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Comment by goldcountry | Hacker News Reader

That's cool and all, but who is actually out here using a linux phone?

I'm not, but I would love to some day. I fucking hate my android phone (and the iphone is just as terrible, in slightly different and often the same ways). Thank god for the people tinkering on pinephones and purism phones, paving the way for something less awful, with control in the hands of the user

We're not there yet, but we won't ever be unless people put effort into it. The linux desktop used to suck, too

To me, phone os is an easy way to get to apps, switch between apps, and handle notifications. It appears to be something else for you. What is an ideal phone for you, and how would Linux help achieve that experience?

Not the person you're replying to, but I have the same issue. The phone OS is indeed a way to get to apps for me. And the problem is that the "alternative" phone OSes don't have access to apps that I've woven into my day-to-day-life: banking apps, contactless payments, video streaming, music streaming, etc.

None of these are available on platforms other than iOS or Android, unfortunately. Some of them have web experiences, but they're terrible on mobile when compared to their app.

I, too, would love to run a mobile-optimized Linux desktop on my phone, but it's not about the desktop, it's about the apps and functionality it gives me access to. So I'm stuck with Android for the time being.

What would be really cool is if these alt mobile OSes could perfectly emulate Android to the point that Google's SafetyNet would believe that everything is a-ok. Not sure if that's even technically possible, but could help bridge the gap and allow alternative OSes to gain some market share among people who aren't willing to give up many of their usual mobile apps.

> What is an ideal phone for you, and how would Linux help achieve that experience?

The main bits for me are privacy and control. I refuse to use an iPhone because I viscerally hate Apple's stranglehold over the platform. I very reluctantly use Android, hating that Google is always watching. A fully-open mobile OS where I get to choose what runs on it, how it runs, and what access it gets would solve both of those problems.

I don't like the ridiculous number of settings you have to tweak to stop google from spying on you, 4 settings levels deep somewhere. I don't like that google made phone manufacturers take the "disable location" button out of the quick menu. I don't like the restrictive policies of the app store that is downright prudish, and how every app on the app store is just laden with crap and ads, and often also spies on you (i do use f-droid to circumvent most of that when possible). I don't like how you literally cannot control your phones update behaviour. I don't like how after a couple years, the phone will stop being updated and you'll have to buy a new one or just accept that your phone has security holes that will never be fixed. If you're using a modern phone os, you are fundamentally not in control of the device, and it will make sure at various points to remind you of this.

That's pretty much my use-case too. I want my laptop, but smaller :)

Primarily, I want software I can trust, because I trust that the developers' motives are aligned with my own: a useful tool that I'm in control of.

In my experience, most Free software fits that bill; whereas most proprietary software seems more interested in persuading me to buy something or sign up for something that I don't want. (Most, not all; I can think of counterexamples.)

Bluntly, Free software is usually much less full of skeevy bullshit.

> Bluntly, Free software is usually much less full of skeevy bullshit.

Yes and it's amazing how much smaller, faster and battery-efficient it can be without all the marketing and tracking crap.

Most apps on F-Droid are a few MB as opposed to tens of MBs for the play store ones. Most are well written and efficient. The quality of these has really increased the last couple of years.

Until I can plug my phone into a keyboard/mouse/monitor and have a powerful workstation I don't care that much about linux desktop apps being on my phone. My phone is backup/on-the-road browser, messaging applicance, and a phone 95% of the time.

Samsung has DeX. They also did Linux on DeX at one point but stopped.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_DeX

https://www.slashgear.com/samsung-linux-on-dex-is-dead-here-...

DeX is pretty useful yes. A bit compromised though by Samsung's latest phones skimping out on the memory side, the S22 has the same amount that the S10 came with 3 years ago. DeX really needs lots of RAM as you'll typically have multiple apps open unlike on a phone screen. Once you run out browser tabs will start refreshing as soon as they so much as lose focus...

Really 12GB or even 16 would be much better for DeX. But you can only get 12 now on the ultra and not everyone likes massive phones.. I don't anyway.

Even if 8GB may be enough now it won't be as apps get bigger. It was nice in the beginning on my S8 but the last years I had it I hardly used DeX anymore as the experience became too slow and the refreshing too annoying. For example, just moving away from a form in a browser tab to copy something from my password manager would result in the browser tab refreshing upon return and the form inputs lost..

I don't particularly care about that either, I just want something I have actual real control over, that's updateable indefinitely, and doesn't shove crap in my face or spy on me

https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 - see video about convergence

I have a Pinephone. I tried, in earnest, to use it as a daily driver; but the software stack was hideously unperformant and the camera was just too awful.

I have young kids; I need to take pictures quickly on occasion. I couldn't rely on the phone to do that, not by a long shot, and so it remains a pointless curiousity that I purchased.

With my recent kernel patches megapixels starts in 2s, which is less than my android phone. It wasn't too long ago the camera app ran at 2 fps and it's now at 60.

I feel like a lot of people are criticizing the PinePhone from the perspective of a product, instead of the labour of love that it really is. Things are constantly improving, but it's not many of us that are spending our free time to do so.

To be fair, the Pinephone store very clearly states that this is a beta device intended for experience linux developers/early adopters only. It’s not meant to be a daily driver yet.

