Two Years of Life with PinePhone
linmob.net
linmob.net
Even so, that does not excuse the rest of the story and hopefully they can improve. A friend of mine also had some frustration with communicating with their customer service (which appeared outsourced or incompetent).
[0]: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Pro#Troubleshooting
They are mainly linux smartphone hackers. If I would buy a device, I would consider it a donation if something goes wrong and not expect something to be able to work with. But that part should probably be made clearer. I also cannot say they are fully to blame, I found their website clear enough that there is no real quality control or support. But if I would have believed certain internet enthusiasts, I would be sad because of broken promises regarding stability. At least basic working functionality by now would have been nice.
Still, things are maybe getting there.
"It's incredible... how much the PinePhone experience improved in the meantime"
If they take your money for a product, then they are professionals for handling consumer cases, they are obliged to be.
They might not want to be, in which case they should hire people who do want to be.
It is not about what you do, it is how you do it, and in particular what expectations you set.
If you sell it like a regular product, without saying clearly up front that it is not supported, then people will legitimately not like you.
IF you are just selling a kit without support, SAY SO. Then the people you want will come buy it, and if you did well on the parts that you claim to do well, you'd have happy customers (modulo the few Kens & Karens who expect everything for nothing).
> a lack of notifications, something I as a "my phone is in silent mode, no it does not even vibrate, I mean it when I say silent"
> when I dropped my PinePhones I was lucky enough to not break them, I am not affected by a failing WiFi/BT chip (an issue not too uncommon by my anecdata)
> I remember attempting to bring the factory image up-to-date around the date devices shipped and ending up with it in a state where at least the GUI wouldn't come up after all
> writing an update in gedit, running Firefox with ~20 tabs for hours would have been plainly impossible without multiple reboots and likely some unfortunate data loss in the meantime
If this blog post is trying to convince me never to get a PinePhone, it's doing an excellent job.
I am just getting sceptical, if that ever will happen. I know that I am also not helping for it to happen, but sorry, I had my share of weird linux driver issues.
The more I interact with both Android and iOS - the less I want to live in that world. I'm tired of products changing underneath me because
"our metrics indicate that [insert ui change here] creates a 1.7% increase in user conversion from unpaid to paid seats"
or
"our metrics indicate that [feature] is heavily used by our most active paying customers, but most new subscribers don't use it at all - we need to push [feature] in their face so they become very active paying customers like the current users of [feature]!"
or
"Do you want to hear about all our products? I know you paid for no ads, but we're not showing you an ad - just a promotion that lets you know that there's a new product that we've just released. Also - Did I mention that our partners have also released a new product that we'll be promoting to you in just a moment! Isn't that great! Also - these aren't ads."
And it's EVERYWHERE in those ecosystems, even in the companies that aren't blatantly disregarding your privacy for their own profit by just directly selling your data wholesale to the highest bidder.
So at least for me, I really REALLY want something open source and usable in the phone sized device space.
---
All that said - I have a pinephone, and it isn't there yet for me. But it's tantalizingly close.
Multiple days of idle with Phosh on pmOS, for one anecdote.
Wake-up on notifications is still a WIP AIUI, though.
I recently got back to mine with a fresh install and a lot has improved since last year.
> My hardware has held up well, [...], I am not affected by a failing WiFi/BT chip (an issue not too uncommon by my anecdata). [...]
> I know, some people will wonder if they should buy a PinePhone after reading this, and I can't really answer this question for you. Read up on PINE64's return policy, maybe; check whether your current phone network is compatible and decide whether you could live with the available applications. Watch some videos and decide if you can live with the time Firefox takes to launch and a lack of notifications. Make sure to have the willingness and time to tinker, to get the deeper "Linux knowledge" necessary if you don't have it, to make whatever distribution you start with your own [...]"
...so, to sum up, if you want a nerdy toy to tinker with, get a PinePhone. If you want something that works "out of the box", go look somewhere else.
That said, it does not have to be a lot of work for basic functionality these days in my experience - e.g. postmarketOS 22.06 is a solid base.
With some differences (better in some way, worse in others), it feels at a similar stage to desktop Linux on commodity hardware ca 2000~2005.
