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Comment by yaky | Hacker News Reader

On one hand, it's disappointing. On the other hand, most of the PinePhone software has been developed, adapted, and patched by enthusiasts. Many applications were never intended to work on mobile devices in the first place. And no top-down direction. Android and iOS have been around for 10+ years, and it would be interesting to compare early Android to PinePhone now.

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]

0: https://lupyuen.github.io/articles/pinephone2

1:https://sxmo.org/

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Phosh is amazing. I'm currently running it on an Alcatel Idol 347 (2015) with 1.9GB using PostmarketOS, and it's just snappy and responsive as any Android UI, using ~ 300MB in RAM with the desktop. Very happy with it.

Does wifi tethering work ok on that phone?

Something I learned recently is that tethering works correctly on the Pro - had to use it for my Kobo. I was looking around for wifi, and eventually figured it was worth looking into for the Pinephone Pro. And it... just worked. Entirely via GUI, with no hiccups (using Phosh)

I'm using Mobian trixie (basically Debian testing) on a Librem 5. The overall experience is very much “not there yet”, but I reckon most of this is down to relatively few high-impact issues, mostly around touch input.

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.

> Android and iOS have been around for 10+ years, and it would be interesting to compare early Android to PinePhone now.

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.

SXMO was basically the only thing that didn't lag on PinePhone for me. Which makes sense, as it's basically sway with dmenu for phone interface. I was very excited about the whole thing and even made the same scripts work for my desktop sway with baresip, but then decided to just use a normal reliable feature phone that looks cool.

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