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?
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.
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.
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.
Mine was probably just a dud but it was still an expensive paperweight.
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...