I'm willing to compromise a lot in order to go with the free software approach, but my god, just do better. There's no excuse for how un-functional this thing is. Try harder.
I had the same reaction with the pine phone a couple years ago. At least that one shipped sooner though.
No really. Best phone I've ever owned. Better than apple or android. It's loss was immense.
It's just a good phone which happens to run Linux, not a mediocre phone hyped because it is one of the few Linux options available.
Maemo was gtk+ based and many Gnome applications ran really nicely. Eg Gnumeric was great. The desktop dev environment worked so you could port or write stuff from scratch then load it onto your phone. apt-get worked - apt was the app store iirc.
But who cares that stuff?
It was as slick and nice a user interface as the then recently released iphone! No really, I'm not making that up. Fold-out keyboard was terrific too. Way, way ahead of android at that time and arguably still. From memory the touchscreen on the iphone was better but nothing else was.
Microsoft bought nokia and killed it. Nothing has been as good since.
Only the Java/Kotlin userspace and the small set of NDK libraries are considered official and stable.
Anyone that ventures outside this path and isn't an OEM doing their own Android distribution, is on their own if the application actually works at all when deployed via the PlayStore, as the Termux guys eventually found out.
> It is currently in a usable state with support for various targets such as the N900, Motorola Droid 4 and the PinePhone.
Neat!
The N900 was my dream device, and the prototype of the latest model still is on eBay for ridiculous price ranges.
I wish the pinephone would be exactly like the N900, but with better CPU specs.
I would, on the other hand, leave the CPU as it is, and welcome any change to battery life. That's the only factor preventing me from using one as a daily driver.
Looking at the comparison[1], it looks like the N9 was a bit more advanced, but it lacked the keyboard the N900 had. At least I also had a N97 :)
[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=3398&idPhone2...
All my horses on this being the #1 reason why Microsoft panicked and pushed Nokia into a partnership that ultimately forced Nokia to sell its mobile business to Microsoft, which of course meant the end of Linux in those devices.
But I didn’t really care. No calculator? No problem, I just fired up Vim while I was bored in class and wrote my own. Contacts book would crash? Again, a simple program I wrote let me quickly grep through a CSV file and add/update/call people.
It was such a joy to use I would carry it around even though I ended up using an iPhone as my daily driver.
It feels like as soon as the community is moving in the right direction, the entire state of technology has moved on to something else and they are constantly trying to realign.
Based on those hypes, Purism probably thought they can just create a phone for hackers first... and never realized the reality that even hackers loves consumer products. Just take a look on how many hackers owns a MacBook as their main driver despite the existence of many good Linux laptops. People are hiding some truths here, and they wanted a smart businessman to figure it out.
As one of the hypered, I'm sorry, Purism. This is the baseline that I actually wanted from a handheld device:
- Runs open source Android and Linux without bug, maybe also iOS;
- Powerful, as least 8GB of RAM and a relatively fast CPU;
- Big swappable battery, 4~6 hours continue use without a re-charge;
- But most importantly, INexpensive, at least not far more expensive than their consumer counterpart;
- Then you can start thinking about ergonomics, self-serving ability, usability and extensibility (builtin keyboard, swappable modem etc)
I should have listed all this clearly in my hype post...
Apple silicon is becoming one of the best options for Linux
Considering how many desktop linux distros fall down with this, you may be expecting too much of your beta-level phones. It's been years, yes, but power management isn't exactly easy. Just look at how bad Linux laptops were even just a few years ago - hell, look at how long it took the multinational mega-corporation to get Android's background power consumption down. It was so bad people on XDA set Tasker to turn off BT, location, and even wifi when not in use.
You're right, FLOSS phones currently aren't good. But they finally exist, and that's enough for me to be excited about
Also people forget that android is still FLOSS. You don't need to be running upstream/mainline linux to be FLOSS. It's mentioned kinda off hand as "oh well running android without google sucks" in the article but graphene OS has proven that you can get a very pleasant, well ironed, and secure/hardened user oriented phone while using FLOSS for basically everything except some firmware level blobs for high end phones. And FDroid proves that we can have 90-95% of all the quality apps we could need without even installing anything google dependent (even FCM push notifications which were historically limiting can be replaced with unifiedpush) That experience contrasts with the "FLOSS phones" like the librem or pine phone which show that you can get most if not all of the hardware working without firmware blobs even if the software up the stack sucks.
