linmob

8 GB RAM is not even enough to do Pro-level web-browsing, so I do agree, this new 14" Macbook Pro is a joke - and let's not forget that swapping can't be good for the storage you can't replace.

I don't think upgradable RAM is coming back to Apple Silicon Macs. Upgradable storage, maybe; and there might be a use for standard RAM as a faster Swap, e.g., in a Mac Pro, to have 256 GB of super fast unified RAM and additional TBs of DIMMs for workloads that need that.

Nitpick: Something is off with the timeline of M2 Pro Macbook Pro ownership mentioned in the article ("Two years ago, I got a 14” MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro processor and 16 GB of RAM.") M2 Pro Macbook Pro were only introduced in January 2023.

I am glad that it charges via USB-C - it's Intel-powered sibling [1] still uses a random barrel plug to charge, requiring you to definitely carry extra equipment to charge both your phone and your tiny laptop.

[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/354652391581 (as a non-endorsing example, this seems to be sold under many names)

Sadly, the situation for the PinePhone has been like this for quite a while.

What changed is that alternatives are more available/in a better, good enough for daily driver state, be it sdm845 powered community-driven device ports or the Librem 5.

Travel advice: This is an experience possible in Hamburg, but, e.g. not in Munich, due to (non-)smoking legislation happening on the state level.

IIRC, Ubuntu Touch has been ported to the JingPad, so there is one supported OS option.

Oh yeah. I've landed on the (slightly weird) "GNU-like Mobile Linux".

There should be videos demoing the p-boot-demo image on YouTube, I included some in my Weekly Updates [0] on the topic. At this point, it makes no sense to try the image - it's simply to old, and projects have progressed too much.

Regarding the battery life: This is a thing on the PinePhone, even more on the PinePhone Pro and (to a lesser degree) the Librem 5. These days I carry a Librem 5 (PureOS) and a OnePlus 6 (postmarketOS), the battery angst does not really apply to the One Plus 6, it easily lasts a day unless something goes terribly wrong. The main reason to do so is that I like to listen to way more podcasts than current (and likely also future) Librem 5 battery life allows.

[0]: https://linmob.net/categories/weekly-update/,

Please add (2015) to the title, the post date can be found at the bottom of the page.

No, unfortunately not - the TH1520 SoC comes with some Vector extension support - but rev 0.7 (IIRC), not 1.0 which one would rather want.

Please add a [2019] to the title.

If you don't need a working camera, a OnePlus 6 (or another well supported Snapdragon 845 device) should solve your main issues.

Otherwise, there's the Librem 5 - it's enough faster to make a difference compared to the PinePhone. As many people receive theirs now (who moved on in the time since they ordered), getting one that's barely used is a possibility.

OTOH, Germany managed to push solar and wind early, too. Sadly, "Klimakanzlerin"[1] Merkel's governments managed to undo a lot of investment through bad legislation, which led to many companies in the green energy sector failing - effectively moving that industry to China.

[1]: She was unironically called that in 2007, after not much more than a few nice words and taking some photographs in Ilulissat, Greenland - yes, press failure was a thing back then, too.

Now, you can complain about gatekeeping, or you can set up more than one keyboard layout (I have yet to run into a reasonable OS or DE that does not allow for this), and switch around when it's appropriate.

Other ways to accomplish this would be coming up with macros or custom shortcuts (e.g., with one or more modifiers), to type the characters you don't have on an UK layout.

All of this is way easier to do than to fix all the 'bugs' in well established programs that have shortcuts that don't work or don't make sense on QWERTZ (or, to take it further, in the native language attached to that language - :wq should be :sb in German. ;-) )

My intention here was not to gatekeep, but to make the case/share my experience that when I first forced myself to use a different (UK [1]) keyboard layout and set my computer to English, many things that previously were cumbersome and hard to remember and did not really make sense, suddenly were easy to memorize and made perfect sense. It was almost life-changing!

Now: Should (1) it be this way, or should (2) internationalization/translation be way better? Certainly (2), but I just don't see it happen, neither in commercial (cost), nor in free (lack of contributors) software.

[1]: Don't do this, US international ISO is better: https://www.farah.cl/Keyboardery/A-Visual-Comparison-of-Diff...

Honestly, as a fellow QWERTZ-native, QWERTZ is generally a terrible layout for doing any programming in languages that go beyond round brackets. Instead have all these umlauts you rarely need, even in normal writing, right there - just a bad tradeoff.

One might even argue that it's terrible for some other keyboard shortcuts, as they stop making sense: E.g., when Ctrl+Z is undo and Ctrl+X is redo, that makes perfect sense on QWERTY, but is hard to grasp on QWERTZ. Yet this is seemingly never customized/"translated", even in software that customizes other shortcuts (e.g., in word processing).

So, long story short, do yourselves a favor and don't use QWERTZ for serious computer use ;-)

While this is absolutely true, and it should never have been implemented this way, I have been following the topic very closely and have not come across a single report of a flaming PinePhone in over three years. With five-digit numbers of PinePhone's out there in the hands of people who don't know what they are doing, this IMHO thus is fortunately mostly a theoretical issue.

BTW: PINE64 did better on the PinePhone Pro, and (since it's also going to be Rockchip (RK3566) based in all likelihood) is unlikely to replicate the mistake on the PinePhone 2.

Regarding the first point: Their current offerings are based on more current Pixel devices (6a, 7, 7 Pro), which use Google's chips, which in turn IIRC are mostly Samsung Exynos with a sprinkle of Google. That way they are only shooting their first product into the foot.

My keyboard accessory fits both of my PinePhones and my PinePhone Pro - it's not easy to put it in or out, but that makes it stay in and not fall out accidentaly.

