I recommend you to look at Lunduke's twitter (@thelunduke)… "Facist" depends on the definition of Facism you go by, but deeply conservative (which many non-conservative people call "reactionary")? Definitely.
577 karma · joined August 31, 2020
Touch works, the Pen works (with pressure sensitivity) rotation works, WiFi and Bluetooth work, Standby (deep sleep, I put to sleep for 8 hours and it only lost 5%) works (including wake-up).
Non working: Webcams.
All that OOTB, without switching to a special kernel or similar. If that’s "shitty unsupported tablet" in your book that's ok, but in my book it's pretty cool and way better than what I've seen on my last ThinkPad (L380 Yoga) when I got it, where standby wouldn’t just work.
- EFI is a bit difficult with distributions when Secure Boot is enabled. Ubuntu and Fedora support it, if you choose a different distribution you may have to tinker, as evidenced in the post;
- camera: Well, Microsoft was doing fancy stuff here; and most distributions just don't support anything but UVC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_video_device_class) style webcams. It's a pain point now, but may not be in a year or two. Also, depending on the lifestyle and the devices one uses, a non working camera may not be an issue at all;
- SSD: Yes, this may be painful, but... for me personal it works well enough. Networking does wonders ;-)
- Lap friendliness... I have had a Surface Pro 3 years ago, and with that device I would agree. With the Surface Go 2 it's way less of an issue. The device is just so much lighter. Works on the subway for me without fear or trouble so far.
Now on the "Why would anyone want this experience" point: I just love desktop Linux, and it's nice to have some full desktop Firefox or apps like rNote [1] on a small, portable device. It's nice to run the OS you know, be able to replicate the same experience on a small form factor device so that you can have it, when you need it, while also being able to use it as tablet - more and more touch friendly apps are available.[2] With GNOME Shell adapting to mobile [3], this experience is only going to get better.
[1]: https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.flxzt.rnote
[2]: https://linuxphoneapps.org/apps/
[3]: https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/2022/05/30/towards-gnome-s...
The Surface Go 2 that the article is about, is an x86_64 device - I recently aquired one and it's really quite nice with Linux in my limited testing. The biggest difficulty with a standard desktop GNU+Linux on a tablet is that most distributions are not optimized for easy tablet use - KDE Neon User Edition e.g. does not come with a virtual keyboard preinstalled.
On Yoga style laptops: Well, they are easier to get started with, but they often are quite a big bigger and having those keys on the back all the time... It's doable, but if you want a "nice 10" tablet" experience these devices are just not what you will want: Too large, too thick, too heavy.
[1]: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=PinePhone_Software_R...
[2]: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=PinePhone_Software_R...
Well, mostly: You can use Spotify Premium, thanks to Spot: https://github.com/xou816/spot
(I could go into bridging WhatsApp over Matrix, or using WhatsApp Web, but I realize that that's most likely too painful for most. Also, Waydroid makes lots of things work, but the side-effects on battery life made it seem impractical to me, to be honest.)
(I was going to add a people "I want to thank for their hard work"-section to the post, but lacked the time to do it thoroughly and make sure I would not forget a major contributor, and therefore dropped that.)
For a select few devices, my personal favorite being the Xiaomi Poco F1 [0], [1] (despite afaik needing Windows to unlock its bootloader), this is already true. Sure, that's not "every phone", but at least one relatively available and nice (for the price) phone.
[0] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Xiaomi_Poco_F1_(xiaomi-be...
Battery life is also comparable to an older phone since we've got CRUST - not much "screen on" time, but it should last you a day.
Regarding replacement batteries: There are some brands that make okay/fine replacement batteries, I am quite happy with the one I've written about in another comment on here. But yes: They should be available in a perfect world, but given current global supply chain problems, it's understandable that they are not at all times.
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.
I have carried the PinePhone as a secondary device for a long time before, and I tried it as a main phone for a week twice (late 2020, April 2021) - things were too crashy for me back then (and the slowness admittedly annoyed me, too).
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.
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.
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.
For more info on these and other apps, check out https://linuxphoneapps.org/apps/ - contributions welcome!
Software is tough though, even the OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner had 128 MB Ram, and Illume was dropped from Enlightenment since. (There’s a note to revive it in the TODO file, though.) Of the ongoing “mobile Linux UX” efforts, Sxmo or Maemo Leste might be adaptable - they come in at below 200MB RAM on 2GB PinePhones.
Additional caveat: All these UIs have been made with touchscreens in mind.
Other than that, I think that the planned GTK4 port of GNOME Maps has the potential to improve things a lot.
Plugging your phone into a laptop dock or a monitor, keyboard + mouse and be able to use it as a "proper Computer". This requires "convergent apps" which change menus and sometimes even add features when they are run on a larger canvas of pixels. It's supposed to be even more in one device.
There must be some way to make this work on other Plasma Mobile distributions.
Delivering all the messaging apps on a GNU/Linux device seems like a difficult task though, from what I’ve gathered about apps that others and I tested [0].