I tried out a PinePhone recently. While I applaud the progress being made by the devs, PinePhone is still a ways out from being a daily driver.
For those looking for a Linux phone, is Purism the only (close to) usable option?
For those looking for a Linux phone, is Purism the only (close to) usable option?
Edit: People responding to me as if I said it's suitable as a daily driver for "most people" or "casual users" need to learn how to read. Not only did I not use either of those phrases, the context of the conversation was "those looking for a Linux phone", which neither of those demographics are.
Compared to the “average” phone of a typical person (which depends on country), the pinephone is slower and less capable than that with worse battery life. I do own one, but this is the unfortunate reality. I could probably use one as a daily driver, but at that point I could probably just as well be without a phone, as taking photos is 2000s category and desktop firefox is not the most usable on a touch interface, let alone on such a weak CPU.
So this benchmark tells me the single-core JS performance of the iphone is 20x that of my just 2 year old phone. And you know what? I didn't notice it was supposed to be "slow". I don't have a comparison to the Pinephone and I'm too lazy to look now but if I, a casual (normal?) phone user don't notice this weak cpu, what else might I not notice?
I can't even do things as basic as placing an app icon on the home screen, and expect that it will still be there after the next reboot.
So it is not a daily driver by any stretch of the immagination, regardless of what you mean by daily driver. Even if your idea of daily driver is "a feature phone would do", it's still not there yet (MMS not being fully working, most feature phones have that).
I love the PinePhone and I want to see it succeed, I don't regret spending the money on it, but it is most certainly not usable as a daily driver.
I can see some progress being made with every single update though, so in time it will eventually get there thanks to the community.
[1] https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-beta-edition-with-conve...
It isn't. It's only pre-installed because there's a money deal involved with pre-installing it. Manjaro also did weird things like announcing they have working MMS when they didn't, and even outside of phones are considered to be a weird distro given their relationship with Arch. Going by the IRC channel, a lot of people install a different distro.
>I can't even do things as basic as placing an app icon on the home screen, and expect that it will still be there after the next reboot.
Known plamo bug that they haven't fixed in forever. I stopped using it for that and other reasons and have no idea why people like it. phosh works fine.
Also, "things as basic as" implies that saving the positions of homescreen items is somehow more fundamental than everything else on the phone, and if they can't get this to work then obviously everything else must also be broken. It isn't, and it's not.
>So it is not a daily driver by any stretch of the immagination, regardless of what you mean by daily driver.
It makes and receives calls, sends and receives SMS, downloads voicemails, runs an up-to-date web brower, takes decent photographs of documents when a scanner isn't available, and allows me to ssh to my other machines.
Turns out different people have different criteria for their daily driver phones. Shocking.
>Even if your idea of daily driver is "a feature phone would do", it's still not there yet (MMS not being fully working, most feature phones have that).
a) MMS matters to a few select countries in the world. But since you assumed everyone else has the same view as you about what a daily driver is, presumably you also assumed that everyone else finds MMS important.
b) Dumbphones can't do three of the five things I listed above as my criteria for a daily driver.
c) In the US, it's next to impossible to find a dumbphone that will continue to work in the next few years because of carriers shutting down everything that isn't 4G and 5G.
Really, all this conversation thread has revealed is that people don't think there's a middle ground between a phone that's 100% usable by all 8 billion people in the world and a phone that's 100% useless.
Regarding the other points:
> Also, "things as basic as" implies that saving the positions of homescreen items is somehow more fundamental than everything else on the phone, and if they can't get this to work then obviously everything else must also be broken. It isn't, and it's not.
I strongly disagree with this, it's one of the first things every new user will do with a new phone, it's the very definition of basic considering that our discussion is in the context of usability. Dev priorities should be based on user needs not on some other obscure technical criterion.
> It makes and receives calls, sends and receives SMS, downloads voicemails, runs an up-to-date web brower, takes decent photographs of documents when a scanner isn't available, and allows me to ssh to my other machines.
So it's a feature phone, bar the SSH.
> MMS matters to a few select countries in the world. But since you assumed everyone else has the same view as you about what a daily driver is, presumably you also assumed that everyone else finds MMS important. Again, Dev priorities should be based on user needs not on some other obscure technical criterion.