Both GNOME and KDE seem surprisingly serious with their mobile efforts but unless you're happy with a mostly console experience it's probably at least another year or two until basic apps like e-mail are in place for non-enthusiast non-tinker users.
As for distros, I am yet try try Mobian but other than that postmarket is the most reliable experience right now so far (Danct Arch may be catching up though :))
It'll be awful for years. But if many people with my skills & elbow grease levels marinates with it for a few years, it could become special.
It takes guts to be amazing, after all!
And my computer is infinitely hackable and idiotproof at the same time. That's helped me learn a lot of Linux stuff by doing fearlessly.
And this isn't to mention how nice it is that all 3 of my machines' full config is in a monorepo, with shared config abstracted into Nix modules.
Maybe I should have highlighted the personal success stories I have had more (contributing to mobile-config-firefox, evaluating tons of apps, creating issues and seeing them getting fixed) - but I really don't like bragging.
I don’t really know how to make it clearer in the limited time I can justify for low-content-value posts like this – and I did not intend for this to land on the hn front page. My best idea is that I could add a caveat box is reading "Hey, i don't like to brag, it's been fun, so read it it more positively than it's written, but don't ignore the negatives fully.", but that would be super weird.
I have a day job that I have to attend now, so I can really only change anything once the attention has moved on to something different.
I swear, HN readers bitch about the content silos on Web 2.0, but throw anyone still writing on their own blog onto a spit and crank up the heat.
Who really cares if the intent is never to buy a PinePhone, it is his freaking blog.
Cant do that religions exists where people believe in God without any evidence, and people exist who believe in Govt & democracy, so that says it all really.
I have one as a backup in case I get robbed or something. It's nice for me to know the state of things.
Complaining that a software stack developed by volunteers is not good enough for you is quite entitled.
Five to seven hours of idle battery life is basically competing with the Steam Deck on who empties the battery quicker. This is before I have mentioned the ghost town of apps that you can't show to anyone if one asks: 'Does it have Instagram?'
Another reason why this device was dead before it has even arrived.
You did not read the full paragraph nor the paragraph after the one you quoted, right? (If you took the time and read them, I really should stop.)
Also, yes, there's no Instagram client I know of (and thus none is listed on https://linuxphoneapps.org), but Facebook properties and a privacy-adjacent, nerdy developer crowd somehow don't go well together.
Dino generates notifications when I get messages, mutt rings the terminal bell when I get email (if I cared I could pretty easily have it generate a toast notification too.) If you treat the thing like a desktop rather than a phone then most of the software will "just work" occasionally needing a small amount of glue to deal with things like the suspend/wake cycle to save battery life while still allowing for notifications etc.
The Pinephone is very much the "just install gentoo" of phones. Most people who actually use it are going to have radically different configurations and experiences.
Here is my wishlist for hardware changes to the Pinephone:
1. Fix the emmc so that it runs fast. There is a known issue with the emmc that it runs at half its max speed. It can be trivially fixed in hardware (and Pine64 even recommends a solder based hardware mod) but Pine64 keeps selling phones with slow EMMC. This would solve some (though not all) of the perceived slowness of the Pinephone.
2. Usable hardware kill switches. You will notice that the article doesn't even mention the hardware switches for the camera/microphone/WiFi/BT/cellular. This is because the switches are A) under the back cover and B) too small to flip with a finger (requiring a toothpick or similar). Purism got this right by making the switches usable.
3. Add a "diffusor" to the LED notification light so that it is more visible from all angles and doesn't make an obvious spot on the ceiling in a dark room.
The software bugs are numerous and I would not yet recommend a Pinphone to anybody who doesn't enjoy using the command-line on a phone.
Also, Pine64 for years has listed replacement battery in their store but they have listed it as Out of Stock. As batteries are the part of a phone that must be replaced every couple of years and because it can be dangerous to use batteries of ill repute, Pine64 should actually sell replacement batteries.
Regarding replacement batteries: There are some brands that make okay/fine replacement batteries, I am quite happy with the one I've written about in another comment on here. But yes: They should be available in a perfect world, but given current global supply chain problems, it's understandable that they are not at all times.
