase on/ship for Mobian too. The package selection for pmOS and Alpine is pretty weak in comparison.

I looked into sxmo and I think it falls clearly into the "clever hack" category and not in the "actually usable" category. There is only so far you can get on a touchscreen device without actually programming any of the apps to support touch. The lack of hardware acceleration in anything X related is also basically going to ensure that it always has poor performance, everything needs to be moved to use GLES based rendering.

> I looked into sxmo and I think it falls clearly into the "clever hack" category and not in the "actually usable" category.

Agree to disagree? Also I think you’re being somewhat disingenuous or uncharitable here.

sxmo has clearly had a unique vision for mobile Linux for power users and executed on just that.

All core phone functionality is available through regular, composable shell-scripts. And all major events can be hooked by simple user-controlled scripts in $HOME/.config/sxmo without any other alterations to the OS at large, no root required. It successfully employs a tiling window-manager by default to allow simple(!) mobile-oriented multi-tasking.

That’s quite something of its own, with no equivalent anywhere else in mobile space, Linux-based or not.

This is clearly a power-user enabling mobile Linux shell, and it’s making no excuses about it.

Sure there might be technical improvements which are possible at several levels in the stack. I’m not debating that.

That does however in no way take away from the vision behind it and how well that has been executed so far.

I honestly do not see what is so remarkable about it. It just never seemed to me like a unique vision but instead an effort to adapt some existing X11 tools to a mobile workflow. Which is a fine thing to do if you like those tools, but that's different from having some grand new vision.

To elaborate: The use of a tiling window manager with explicit workspaces doesn't really make sense to me on a phone since every app runs fullscreen anyway. The use of shell scripts doesn't really make sense since editing text on a phone is awful. I don't understand what the definition of "power user" means here either. What does this do that other phones and shells can't do? I can edit shell scripts in Termux on Android too, but it's still awful and unpleasant. Unfortunately I just wasn't able to figure out any reason to use it.

And just to be clear, I would not describe any Linux phone as a grand new vision. They're sadly all playing catch up. Maybe that will improve in the next few years.

Edit: I forgot to mention, the use of volume buttons to control a device with a touchscreen is pretty ridiculous. I mean, come on, you have that big nice touchscreen and you're not going to use it? Or has this improved recently where you don't have to do that anymore? Please let me know, thanks. Maybe I'll try it again if this is any better.

> I mean, come on, you have that big nice touchscreen and you're not going to use it?

The best case with a desktop-like environment like sxmo is to just reuse the touchscreen digitizer as a plain old touchpad, with some tweak for other gestures (e.g. tap for clicking, double tap for dragging). AIUI, this is how mobile clients for VNC and RDP work already, so enabling this on the mobile desktop itself would be quite straightforward.

I don't know, that just seems to me to defeat the purpose of having a touchscreen. I've tried to use those mobile VNC clients and the experience is really bad. It's something I would use if I really had to access some important files on my desktop, but I wouldn't try to log in to my desktop with a mobile VNC client every day just to do work.

> The use of shell scripts doesn't really make sense since editing text on a phone is awful.

You don't have to write the scripts on the phone. You can ssh into it from your desktop. Or connect a keyboard and screen.

Yeah but that kind of defeats the purpose of having a phone, doesn't it? :)

I've seen some neat code editors on iOS/Android that do some fun things like:

- Have a special keyboard that contains only symbols for the target language

- Handles all editing at the AST level so you can't make typos

- Make heavy use of completions everywhere possible

There seems to be no reason we can't also have that here.

> Yeah but that kind of defeats the purpose of having a phone, doesn't it? :)

No, I would say it opens up infinite possibilities for useful customizations. Even if you aren't a programmer, someone likely writes a relevant script for your use case.

I mean if you have to transfer files from your computer or connect a keyboard just to do something on the phone. That's really inconvenient, I've tried to use my Pinephone that way and it's unpleasant.

The other platforms have figured this out, where the "someone likely writes a relevant script for your use case" becomes "someone likely writes a relevant app for your use case" and you just go to the app store and download it. No need to mess with scripts or plug in a keyboard, and you still get to have plenty of customization. I believe flatpak has started to add categories for mobile apps so that is bringing us closer to where things need to be.

Edit: I found the Purism blog post where they talk about this, the metadata should be usable by anyone doing packaging or building a mobile shell. https://puri.sm/posts/specify-form-factors-in-your-librem-5-...

I wouldn't want to say you must try again, but if you're interested in playing more with the toy for nerds, the Mobian wiki [0] is full of helpful tips.

