PinePhone multi-distro demo image
xnux.eu
xnux.eu
I suspect they're all still far from it but it'd be interesting to know which are worth keeping an eye on.
The phone ships with Manjaro Plasma, and it's definitely not ready as a daily driver. Maybe it's the hardware, we'll see when I can try out the other OSes, but it's very laggy and very buggy (which to be fair, is exactly what I expect from a phone labeled "beta"), would not trust it as a daily driver.
Maybe you could share if you tried it with the normal PinePhone or the PinePhone Pro as well.
> "Did the modem randomly die without you doing anything" Yep
> "Or under high load it gave out sometimes?" No, it would be just idling/sleeping and it would crash on me. It's not like it would automatically restart itself either. It was just dead until I rebooted the phone (which is slooowwww), restarting the modem manager and the modem it self, didn't fix it reliably for me either, only sometimes that would actually work, that whole process of restarting the modem and reentering your PIN could easily take multiple minutes. Under load (e.g. Firefox) it would just have the same (crashing) behavior.
I have had more missed phone calls because of it, than I'd like to count.
For me the Quectel firmware was very stable whereas the OSS firmware wasn't. "Stable" as in it would periodically crash, but would come back on its own within a minute. The OSS firmware would also crash but would usually not come back until a reboot.
This was with v0.5.5 IIRC. It seems to have gotten better since the 0.6.x versions of the OSS firmware.
Really the bigger reason to switch to the OSS firmware is that there's a privilege escalation vulnerability in the Quectel firmware that IIRC they still haven't fixed. In any case even if they fixed it in a new firmware release you wouldn't hear about it to know you should install it, whereas the OSS firmware is now being distributed through fwupd so it could be almost as mindless as updating your distro.
I personally have moved to a Librem 5 with PureOS, mainly since it is much faster, and I like the user accessible HW kill switches. I use it for "Phone" tasks, email, web browsing, 2FA, Telegram, Signal, the occasional camera picture, and Matrix.
Instead, please ask what it is you want the phone to do, and then people can give you a clear answer.
+ phone call audio quality is as good as some cheapo Android phone I can buy at Walmart, across all the distros in this multi-distro image
I mean, you have a report above that the Pinephone can't even achieve that. (And worse, the user is considering diving into ALSA configuration to fix this!)
If it's true that a phone device cannot be depended on to achieve bog standard audio quality for a phone call, then the player isn't ready to fight in the "daily driver" quest.
I'm willing to write a command line prog that plays the Legend of Zelda secret discovery melody and prints your comment when the the Pinephone achieves bog standard "phone-ness."
An open phone will inevitably have incomplete distributions for it: that's the entire goal of an open phone.
The problem is if there is not a single option that covers the basics well, or if that option is non-obvious (i.e. you don't know which is it).
I've personally used Meizu MX4 with Ubuntu for years as a daily driver, but I was happy to give up on Android apps. That was slightly more powerful hardware but also 5-8 years ago.
Next question? Although it looks like you're not interested in asking questions, just insulting people who actually know what they're talking about.
BTW not everyone who gets the PinePhone uses it for calls; the number of people who brought the keyboard case in order to use it as a PDA or laptop should be proof of that. So I say again that "daily driver" is not a well-defined term with a single globally-recognized meaning, and people should ask precisely what they want from the phone.
Previously I used SXMO and Mobian. SXMO is fun to script. I got tired of having to script everything after a while. Mobian works out of the box. But they don't have the newest software, so I switched to Arch.
I recently got an ATT pre-paid SIM (that I was planning on putting in an Android phone eventually). I thought I would give it a try in the PinePhone just to see what happens and found that it would not activate... (Note that this was just a normal pre-paid SIM direct from ATT and not from some 3rd-party MNVO that might require an app to activate. When I eventually installed the SIM in the Android phone it was able to activate as expected without installing any apps).
General info is documented at https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Carrier_Support
Either way, since they have a Queltec modem, just write AT+EGMR=1,7,“NEWIMEI” over tty to the modem and your IMEI is permanently changed.
This means your carrier will provision your device on their network.