E.g., the battery wouldn't charge in the phone. I bought an external charger, and this seems fine, but ideally I'd like a backup battery so that I can charge one while I use the other. But pine64 batteries have been out of stock for ages. Their wiki says "The supplied battery is meant to be compatible with Samsung part number EB-BJ700BBC / BBE / CBE from the 2015 J7 phone": I bought the CBE one, but it's such a tight fit that I'm terrified of using it in case it explodes or something. I have no idea where to get a proper pine battery from. And the forums are not exactly flooding with activity when I asked my question (https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=16851)
Beyond that, a lot of the stuff that is supposed to work on Pinephone, turns out doesn't work in the Pinephone Pro. In particular, the multiboot sd-card demo (https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=11347&pid=77027#...), which I was really keen to try, because I found the 'stock' distribution that came with the phone pretty ugly and useless (to my needs, anyway). I had the Jolla phone in the past, and I was very happy with it, so I may try to install Sailfish when I get the time to figure out 'if' it's possible, and if so how ...
But for now the pinephone pro is just sitting there, waiting for a compatible battery to show up, and me to find the energy to experiment with a compatible OS, before I'm even going to use the phone for anything even remotely productive. I'm gutted.
I received the Pinephone Keyboard a little more than a week ago. Ordered it because I thought it would revive my motivation to use the Pinephone, because it would turn it into a cool mini linux laptop.
However, since receiving it, I wasn't able to get it working. According to the community the pins don't always make a connection to the phone and you have to shim it, while risking to break something. The keyboard charges the phone and all the required drivers are installed, but typing just wont work.
Overall I still really like the idea of the Pinephone. But since receiving it in 2020 and recently receiving the keyboard I had to spend 90% of the time using it for debugging, fixing, reinstalling OS after breaking upgrades etc. and am now at a point where I just don't care about this device anymore. Because during the 10% when I can actually use it, it is just way to slow.
I of course knew what I was getting into and know that it's still in a dev phase.
My favourite OS to use is DanctNIX with SXMO, btw.
Although to be honest, after using mine for a month I gave up for various reasons such as upgrades breaking things.
Initially, I got no response from the keyboard so I started reading up about it. The first think I found is that when you've got the phone attached to the keyboard, you mustn't use the phone socket for charging as it can fry the electronics (something about the charger chip in the keyboard, I believe) - only use the keyboard socket for charging when connected.
Then, after worrying about whether I'd fried a brand new device, I discovered that after a software update, the keyboard suddenly started working. However, the top row of keys weren't working well and required a stern press for them to activate, so I hit the forums again looking for a solution. Some people were making shims for the top row of keys, but then I found a post going into detail as to why the keys had trouble activating. Apparently, the rubber doesn't have enough room to squish down, so an easy solution (if you have a dremel) is to remove the top row keycaps and remove a mm of material from the top edge of each keys (the side nearest the hinge). Took me about ten minutes and now they work perfectly.
Still haven't found a good use case for it though as the screen is short and wide so not great for terminal hacking.
https://twitter.com/marekgibney/status/1276881389091278848
I have to say that I never found a use case for it.
I remember that I hated the OS it came with. I think it was some flavor of Ubuntu that did not let you install software in any normal way. If I remember correctly, I did not even manage to get vim running.
After some reading up on mobile Linux distros, I switched to Mobian, which I generally liked.
But then I noticed that the phone wakes up and turns on the screen at random intervals. And quite often. Never found a solution to fix this. The web is full of reports about it:
https://www.google.com/search?q=pinephone+wakes+up
I watched the development around it for a while and contributed some details about the issue. Checked back every few weeks and did not see any progress. Then forgot about the phone at some point.
One problematic issue I can see the Pinephone have in regards to this is that there's no unified push service that works for all apps. Google has forced everyone on Android to use their push service and it's terribly restrictive for application development but over the years this has also solved a lot of battery life issues. Apps holding open connections of their own just to see if there are any notifications is fine on desktops but it's a challenge open platforms will need to solve somehow.
I don't think that's the problem. It would not be that hard to have system-wide settings to control which applications can apply for background updates.
My (limited) understanding is that the difficulty resides in hardware support for sleep/low-power and the many different implementations from every hardware vendor. Note that it's also a problem on desktops/laptops (with S3 and related techs) even on Windows using official firmware/drivers.