You're right, lots of things don't fit the screen. Running

    scale-to-fit firefox on [1]

would fix your issues with Firefox not scaling correctly, for the most part. The other person that replied to you is right - it's currently a toy for nerds more than a drop-in replacement. With compromise and some effort (such as running your own Matrix server to replace Signal / Whatsapp / Discord), it can be done. But I'd hope to inspire you to try again, while tempering expectations for just how ready mobile Linux currently is :)

[0] https://wiki.mobian-project.org/

[1] https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php?id=tweaks&s[]=scale...

From reading OP I it sounds more like mobile-config-firefox is not installed and thus Firefox does not work properly.

tbh I think Pine has been extremely, excessively clear about this being the expected state of their phones. It's stated over and over on almost every page that the software is incomplete and not suitable for most people, it's primarily a developer target to try to achieve that over the span of years.

>There are far too many out-of-the-box bugs and glitches to consider this a usable product.

Their phones are clearly marked as "Beta" on their store[1]. Forgive me for being so blunt, but what did you expect?

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

Beta traditionally means it works in the common case, with some glitches and bugs around obscure uses that wider testing will identify.

The PP I received was crashy and couldn't even update the OS because a file or library was broken. :-(

I had to start it up ten times, run a terminal with a mobile keyboard in a 4pt font to fix the updater before it crashed at the one minute mark.

I'd call it pre-alpha.

What OS did you use? I use mine with Phosh (tested Mobian and Archlinux) and I don't have the same experience at all. The device is still severely underpowered though so the Pro version with a much better CPU is a welcome change.

Can confirm that the Arch build for my pinephone performed significantly better than the default KDE rom that shipped with my device. Vibration, lights, volume & volume rockers, responsiveness, calls, keyboard etc - all mostly working on the arch release.

But I 100% agree - the device is just too slow for me. Would love the increased RAM and extra CPU power.

Plasma Mobile does not have autoscaling of windows like Phosh does.

For me, the deal breaker is not being able to run any banking apps. That's not a fault of the PinePhone, but a sad reflection of the state of affairs.

Can you open banking websites? The only downside of not using an Android/iOS app (in my case at least) would be "mobile deposits" (depositing a check by taking a picture of it).

A lot of banks in the UK offer better IX through their apps when compared to websites, some don't offer a fully featured web client at all (Monzo and friends).

With this 'mobile app' duoply, it feels like we're back in the days of IE6 and ActiveX controls.

In addition to the UX they also lack the functionality and some use the mobile app as a 2FA mechanism for the website site, so to use that I'd have to carry around another android/iphone just to 2FA.

I noticed many of the same issues, but the most concerning one for me was that the modem (behind the upper rear of the phone) gets extremely hot. This has to be terrible for battery life and general longevity.

Many people are running an open-source re-implementation of the modem [0]. Neither the proprietary nor the open-source firmware for the modem are perfect, but the latter has the advantage of being clocked down to 100MHz instead of the default 400. This allows much better battery life, as well as giving off far less heat :)

[0] https://github.com/Biktorgj/pinephone_modem_sdk

Modem is a heatsink for pretty much all the other heat producing stuff in that phone. It gets hot when whatever else gets hot (PMIC when charging, or SoC when doing soc stuff).

> For example, the convergence dock will not display on a monitor.

I recently watched a presentation [0] that focused on the pinephone state-of-affairs, and it did not leave me with the impression the dock couldn't display on a monitor.

Are you sure you're not just experiencing some pathological incompatibility problem? Or am I going senile and need to re-watch the video?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuEL_GJ1Y2s

He's experiencing a known HW issue, most likely. There's a manual workaround for now: https://xnux.eu/log/#045

I'll implement a SW workaround eventually, but I'm still recuperating a bit from the work on the Pinephopne keyboard. Once it's released, donations will hopefully increase a bit again, and I'll be able to do more development other than a kernel maintenance.

Now there's also Pinephone Pro and Quartz64 based router sitting on my table which I'm mostly playing with these days, so I'm a bit torn on where to focus my energy next. :)

A basic but very important question: can it phone and send/receive text message reliably?

Smartphones are so bloated with functionalities, it seems nobody ever talks about that. I don't see the answer on the website.

I saw an article that touched on this for the pinephone (not the pro) and they said that it made and received calls fine but did not originally have dtmf support. If you need to check your voicemail and enter a passcode or use an automated system to pick up your prescription, you could not use it for that. It seems that has been ironed out depending on which OS you put on it.

Not reliably, the modem can crash at any time and until you restart it manually from the terminal you can't send/receive text/calls.

I send and receive texts all the time on my PP. What are you talking about?

Normally happens during suspend and when you wake the phone up again, the modem is gone until you do `sudo systemctl restart eg25-manager` (using the FLOSS firmware on the latest release). When it happened once, it will happen more often, until the phone is rebooted, than you get it working for longer time again.