That said, in mine the accesories battery no longer charges, so there are definitely issues with the keyboard accessory aside from being humongous.

I used my M1 MacBook Air last weekend with Asahi and GNOME on train ride for roughly 4 hours (browsing the web, fiddling with a server over ssh, writing a blog post) and when shutting it down, it was still at 78%.

This used to be different when I first installed Asahi, but the GPU driver and other improvements have made battery life something I don't really worry about anymore.

I always wanted to own a Fx0, could not pick one up at the time due to monetary constraints, and would still like to have one and have been monitoring eBay unsuccessfully for quite a while ;-)

I would love for the open web on smartphones be unleashed again (since it would also help my beloved 'Linux Phones'), but I see the opposite happening: More and more real world services force you into apps that only exist for Google-played Android and Apple iOS.

Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20230208230721/https://vadosware....

Since KaiOS was already mentioned: If KaiOS feels to corporate or proprietary, check out Capyloon https://capyloon.org/

Can confirm, authentication files don't help. Bing is seriously broken, and their support is all but helpful. This is an excerpt from one of their replies:

> "Thank you for your patience during our investigation. After further review, it appears that your site did not meet the standards set by Bing to remain indexed the last time it was crawled. To ensure that this was not a false flag, I also escalated the issue to our Product Team and they manually reviewed your site and confirmed that it is in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines detailed here:

https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-guidelines-30f....

We are not able to provide specifics for these types of issues but we recommend that you review our Webmaster Guidelines, especially the section Things to Avoid, and thoroughly check your site for any deliberately or accidentally employed SEO techniques that may have adversely affected your standing in Bing and Bing-powered search results."

Before snarking, please check that link and the long lists of things - I did not find to find my website https://linmob.net to be offending their "things to avoid list".

That was a reply to my first ticket requesting re-indexation, later tickets only got what I would call "non-replies".

Did you manage to get re-indexed? I did not, and after the first attempt, replies to my tickets became quite rare.

If only it made sense economically, I bet someone would do it. As desktop OSes are perceived to be free (comes at no extra cost with the hardware, including updates for multiple years), there's not nearly the same Return On Investment as in B2B cloud and server markets. RedHat realized this aeons ago, Canonical followed in 2017.

At the same time, commercial products are being downgraded in usability by nagging users to subscribe to paid add-on services, telemetry and ads. And you can't even pay to 'get back to sanity'.

I was going to make this comment - jokingly.

If there's a person that might be self-identifying with 'Steve Jobs of Linux Phones', Todd is the most likely candidate :-D

While Sailfish, Nemo Mobile and Sxmo manage to feel somewhat smooth, slow storage and meager AllWinner A64 memory bandwith are what make the PinePhone feel like that.

I found postmarketOS and DanctNIX Sxmo and Phosh good enough to be bearable (it helps that I am used to slow systems thanks to being exposed to terribly slow business software at my day job).

GNOME Contacts 43 can import .vcf, so that one is partially solved. :-)

This new PineTab looks promising. It seems to have fewer options for extensions than the 1st gen, and I am a bit sad, that PINE64 did not design this as a baseboad for their SoQuartz SOM to make SoC upgradability a thing.

My Newton MessagePad 2100 used 4 AA batteries, the Palm m105 used 2 AAA batteries, so this used to be possible with monochrome displays.

But: Watt hours (Wh) are quite low for these NiMH rechargebles. I think what would be preferable would be a standardised size of phone-fitting Li-Ion batteries that manufacturers are required to use.

(I highly doubt that this will ever happen, though.)

See https://www.thoughtco.com/what-good-are-wasps-1968081

I've been spending way too much time making content about the hardware, and still would if my new job would not absorb so much of my time and energy. I still write a Weekly Update on the PinePhone and similar projects on https://linmob.net.

I also still have a PinePhone (postmarketOS CE 3GB, 32GB) for my second SIM, and I don't miss calls or texts (SMS, MMS aren't popular in germany) as far as I know - e.g. I've never noticed 2FA SMS not coming through. I am running postmarketOS stable and use the open source modem firmware by BiktorGJ. But: This depends on your mobile carrier, and it may work different for you or impossible, e.g. AT&T in the US has gotten really strict about whitelisting devices for it's network and PinePhone is just not on that list.

Now, about battery life: If you use it as phone, and don't have too many calls, it's fine. It can even last two days, if it's mostly chugging along in standby. But: As soon as you do compute-heavy things, like browsing the modern web, ... Well, it lasts a few hours, depending on how much you do (I sadly did not find the time to do a battery rundown test since mid 2020 (when things were early and terrible), but don't expect more than 2 hours of Firefox use). It's definitely not up to modern iPhones. Also, PinePhone is really slow. I love it, but it's really not fast and never will be.

Regarding a credible report, maybe check out the latest episode of the postmarketOS podcast [1].

In terms of hardware, I keep recommending the Xiaomi Pocophone F1 [2]. It's fast and has decent battery life (being based on a chip actually designed for phones helps). I had to use Windows to unlock the bootloader, after that, installing postmarketOS was easy. You loose the camera and the option of not really usable kill switches, it also does not run all the distributions that PinePhone can run, but other than that, it's as good as it gets IMHO.

Also, keep in mind that the app ecosystem is limited, I try to track it on https://linuxphoneapps.org.

Overall, if you can afford to buy a PinePhone or a used Poco F1 (plus a new battery ;-)) easily, just give it a try. You'll find out quickly whether it's for you (you should like to tinker a bit) or not. :)

PS: If you have further question, feel free to send me an email - I might not see replies here.

[1]: https://cast.postmarketos.org/episode/25-Interview-Alyssa-Sp...

[2]: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Xiaomi_Poco_F1_(xiaomi-be...