If you have more detailed reads, please share :)
This would let you run your own push server (or use someone else's), configure it system wide on your device, and all apps would be able to use it automatically with their services.
I won't reveal exactly where this is happening because the software is still in a proof-of-concept stage, but KDE folks are working on a 'unified push service' right now.
Honestly the browser, google maps (which works in the browser), whatsapp, SMS, phone calls, alarm, stop watch, camera... that's really about all I use on a phone. If I can find a linux device to switch that does that, I'll switch in a heartbeat. Phones are the least pleasant part of my "digital life" because of their toy operating systems.
From what I've read online the SoC is quite slow compared to most modern smart phones so your mileage may vary. Sadly, the mobile phone market is as closed down as ever, making it very challenging to get any kind of open source system to get calls or texts. There's a reason they shoved an external chip in there!
If you want an open, somewhat limited but usable smartphone experience, check out Sailfish. They've been in the mobile phone market for years and their original base in Android makes the OS compatible with quite a few devices with decent SoCs.
Personally, I'm waiting for the day you can hack PostmarketOS onto a phone and just use it as a phone, but that's not going to happen any time soon on closed hardware.
For a select few devices, my personal favorite being the Xiaomi Poco F1 [0], [1] (despite afaik needing Windows to unlock its bootloader), this is already true. Sure, that's not "every phone", but at least one relatively available and nice (for the price) phone.
[0] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Xiaomi_Poco_F1_(xiaomi-be...
https://element.io/blog/ems-launches-fully-managed-matrix-br...
And there are a bunch of Matrix clients for Mobile Linux (I use Nheko, but Fluffychat is quite good as well)
What’s the showstopper into bringing an open phone to a general audience? (Aka open box, turn on, type in credentials and done.)
In the meantime I hope my ancient iPhone keeps working.
The best daily driveable "open"(as in OS and Kernel) and privacy focused experience would be with a Google Pixel and CalyxOS / GrapheneOS.
be aware, you might face issues with SafetyNet, other than that its perfect.
Billions (even more likely, tens of billions) of dollars required to make a mobile phone happen.
Developing everything, that is, all the hardware and firmware, from scratch since iron manufacturers aren't willing to open theirs.
The biggest showstopper is Open phones can't seem to do what all of their closed competition can do. If an Open phone can't reliably make calls, send texts, get on WiFi, or run apps people want there's no demand for them.
Even the cheapest Android phone has millions of person-hours sunk into its hardware and software implementations. There's no need to drop down to a command line to get some component to work right. If it truly sucks you can return it and at worst you're out under $100.
Until an Open phone can get to at least the capability of a cheap Android phone you can buy at a drug store no one is going to want them, especially for the price premium of their low volume production.
I'm running the default Manjaro + Phosh it came with, and upgrading through pacman. The phone functionality works fine (calls, SMS, phone book, etc.). One annoyance is that menus in Firefox don't display correctly, which makes addons like uBlock less useful :(
I've also been using the hardware keyboard, which extends the battery life comfortably, and makes it much easier to do long-form writing (due to the physical keyboard itself, and not having an on-screen keyboard wasting space). Unfortunately the keyboard battery no longer seems to be working; I'm not sure if it's due to a kernel update, or a hardware problem (I may have fried the charging circuitry by plugging it in wrong!)
I see no real future for Linux mobile unless the EU makes some law that forces Apple/Samsung to make flashing easier.
https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec5.mp4
https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec6.mp4
Here it's driving an even higher resolution screen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHOgVmxH_dA
And here it's driving Firefox on a 1440p screen (purely rendered via CPU with GPU disabled):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdKNugT-mTQ
What's subpar is software optimization of some apps, or some combinations of compositors and apps.
I really want to like the pine phone, but whether the fault is hardware or software the result is that it’s just not there for performance in my experience.
I’m hopeful that between the pine phone pro and a bit more time to optimize software it could be one day, but it seems a while off.
Incidentally I have basically the same complaint about the pinebook pro. It’s not unusable, but a very small amount of extra power would take it from being a secondary laptop I only pick up for fun to a real viable daily driver when paired with a powerful desktop.
Yes, opening a badly optimized website, like youtube or twitter is slow. Thankfully there are alternatives like twitter -> nitter, etc.