It's not Beta. At the time I purchased it, it wasn't even Alpha. Beta, as a game developer, implies to me that there's a few outstanding show-stoppers but on the whole the product is safe to show to eager end-consumers who are willing to tolerate some rough edges. The PinePhone isn't even that, yet; I couldn't conscientiously hand it to a non-techy and ask them for feedback because I'm not even sure it would reliably respond to their touch input, let alone do anything else.

Seems like you're just arguing semantics. The pinephone is very clearly advertised as aimed at developers

The question was if anyone was using a Linux phone.

Did I use it to tinker with mobile Linux? Sure.

Did I find success using it as a phone? No. It's nowhere near ready to be used as a phone outside of tinkering.

Well, I don't disagree with that, my point was just that you're arguing semantics regarding the word beta, because their marketing is very clear about what it is (and I'd also argue that beta for hardware is a different standard than for games, but I guess now I'm arguing semantics)

Do you think even a developer will want to use something that falls apart in their hands like wet sawdust as a daily driver? As a developer, hell no. I'll give Linux phones a couple more years before I try that.

well, the point is to develop on it so that future becomes possible.

Yes, but if it's to address the needs of a real user and not a spherical user in a vacuum, the phone has to be able to handle some rudimentary functionality in the meantime so developers can dogfood what they made. Few developers will carry two phones all the time.

well, the hardware has to exist to develop it, it's a chicken and egg situation. We're clearly in the very early baby step phase here

> Beta, as a game developer, implies to me that there's a few outstanding show-stoppers but on the whole the product is safe to show to eager end-consumers who are willing to tolerate some rough edges.

I don't know what games you have worked on but as a user that description seems to match what is called "final patch" by the games industry.

The Pinephone isn’t a video game.

Considering that video games are usually released unfinished; if you're saying it doesn't even meet the dismal quality standards of video game development, wrt Beta quality, then I agree with you.

I can't rely on any phone's camera for speed. Sucks to hear this one is even worse than normal.

The camera is so bad that it's even a shame that they bothered adding it. The additional cost for the hardware clearly wasn't worth it.

If Pine64 didn't include hardware that wasn't fully software supported at any arbitrary point in time then the PinePhone as a whole wouldn't exist in the first place.

The thing with the cameras is there's hardly anyone putting effort into them - on average around ~1 person is working on the entire camera stack in their free time (there's a number of people, but none spend their whole time on the cameras). So it's honestly pretty amazing how far we've already come.

Seconded. It's been several years of development time and I still think I'd get better pictures with one of those cameras that saved pictures on floppy disks.

I've bought two Pinephones and I hope things go well but man, I install Mobian and wonder what exactly their long term plan is... it runs like an absolute dog, worse than a $30 Android prepaid phone. The only way to get reasonable performance has been to use sxmo, which is ok for me but not the experience normal people want.

If you need a good camera, consider Librem 5 instead.

Note that while it's already possible to get really good looking photos out of L5 camera, there's still quite a lot of software work left to do for it to work in an effortless point-and-shoot fashion. It will come, just be aware it's not there yet.

Iphone’s are ridiculously good from a lock screen to shoot perspective, especially with live images.

I am. I have used a Pinephone with Mobian daily for a while, I am currently using a Librem 5 with PureOS.

I only turned on my Android phone once since December, and that was to factory reset it since I wasn't using it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24959506

And I'm using a Pinephone as a daily driver, too.

(Note that kop316, who has the second comment there complaining about lack of MMS support, went on to implement MMS support themselves by writing mmsd-tng. Many distros added it recently and it supposedly should work with Phosh's Chatty and on SXMO.)

Yep, I wrote most of the support in for Chatty myself as well. Chatty works pretty well with MMS, and I have been using a Pinephone/Librem 5 full time for almost 2 months now.

A bunch of people are. If you compare the efforts of communities of volunteers against the investments in google/apple phones you can already call FOSS phones a big success.

It's not chic though so can you call it a success just because it's possible and works but you have to put a little effort in?

The idiotic silent downvotes are unnecessary.

This board has a real hate-boner for the PinePhone for some reason. Any phone that isn't 100% as capable as a flagship iOS or Android gets defined as "not ready to be a daily driver", because people think their definition of "daily driver" is some universal constant that everyone abides by. The rest of us who happily use it as a daily driver apparently don't exist in their worldview.

Already in this subthread there's "We're not there yet", "I couldn't conscientiously hand it to a non-techy", "It's nowhere near ready to be used as a phone outside of tinkering", "something that falls apart in their hands like wet sawdust", ...

> This board has a real hate-boner for the PinePhone for some reason

What a strange thing to say. It's hugely popular on HN.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

That doesn't change what I said.

I wonder if it's a sign of the HN crowd moving from startups to FAANGs.

So much for the "hacker" news...

I do. I run Fluxbox on PostMarketOS. I use dino with jmp.chat for mms. I use emacs diary+git for calendar. I have some custom power management service I wrote shortly after getting the phone so it gets long battery life. My bank and brokerage both have decent web sites.

I'll never go back to a non-Linux phone, I'd rather not have a phone at all than tolerate the older mobile OSes.

If my Jolla phone hadn't kicked the bucket i'd definitely still use it

I have Xperia 10 II with officially supported Sailfish OS as my primary device, with family member using Xperia X in similar capacity. :)

I am, typing from my Librem 5 right now during my usual morning browsing.

Unlikely to, soon. If I could flash Android hardware I would... one day.

Phones are battery operated. Performance per watt is mission critical.

Hey there!

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