The PinePhone Pro brings upgraded hardware to the Linux phone
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
EDIT: If the PinePhone isn't a good choice is there another good more FOSSy phone I can turn to? I am sick of Google, and I have neither the inclination nor funds to join the apple ecosystem, anything else I could do?
Now, it is a fun toy to play with. PostmarketOS with SXMO is an interesting experiment and I love the idea of a pocketable linux computer with a modem. It could potentially even be a phone if people stop trying to treat it like a feature phone and accept that you are running on limited hardware and software needs to be written as such.
>Slow
But it's fast enough. Since you can use overlapping WMs you're not stuck staring at loading screens and can use other apps while you're waiting with no time spent switching. Android is heavy. It's way worse than people realize.
>Short battery life
You can fix this by adding an extra run level that uses RTCWake to sleep the phone when it's "locked" without missing notifications. I think a number of distros have added this.
Also you can swap out batteries unlike nearly every other phone. They even sell a charger. I have three that I cycle through.
>Buggy
IME it's better than Android now. EDIT: Well, let me clarify this. You will have to tolerate some bugs, the EG-25 modem firmware is particularly bad. I use VOIP for MMS and voice because I don't trust the modem to behave. Everything else (the stuff the community actually controls) is better than Android though in my opinion.
This should be part of the default configuration, because the battery life is way too short. Swapping batteries isn't a workable option for a daily driver, and besides the extra batteries have been out of stock for over a month.
Can it scroll the contacts list at 60 fps? Can it run youtube with hardware acceleration?
It is very very slow however. Firefox takes 40 (EDIT: ok more like 15-20) seconds to load, and I don't even bother to load heavy resource sites without uMatrix.
Also, battery life is not great. Screen on time is 3-4 hours, and standby time is approximately 12 hours.
I wonder if they can’t use a raspberry pi like base, since in the Pi3-4 loading Firefox is quicker by a margin.
So far for me it has yeah. I really don't know enough about how well it works outside of the US (but many of the devs seem to be in Europe, so I imagine it works well there?) For me the biggest thing that hurts is battery life, but normally I am in areas where I can just plug it in, so it isn't a big issue. If I am out and about for a day, I just carry around a battery pack (or a spare battery).
> I wonder if they can’t use a raspberry pi like base, since in the Pi3-4 loading Firefox is quicker by a margin.
You could probably get an EG-25 USB modem and play around with it, but AFAIK no one is doing that, so you'd be largely on your own.
I think a lot of the devs actually do this.
This would be a massive downgrade as far as freedom. Raspberry Pis are full of blobs. The original PinePhone uses what is basically the Pine A64 as its base. A very old and slow SBC of Pine64's (and it was right at the PinePhone's release). The PinePhone Pro uses what is basically the RockPro64 as a base, better than most if not all Raspberry Pis. The same (but slightly modified) RK3399 SoC used in their Pinebook Pro laptop.
You might try experimenting with different configurations. With a lightweight X11 WM on PMOS Firefox takes ~10 seconds to load cold for me (and it's closer to 4 if I've just killed it.)
However, the Pinephone Pro does not have as mature drivers/kernel/etc. as the OG Pinephone, so I think trying to compare battery life at this point is unfair, as we are comparing something folks have had lots of time to refine versus a brand new product.
Maybe even find something supported by both LineageOS and postmarketOS, like the OnePlus 6. That'll get you closer to something like a PinePhone in the same device if you so desire it.
Maybe have a look at the Fairphone, the last iteration seems neat, and it's compatible with several FOSS OSes (at least Android based ones, but I think other too).
Best is to use a second hand/refurbished phone: better for the planet, the price, and you can choose carefully a model compatible with the FOSS OS you would like to have.
PinePhone (Pro) is not (yet?) good as a daily driver, but it's a great platform if you want to develop for various OSes (booting on a new OS is as easy as switching SD card). With the new keyboard accessory, it's a great super small and portable computer, and the community is very active.
Mine was probably just a dud but it was still an expensive paperweight.
I have been using Sailfish OS from Jolla since 2014 as daily driver and only phone. It is usable as a daily driver but you can notice it doesn't have the billions of development time poured into it like Google and Apple do. It is not 100% open source, but it is real lInux with systemd, wayland, ssh as root, etcetera. I am using it now on a Sony Xperia XA2 that I bought second hand 2 years ago for 110 Euro, together with 50 Euro for Android App Support it works fine for my usecase. Before that I used the original Jolla 1 for 5 years. That device had support from Jolla from 2013 untill 2020, 7 years in total. Choosing a phone for Sailfish today, I probably would end up with a Sony Xperia 10 or Sony Xperia 10 II.
There are only a few [1][2]. Pine and Purism seem to be the two main ones, in the US at least.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_pho...
E: I noticed that currently purchasing SailfishOS from outside ofl Europe is "prohibited" according to the purchase page. That is a bummer for non-europeans.
And now in the Year of Our Lord 2022 it's being marketed as a "pro" phone?
Take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKULVvGSQD8
I'll consider compiling armbian to test it again. My personal experience with it is better than what I had with a raspberry pi 3.
On mine I run PMOS configured nearly the same way I have my other computers configured (same WM and everything.)
I would call it....sort of official? It isn't Debian per se, but many of the devs working on it also are working with Debian to get as much upstreamed as possible (or are affiliated with Debian proper). It also tries to use upstream Debian packages as much as possible.
I run that (and develop for it!), and I have ssh on it.
So I would say maybe in a year or so Debian testing could run on it.
It’s running already (well as close as possible for mobile). But they say «in a year» it’ll be usable as a daily driver too.
Mobian and Manjaro ARM are much more lenient about patching up their kernels in the name of device support (perhaps to a fault, but if the images work...).
Also most people don't like carrying a compass and road atlas like I do so the turn by turn navigation needs to work (KDE marble will stick you on a slippy map and route for you but I don't think it does real time navigation right now.)
As far as pictures....the Camera on the OG Pinephone is not great, I would not use it to take serious pictures (or I am bad at taking pictures, which may also be true!). The Pinephone Pro has a much better Camera, but so far, it does not work in software.
It's just not ready, and won't be for a while. I guess not many people want a full blown Linux pc in their pockets. A shame really
Full blown Linux applications need a keyboard. Even if they are reworked as touch friendly (I think GNOME is working on that, Canonical did) when the use cases swing toward typing a lot then we need a keyboard. There are foldable keyboards that fit into a pocket but the two of them start to become bulky. They probably belong to a bag and a bag could accommodate a tablet (10" screen) plus a keyboard of that size.
If one moves between multiple houses each one equipped with monitors and keyboard, it could be OK as a low power desktop replacement. I don't think I'm able to do my work on that though. Not enough RAM. It could be OK as an emergency device, but again, so is my tablet and my Bluetooth keyboard. BTW, my tablet runs Ubuntu 16.04 in a container (same kernel as Android.) Too bad Samsung discontinued Linux for Dex.
I actually think Canonical was on the right track to deliver something great. Maybe too great. Without getting into conspiracy mode, I'd say it was very unfortunate that it ended up nowhere which exactly where Mozilla did with their efforts.
I've long ago abandoned the hope of having one device do it all. It makes no sense, really. But Linux phone is possible. Having a nice UI with it is far from the main issue I think.
For me, it's not beating everything else by virtue of 99% of phones working as daily drivers out of the box. From all I've heard elsewhere, and even in comments in this thread from owners it clearly does not pass that bar.
If I think about it as a phone it's heavy like a stone (hopefully everybody agrees), too large (probably I'm almost alone on this one) and too expensive.
Furthermore I'm definitely not buying a phone that heavy.