(I was going to add a people "I want to thank for their hard work"-section to the post, but lacked the time to do it thoroughly and make sure I would not forget a major contributor, and therefore dropped that.)
Ultimately, software developers will ALWAYS stress the hardware to the limit. With labor saving software tools or else with performance hogging GUIs.
Simply put, devices need to keep up with the latest and greatest.
Unfortunately, this seems to be a common line of thinking, not least within the EU corridors of power themselves: Instead of nurturing competition and their own tech industry or create an environment where such an industry can thrive, they somehow try to regulate it into being.
This way, Linux on smartphones would still remain a very niche proposition for hobbyists and enthusiasts. Regular consumers probably wouldn't flash their expensive Apple or Samsung phones just to run Linux on them.
Without a vendor selling a complete product, alternative smartphone operating systems will largely remain a pipe dream.
Then why haven't "vendors [..] capable of producing decent hardware to run Linux on" sprung up in the unfettered entrepreneurial utopias of Shenzhen or SV?
This has nothing to do with Europe's (very real) difficulties in establishing a local tech industry. The OP wished for the EU to enforce the opening of phone hardware because he does not see any path for this to happen organically anywhere, and the EU happens to be the only entity that might be both capable and willing to knock down technological moats.
The closest thing I can think of is Apple taking BSD and making Darwin.
Which company would be happy to risk so much, in such a busy market as mobile OS?
Disclaimer: i'm no hardware engineer
I believe this is utterly false. There is a strong distinction between selling open hardware (the real stuff, not just open board design) and selling closed hardware.
If all you care about is board schematics, it's not hard to buy various chips and assemble them into functioning hardware. It's then often (though not always) possible to use the various binary firmware and drivers provided by the vendors for a certain platform (say Android device tree, or Windows driver) and make the hardware usable under a specific system.
Now, if you're trying to do real open hardware and have 100% schematics available, good luck: it's technically possible to acquire an open hardware micro-controller/CPU (though you have to look for it), but then you need open hardware GPU and network card and i don't think that even exists (at least not fulfilling our 2022 feature expectations).
These problems are detailed in various sources. My two favorites are an article about Lenovo hardware support in HaikuOS and a recent talk about operating systems design for interfacing with hardware:
https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmu_man/2021-10-04_ok_lenovo_w...
https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-ke...
Correct. The entire supply chain evolved for proprietary stuff. There are NDAs and roadblocks everywhere.
Most chip vendors are very happy to assist close phone manufacturers in implementing drivers, optimize battery usage etc. and do not cooperate with any open source effort.
If you're worried about competition, hardware specs is what fuels competition, both for hardware manufacturers (so clients can make an informed decision about what they buy) and for software vendors (so clients have a choice).
The software competition/interop problem is very well summed up in this article: https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmu_man/2021-10-04_ok_lenovo_w...
Just imagine if you bought a house and the schematics were under an NDA you have no access to. You would have to contract a specific company to perform any repairs/adjustments, and said company could proclaim your house EOL any day and stop providing support for the many cracks and leaks its bad designs created in the first place. That would be a nightmare situation, don't you agree? Why is the equivalent supposed to be acceptable when it comes to phones?
Remember, not even Microsoft managed to pull it off and not for lack of money or try. There is simply an inherent local minima/maxima for these 2 platforms.
How do we expect a third competitor to show up? It’s like expecting a 4 years old girl to compete with heavy-weight MMA champions. The rules around a market are the only reason capitalism could work, otherwise we would only have paper-clip machines sacrificing everything for profit.
Regulation is exactly how you nurture competition. That's what a government is supposed to do.
Instead the US not only allowed but actively encouraged the google/apple duopoly to control the whole market.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture for clarification.
Fair and efficient markets don't exist in a vacuum.
In a free-for-all, everyone would be insider trading, stealing, and defrauding.
Integrated, non-modular technology platforms are not competitive marketplaces. You cannot introduce a competitor to the Apple App store or iOS because it's a monopolistic integrated platform.
Society has to continually keep creating laws that turn non-marketplaces into marketplaces. Just as it has always done.
There they had a business case, reduce UNIX development costs, on mobile there is no benefit as such over what Android already offers.
