Mine is still sitting in a drawer. I take it out twice a year to update it and see if the lock screen (a static image with a text field) still lags and misses inputs
I believe PinePhones ship with Manjaro and Plasma Mobile, which is notoriously slow and unstable, and is part of the reason why I went with Phosh.
For a more feature-phone experience, there is an ongoing project to put NuttX RTOS on PinePhone [0].
For a very performant and customizable but unusual (button navigation, terminal-based) experience, there is SXMO [1]
Editing text is very frustrating (but it sounds like the 1st iPhone was on-par). The keyboard doesn't always appear or disappear when you'd expect (but you can manually open or close it in Phosh). The biggest frustration here is that the text editing context menu (Copy, Paste etc) doesn't appear at all consistently.
There's also a bug where the context menu appears when it shouldn't (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5540), which makes several apps more awkward to use.
Phosh as a shell is mostly fine. The spatial model doesn't really make sense, so it's not as nice to use as the mobile version of Gnome, but that's still pre-alpha for now. Phosh hides the window's close button for some reason, and overrides that setting on every restart, so until apps switch to the new dialogs (which landed yesterday), even closing a dialog is awkward.
Overall it feels very cobbled-together for now. Files and Camera don't work properly yet, so Mobian has replaced them with Portfolio and “Camera (Dev Preview)” (which is actually a completely separate project called Millipixels that looks like a tech demo). Firefox has been heavily modified, including the bizarre decision to put the headerbar at the bottom of the window(?!) unlike any other app, and hide a load of menu options.
And then there's the general fit-and-finish I'd expect from Debian (compared with Fedora). There's a useless “Advanced Network Configuration” app that appears in the app grid, but apparently isn't a real app, because when you try to view its details Software says “Sorry! There are no details for that application”, so you can't get rid of it, whatever it is. Also, Evolution Alarm Notify; but at least I know how to prevent that from starting. (There's less of this sort of thing than with Ubuntu, though — there aren't 3 separate apps for installing software, updating software, and everyone's favourite pastime, configuring software repositories.)
It is possible to use it for basic tasks, and for me personally, I'd rather put up with good-faith bugginess than have to deal with something that assumes I want a Google account.
I used a Nexus S running CyanogenMod more than 10 years ago. Lagging and missing inputs were not problems. The Nexus S is notionally still supported by LineageOS today, but trying to actually run LineageOS on it is unbearably slow.
Yeah as soon as I got my pinephone and the lag on the lock screen happened I had a sinking feeling it wasn't going to be that great.
Also, I tinker with many of my devices but it would be perfectly valid if the pinephone I purchased I wanted to just work out of the box, at least to the extent where the first screen doesn't lag on keyboard input.
That's a huge sign of immaturity at least in the QA process (if one even exists).j
Mind you, I really want things like Pinephone to work and be a viable alternative to the general ad/spyware infested crap on the market.
The Pinephone home and order pages had a warning in figurative blinking neon signs clearly stating it's not for consumers and squarely targeted at developers interested in making the software better.
my budget for a phone is about $150. i have been thinking about getting a pinephone (with a keyboard) but that would have been twice my budget, and after i saw a friend with that having trouble getting the keyboard working, i passed on it. before i had a fairphone 3, which i had received as a gift, but its performance was worse than the $150 phone i had before that. now however i got a very good deal (slightly over my budget) on a refurbished 3 year old oneplus nord that new would have cost $400. and boy, i have never had a phone that was that good. not only is it much faster, the battery lasts longer too.
i can now understand why people like to spend money on a high end phone. i still won't spend that much but thanks to refurbishing services i don't need to.
i really appreciate what fairphone and pinephone are doing. we need these alternative phones. i had my share of them, firefox phone, geeksphone. a sailfish based phone from india, a samsung phone running tizen. i even got a second hand openmoko very cheap because the owner was unsatisfied with it. and i can really see the evolution.
the problem is that these phones are a few years behind the curve and that the apps are written for high end phones. (the fairphone was really struggling to run wechat)
so actually, in theory you should be right. there should be software that is snapping fast even on these phones. i mean even the openmoko had usable apps. but in practice, sadly the hardware is simply a limitation.
perhaps in a few years phones will reach the same state that desktop and laptop computers have now. they can only speed up by adding more cores, and individual applications can't really go any faster, so a 7 year old computer still performs fine, even for my kids as a gaming device.
That's basically what I did: https://announce.asheesh.org/2022/09/i-switched-to-iphone-fo...
I didn't see issues running wechat on a Pixel 3a, which is slightly older than the Fairphone 3. I replaced my 3a with a 6a, but not for any performance-related reasons.
Maybe there's something weird about the Fairphone 3?
I am reading HN on it right now, still going strong!
Admittedly I have never used it as my first phone. The mechanics and probably the battery (still the first one) would not have lasted.
Yes it uses the GTK toolkit but that has nothing to do withe GNOME-Shell or its performance problems.
I corrected the Wikipedia article.
It's because you're not their employer, so they can do (or not do) whatever they want.
With that said, I think 3GB RAM feels very low for a device running this kind of software. Even the Nokia N9 had 1GB RAM.
I also got lots of shifty looks using my phone on the train as if I were a hacker terrorist or something.
It's been much smoother using LineageOS on a very old OnePlus One than the Pinephone, but I still keep it around to try out new OS updates.
Such a collection of hardware can't realistically compete with mainstream phones which have very tight hardware and software integration to achieve the most performance with the least power draw.
It's a bad phone (and bad portable computer), but mine might work for as long as LTE and my desire to recompile exist. Schematics, opensource and spare parts being available are the crux of it. It's the phone for those wanting to build their phones and it's pretty good at that.
If the market was still free, the future would be a BB committed to trust reciprocation. But it's too late now. So aside from de-googled provided by some specific vendors, just fuck phones.
There are some people who do not notice things like this. Or they don't give them importance. Fill your team with them and get prepared for the shitfest.
https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec6.mp4
Could 2005 Nokia do that?
I am quite happy with my Pinetab (I am typing on it now). I see the Pinephone as a smaller version of that. My Pinetab has replaced my phone for quite a lot of things - I use my phone a lot less.