"A basic but very important question: can it phone and send/receive text message reliably"

Half a year ago, when I looked into it, the answer was a clear: no. And there were not many things that did work reliable, without frequent freezes and crashes.

I doubt that fundamentally changed, so if you are looking for stability and reliability right now, than better look somewhere else. This project is about to get to such a state.

That's part of why it's so infuriating. I wish they'd not install anything that wasn't working reliably. If only three features currently work, fine. Build from there.

But a crashy mess that can't do 100 things while it overheats? I have no use for that.

Fred Brooks, 1987:

Some years ago Harlan Mills proposed that any software system should be grown by incremental development. That is, the system should first be made to run, even if it does nothing useful except call the proper set of dummy subprograms. Then, bit by bit, it should be fleshed out, with the subprograms in turn being developed--into actions or calls to empty stubs in the level below.

I have seen most dramatic results since I began urging this technique on the project builders in my Software Engineering Laboratory class. Nothing in the past decade has so radically changed my own practice, or its effectiveness. ... The morale effects are startling. Enthusiasm jumps when there is a running system, even a simple one. Efforts redouble when the first picture from a new graphics software system appears on the screen, even if it is only a rectangle. One always has, at every stage in the process, a working system.

> Half a year ago, when I looked into it, the answer was a clear: no. And there were not many things that did work reliable, without frequent freezes and crashes.

It's gotten much better since then. Now phone calls are reliable. If you install and configure the upcoming MMS support, messages work reliably.

Most of the freezes and crashes have also been ironed out.

Source: daily driving postmarketOS with Phosh

> I doubt that fundamentally changed, so if you are looking for stability and reliability right now, than better look somewhere else.

I agree that full stability is a work in progress. But so much progress has been made in the last year that it feels almost like a different OS.

I can't wait to receive my Pinephone Pro!

"I can't wait to receive my Pinephone Pro! "

Me neither ;)

Why do you want to move off Android? Depending on the reason, your needs would probably be better met with an alternative Android distribution on Android hardware.

Not OP, but I'd assume everyone with the goal of dropping iOS and Android is doing so for philosophical reasons. I still have my BlackBerry KeyOne. Battery life is still measured in days, but GApps bloat has pushed me to Open Street Maps. Literally every single aspect of the KeyOne is better, from battery life to performance to app availability and polish - but opting out of all tracking may be more meaningful to some.

Unfortunately I think AOSP distributions are a long-term dead-end. Unless maybe if there was a hard fork. Or else it's just a scramble to keep up with whatever changes google is making, dealing with unsupported hardware and hoping that whoever maintains the build for you device knows what they're doing, and re-implementing gapps to try to get some mostly broken compatibility.

I never liked Android, having owned a few. The hardware is quickly obsolete, interface has this clunky feeling, apps don’t work properly, often because devs don’t see the same rewards as their iOS brethren. And however you spin it, it’s all proprietary sponsored.

A linux phone might have the same problems, but at least its far more closer to the Open Source side of things.

I am a software developer. I would honestly not have the nerve to release a product with software in the state the Pinephone is in today. But of course, pine64.org takes no responsibility for the software on their phone, it's a "community project".

Until there's somebody who is willing to be embarrassed by the state of this software, and able to do something about it, there is no hope here. It does not get better.

What Pine has done is break the chicken/egg cycle of "there's no hardware -> there's no software"

I disagree with your assessment. There are plenty of competent programmers who are working on pushing forward this software, and even following from the outside I've watched massive improvements over time.

We needed (more) open hardware before the software could get properly started, and that's what Pine provided.

I don’t know how closely you’ve been following the progression of development, but every few months I get the itch to play around with my PinePhone and flash the latest version of one of the OSes. The experience is consistently greatly improved over the last time. I’m at the point now where the greatest usability issue I run into is performance, though I’m sure if I were to daily-drive I’d bump into more.

"I’m at the point now where the greatest usability issue I run into is performance"

As someone who has used the latest iOS and Android, I can't agree. The performance of the Pinephone is indeed really terrible, but the usability in general is also awful. There are just way too many little details that are missing, most Linux apps are still not really built for touch. It will be a while before all the important apps are fully ported over to Qt Quick and libhandy/libadwaita, but maybe by then they will have made a few more revisions with a better CPU. And of course I expect desktop users to start complaining when that happens because some apps will start to get more mobile-oriented...

People are improving the SW constantly. And it does steadily get better ever since the release (and before, because A64 is older than the pinephone, and was also implemented in mainline Linux by someone other than the SoC vendor).

>I would honestly not have the nerve to release a product with software in the state the Pinephone is in today.

To be fair, they're clearly marked as "Beta" on their store.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com