So what is stopping us from just starting with one of the generic AOSP targets for graphene os and focusing it for one of these FLOSS targets?
Do we just not have the specs in the hardware with decent FLOSS support? If that's the case, doesn't that mean we are quite literally steps from the finish line?
My other question was, why the first iPhone is significantly faster than a recent PinePhone.
Also FOSS GPU support depending on what device/SOC you have really varies. So weak GPU support can end up handicapping the experience.
Personally I'd like to mess with an android pinephone pro (not the stock "linux with android containers") but I'm not willing to foot the bill to set one up to play with.
Was it bad early on? I seem to recall even the original Nexus One would last all day on one charge.
By contrast the Librem barely lasts 4 hours, rendering it completely useless as a phone.
Do you have a source for this? This sounds a bit hard to believe, and I can't find a source. The sources I found show that within Steam installations, Steam Deck users are a significant share, but not the majority [0]
[0] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/06/steam-deck-already-hit...
A small consolation may be the fact that not all the software development effort we’ve paid for is lost. On the contrary, the work Purism has done both in userspace and kernel have immense value. One day, another Linux-based phone will appear, and it’s going to stand on the shoulders of what Purism did. It’s never going to be perfect, or even nearly as polished as the duopoly UX we’re accustomed to. But it’s going to be good enough, no matter if Purism will even be around by then.
Also, the software for our Librems will only become better with time, as annoyances are ironed out.
tl;dr Purism is definitely underdelivering, and we have all reason to be mad at them. It’s only going to get better though.
It probably isn't, but the fact that it seems like a possibility isn't a great sign!
it simply cannot be permitted. somebody realized PC market/platform made a huge "mistake", letting anybody make software for them and permitting random hardware. this 'mistake' was avoided on smartphones for very pointed, clear, intentions of social control.
there exists NO homebrew smartphone hardware like for PCs.
Heck, you’d think people on hacker news would be all over open source alternatives to proprietary hardware, software, and services. Yet take a brief wander over to one of the many (many) recent Reddit crisis threads and you’ll find countless naysayers talking about how lemmy and the like will never succeed, despite gaining hundreds of thousands of users in a week and a half.
how could lack of demand be made to happen?
but I'm not trying to imply anything. I merely wonder if such a thing (to create or destroy demand of something) is possible; and if it were, how would you do it?
surely it involves marketing? but I also want to reflect on the market cap of convenience...
For an open phone to be truly successful, it has to be better for its users, and in a way that's worth shifting ecosystems for.
Yes, every PinePhone thread has people posting that it's unusable because it's not as good as a flagship iPhone or Android. Or the usual "not ready to be a daily driver" ... because the definition of "daily driver" is apparently a constant of the universe written by God so everyone is expected to have the same one. Meanwhile I've been "daily-driving" my PP for two years at this point because calls, SMS, voicemail, Firefox and the camera work well enough.
I have quite a bunch of pine64 devices, but after I saw these interactions, I didn't even dare to ask anything nor to interact with them on any level.
Install the OSS firmware. Quectel firmware is shitty. For me the OSS firmware doesn't crash at all, though I've heard other people say it still crashes for them once a day or so (?). In any case eg25-m will bring it back so it won't be "unusable".
>"if you don't like it, go away. we are happy with it as it is, there is no solution, and you shouldn't be seeking one. you are bad person for even asking. pine* is not made by apple/samsung, you can't expect it to do things".
You only get these responses if you reveal yourself as someone who didn't read the warning labels before buying the hardware and/or if you act entitled to a solution, as AndyKelley did in this thread. We indeed do not have any patience for someone who comes in and says "It's complete trash. The software is shit, the battery is shit, it's expensive, low specs, completely unusable."
I won't try to convince anyone about the (un)friendliness of the community. If you enjoy its current state, good for you. I, for one, avoid it. I guess everyone can decide what community they want to participate.