I don't live in one of the countries where MMS messages are mainstream, so they don't matter to me, but I know those countries exist, and some of those are among the largest countries by population, so I consider it a priority. Again, Dev priorities should be based on user needs not on some other obscure technical criterion.
> b) Dumbphones can't do three of the five things I listed above as my criteria for a daily driver.
they can do everything you mentioned except SSH, and I'm pretty sure there was some Nokia Series 30 app that can do SSH, but of course it's debatable if Series 30 falls under smartphone or feature phone.
> Really, all this conversation thread has revealed is that people don't think there's a middle ground between a phone that's 100% usable by all 8 billion people in the world and a phone that's 100% useless.
At the moment PinePhone is usable by less than what, 2% of the population? So according to your own criteria it's 98% useless? :-P
>I strongly disagree with this, it's one of the first things every new user will do with a new phone, it's the very definition of basic considering that our discussion is in the context of usability.
>At the moment PinePhone is usable by less than what, 2% of the population?
Read the edit in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29310621
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>Dev priorities should be based on user needs not on some other obscure technical criterion.
>Again, Dev priorities should be based on user needs not on some other obscure technical criterion.
Sorry, but you don't understand how Linux works. People create things that they want to use themselves, not because they have to satisfy KPIs about number of users to their management.
The whole reason MMS support exists now is that one person decided he needed it badly enough to spend time learning a large amount of time reading the spec, learning glib, etc.
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>So it's a feature phone, bar the SSH.
Wrong. My feature phone can no longer work for calls or SMS because the carrier decided to block it, since it's shutting down 3G. It also doesn't have an up-to-date browser.
> People create things that they want to use themselves, not because they have to satisfy KPIs about number of users to their management.
Instead, for me it is more something like:
"I create things for the community, including my mum who, back in the 90's, could never learn how to program her VCR".
Well, I've never contributed to any Linux distro but I contributed to a few OSS projects and I usually have that kind of goal in my mind.
Regarding the feature phones problem, I believe there are a few "new" feature phones that support new network standards, I will dig the links up, I'm a bit of an Amish when it comes to phones so I have researched this topic multiple times in the past (but eventually decided to go for the PinePhone instead). The browser is not going to be great of course, but should be serviceable in most cases.
Edit:
these are some of the feature phones I have evaluated, they all support 4G, at the time I did not have browser or camera among the requirements so some of those don't have them:
https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/product/feature_phone/ky... This one has no camera
https://www.thelightphone.com/ this one has no browser or camera
https://mudita.com/products/phones/mudita-pure/ Unfortunately still says "pre order", so not viable right now
https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_au/feature-phones All models have camera, browser[1] and 4G, unfortunately they come with some unwelcome preinstalled software, such as Whatsapp and Google Maps. PS the link brings you to the Australian website, if you are in the US replace "_au" with "_us" in the URL, the selection of models is slightly different.
[1] all except the 225 have KaiOS Browser which from what I've read is serviceable for basic browsing, the 225 apparently comes with a lightweight browser based on Opera Mini which is unable to render correctly most websites so it would be only useful strictly as an "emergency" browser.
> Firefox: 8 seconds to open; ... and loads my start page in 21 seconds.
It's constantly improving, and the PinePhone Pro seems similarly promising, but I'd be downright shocked if there triple digits of people daily driving it and enjoying the experience (outside the satisfaction of living on the bleeding edge).
It unfortunately not fully open source, but other than that its a normal Linux distro (Qt, DBus, systemd, rpm, Python, etc.). I have been running it on my primary device for years so I would say it is useable. ;-)
If you just mean a phone that can run a more traditional Linux distribution, you could look into Postmarket OS. There's a list of supported devices here: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
Maybe with some patches on top to enable more functionality, but easily rebaseable, unlike some abandoned 3-6 years old kernel with milions of lines of changes that you have no way of rebasing on top of the latest Linux release, to be able to enjoy all the latest Linux kernel advancements.
More strict definition would be that you can just boot Arch Linux ARM on it or other ARM distro out of the box, and all HW will be accessible and usable.
Otherwise Linux phone is any old Android, because all of them run some hacked up version of Linux. :)
Lack of support for proprietary apps is something to blame those proprietary app developers for, generally. They haven't given the people freedoms to port them.
Matrix and XMPP are third party, free, and already usable on a PinePhone.