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Comment by thematrixturtle | Hacker News Reader

> five to seven hours of idle battery life

> 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.

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Author here. The blog post is not meant as a discouragement, but as a report. It does not help anyone if people get a PinePhone (or other Linux Phone) with the expectation that it's just going to work like their big-platform-high-volume smartphone, and then cry a river because mobile Linux is not as refined.

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.

Maybe you should make this clearer to your readers?

I trust my regular followers (blog, videos, social media) to somewhat know my tone by now (I've been writing over a hundred blog posts over the past two years), and it’s them I wrote this for.

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.

Or just allow and trust the readers to make their own conclusions.

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.

Nobody's complaining about the author or blog here? If anything, I'm quite grateful to them for documenting all the warts, and making it really clear that the PinePhone is not an option for us casuals in the process.

> Or just allow and trust the readers to make their own conclusions.

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.

Sort of an implicit assumption when publishing a literary work is that the readers can actually read.

You have way more patience than the average people making comment here, at least someone's trying I think.

I have one as a backup in case I get robbed or something. It's nice for me to know the state of things.

Almost all of that is referring to 2020 and no longer the case.

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.

Still, the "Conclusions" section isn't that encouraging either:

> 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.

I agree with your summary. I enjoy PinePhone and Mobile Linux a lot, but if someone hates tinkering (or has no time for it) and wants a seamless experience, they should just get a different device.

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.

Thanks for the reply and for the work you put into Mobile Linux! I enjoy (a moderate amount of) tinkering and use Linux on both my work and home PCs, but my requirements for a phone are a bit more demanding - a phone has to be a device which I can depend on to work e.g. when I get a call, if I forget to charge it overnight, when I need to quickly scan a QR code to access some website on the go etc. So I'm afraid I'm not in the market for a Linux phone right now, but I hope (thanks to people like you) it will get to that level one day...

You might consider getting a refurbished Google Pixel and put in your choice of GrapheneOS or Calyx. For someone like you it may be a good compromise, and maybe at some point you get a side Linux phone to eventually transition towards.

Based on what you write, a Sony phone with Sailfish might still be fitting and polished enough.

Yeah, that's reasonable.

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 :))

Well, to be fair, everything I read about PinePhine convinces me to never get a pinephone.

Well, I on the other hand was convinced, that I want one, as soon as it is stable and out of alpha.

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.

I'm mostly on the other side.

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"

"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]!"

"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.

I'm tempted to get it as a second phone and run NixOS Mobile on it.

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!

Having my daily driver run NixOS is my ultimate goal.

I've been using it for a few years now (across 2 laptops and a tower). For basic usage, it works pretty great. So terminal + internet + basic programs. KDE is wonderful by default and easy to customize (not a NixOS thing). For more specific stuff it can take some elbow grease (packaging software, playing games, more exotic system config). Between the nixpkgs issue tracker and the official docs/wiki, it's pretty easy to figure things out.

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.

I get notifications on mine just fine, even with suspend.

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.

PinePhone is clearly marketed as a device for enthusiasts and developers. The hardware is very cheap.

Complaining that a software stack developed by volunteers is not good enough for you is quite entitled.

It is indeed great at putting off tons of end users. I have no idea why anyone would expect anything beyond useable for a Linux Phone if these mountains of issues are being revealed to the end user.

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.

Author here. I'm sorry for being blunt, but good grief, comments like yours make me want to stop blogging!

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.

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