Put us to live with pigs and in less than a week we would be fine.
Give us a PinePhone and we would be ok in a week or two. It would become "the new normal". In the end, you can take photos, run apps, develop shit, make calls, send text messages.
It's just like switching between Android and iPhone and back again. Something that many of us have done at least once.
Am I downplaying the PinePhone? Not at all. I'm just saying that its not a big deal one way or the other. If you used it, I'm sure you would be fine.
Having no WhatsApp, no Spotify, no banking app, no Apple Pay or NFC payments, no Widevine so no Netflix and so on is making using Linux on the phone very difficult for both Android and iOS users unless they REALLY want to
So until things improve and there are more alternatives to what you mentioned, this won't be a mainstream device. And that's fine. We should celebrate where we are today compared to a few years ago.
Well, mostly: You can use Spotify Premium, thanks to Spot: https://github.com/xou816/spot
(I could go into bridging WhatsApp over Matrix, or using WhatsApp Web, but I realize that that's most likely too painful for most. Also, Waydroid makes lots of things work, but the side-effects on battery life made it seem impractical to me, to be honest.)
I've heard energy management is often difficult to do right in Linux, but I just wonder why...
You can have Pinephone suspended for 7 days if you like, under certain circumstances. Or you can drain it 2.5h if you mean to compile Gentoo on it. And completely different SW optimizations would come into play depending on the scenario.
"Battery life" usually means how long will battery last, before you need to replace it.
No, it does not. "Battery life" means how long the device lasts on a fully charged battery before it needs recharging.
What you were thinking of is called "battery lifespan" or sometimes "battery longevity", or even "battery cycles".
If you'll play a game, it will matter whether the game consumes 30% or 290% of CPU time. It will matter if you use the phone mostly indoor, or outdoor, because backlight is a major power sink. It will matter if you need wifi or mobile internet, or whether your usecase is mostly uploading or downloading data, how much screen on time you'll want,...
It's nonsensical to ask for how long will phone run on a single charge without specifying what you'll be doing with it, because it can be anywhere between 7 days and 2-3 hours.
There's no such thing as a typical use.
So it happens at a higher level, in application management etc...
And then, why aren't those pinephone OS doing it better?
One thing I wonder about is can the popular apps be made legally in an open source way, do you have to get the companies to make a Linux app for PP/PPP. This is with regard to get mass adoption.
I do the same thing, put the batteries in, update them (run both Mobian/Phosh and Manjaro/KDE Plasma Mobile). Then turn them back off. I have a TMobile number for it but the pro also has this sleep/wake issue. Where it will not wake up after a while. It's more apparent with the plasma Mobile than Phosh.
I think it's worth it with regard to saving money, supposedly the price will bump up. But as far a s a daily driver/main phone I still use an Android.
The external display detect/reliability is buggy still too as in, plug it in, nope, plug it in, nope... There it's working. That kind of thing.
I have carried the PinePhone as a secondary device for a long time before, and I tried it as a main phone for a week twice (late 2020, April 2021) - things were too crashy for me back then (and the slowness admittedly annoyed me, too).
-Missing a "killer app"
-Not reliable in an emergency.
-Near the UI experience of a much older Android or iPhone device, but without the battery life.
I find it interesting how much people's feeling of safety has become dependent on their access to a personal smartphone. I didn't even get a regular cell phone until high school, but I never felt like I was in danger. Now, even though everyone around me has a smartphone on their person, even I feel slightly uneasy when I don't have my own phone in my pocket.
Battery life is also comparable to an older phone since we've got CRUST - not much "screen on" time, but it should last you a day.
See "Reasons to buy" in the table:
https://forums.puri.sm/t/comparing-specs-of-upcoming-linux-p...
the hardware is very slow and very out of date compared to maistream
I- huh? Open hardware? Elon Musk?
I can only find a vague legalese pledge that doesn't seem to be very attractive for real world use according to many, and I know that Tesla is starting to really enjoy being an Apple-like company with such hits like proprietary chargers.
I'm also seeing no Teslas are listed on the supported page for projects like openpilot.
What we need is general opinion to be against such closed ecosystems run by industrialists with world records for wealth concentration. Not dreams of Captain Save A Pleb.