While GP's language was definitely coarse, he does make some point. Personally I'm in for the hacking, I care relatively little for other people's (userspace-) software on these devices. But I do see a lot of sentiments around the web saying things like "look how good phosh/kde/XYZ is running on the PP, wow, such speed, many responsiveness" - even though it is objectively not running good when tried in person. Such statements can definitely trick users who just want a novelty phone - they read these reviews, and think that finally there is a viable alternative.
(Disclaimer: while I'm not a fan of some aspects like userspace sw and community, I'm a big fan of most Pine64 hardware, and I not only don't regret any cent I spent with them, I plan to throw more money at them.)
Either you're saying those reviews are lying / wrong, in which case the problem is not the product but the reviews, or you're saying those reviews are accurate but don't reflect the use case of the buyer for whatever reason, in which case it's not the problem of the product nor the reviews.
In my very first comment I said that he was welcome to come onto the IRC etc and ask if the phone can do X, Y, Z that he needs it to do, and he would've gotten an honest answer for that. You've decided that you don't even want to do that because you've been soured from the community for whatever reason, and frankly I don't care to convince you otherwise.
In the same way, AndyKelley spending a $1000+ without doing the research and then whining about it is his loss, not mine. Even in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36414414 he's still going on about "The issue with librem is that they [Purism] put very little effort into the basic user experience of the software." because he thinks it's an iPhone or Android that only has one choice of OS or UI.
Locked down platforms without user freedom are a goldmine
Judging by consumer behavior it appears that ease of use is more important than virtually any other concern.
People who really care about things like privacy and freedom are too few in number to tilt the market, and this is compounded by the fact that as a rule FOSS people don’t pay for things. So the market here is a small number of cheapskates.
The people I care about are the power users, the posters, the creators. People put effort into building communities. Those folks are very few in number but extremely important. They can create a community anywhere they go.
They’re also willing to put in effort to begin with so it’s generally easier to get them to move to lemmy when the experience may not be as polished.
Mobile software is far harder and more costly to produce than desktop because the small form factor and rapid casual use cases mean there can be zero tolerance for bad UX. The amount of effort that goes into just getting things like touch keyboard and touch gestures just right is monumental. The tolerances are very tight.
PCs with big screens and keyboards can support I/O paradigms that are much less demanding of perfection or require much less polish to make usable. A PC can just put some buttons on the screen or use a command line and that works fine. A phone UI needs obsession.
Modern phones are probably the most advanced products humanity has ever produced.
Keep the GUI as simple as possible with the smallest number of options and features as possible and focus more on perfecting what is there. Ship a more minimal better polished product. If you don’t have the resources to perfect it, drop it.
Make anything more custom or advanced configurable via ssh, but make the core features entirely usable without doing that. At first you might not even have an App Store, just a CLI package manager you can access from a PC with ssh.
It’d basically be a hackable minimalist phone. Someone who just wants a privacy oriented minimal phone could use it as is and power users could ssh in and hack on it.
We may as well be talking about an open source, community developed trip to the moon. There are no viable intermediary steps. You either have billions of dollars to find it, or you can't do it.
If you only care about a portable hackable device, the steamdeck is probably the product for you.
In other words Apple could outspend a member of the EU. I don't think a crowd-sourced community project can match that.
>I had the same reaction with the pine phone a couple years ago.
Anyone who writes "the software" like you and TheAceOfHearts did, as if it's an iPhone or Android, doesn't understand the first thing about a Linux phone. Please resell them to someone that's less PEBKAC than you. Thanks. They'll appreciate it.
And in the future I recommend asking people who have them before you buy them, so that you know ahead of time not to keep these phones from going to people who will make better use of them. For example, we in the PinePhone IRC channel will happily listen to what you want from the phone and tell you whether the phone meets those requirements or not.
It's okay. Really. Not everything has to be for everyone, and evidently Linux phones are not for you. Please don't buy them. Thanks.
And as for the PP the manufacturer has always been very explicit about it:
https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-beta-edition-with-conve...
>Beta Edition PinePhones are aimed solely at early adopters. More specifically, only intend for these units to find their way into the hands of users with extensive Linux experience.
And yet here you are hectoring the plebs, putting us in our place. It sure seems like you care, because if you didn't you would have kept quiet and got on with the good life.