linmob

The GNOME Calls app in the Librem 5 can do SIP calls, and the SMS/MMS app Chatty can do XMPP (OMEMO encryption is cuddly though) and Matrix support is being worked on (as in not enabled by default yet).

Based on my recent experience with a Librem 5, this is an accurate figure if anyone has doubts. Not doing much with the phone, just a few (like 4) photos and SMS and some light browsing of Mastodon, I can get up to 12 or 13 hours with WiFi turned off (via hardware kill switch) at best - with WiFi on I land where kop316 is.

Both of these figures are way better than they were a year ago, back then I managed to get 8 to 9 hours with WiFi off.

There’s work happening to make suspending the phone an option (that’s how the less efficient PinePhone, that’s equipped with a smaller battery manages to deliver better battery life).

There‘s a script for waking the PinePhone up regularly to mitigate this: https://codeberg.org/Silmathoron/pinephone-autowake

> Of course, petrol costs a lot more in Germany than in the US. In practice, that tends to limit driving much more

Not really. People that drive a lot or like to save money just buy more fuel efficient cars - whenever I read about fuel efficiency of US cars (and bother to convert gallons and miles to units I understand) I am shocked how super inefficient many vehicles on the US market are, especially given that speed limit - likely due to much lower petrol cost.

One thing this article fails to mention is that in practice, you can mix and match and have e.g. Plasma Mobile apps on Phosh. Sadly, most distributions don’t do a good job at enabling this by default (as in preinstalling the qt5-wayland package (which usually is not in the dependency list) or setting the proper environment variables, so that people don’t have to figure these out on their own.

Also, video recording is (albeit obviously somewhat poorly and not up to todays standards) is possible, it‘s just that Megapixels, the de-facto default camera app, doesn’t have the feature.

If you wonder about Linux Phones, I try to weekly collect what has happened in the previous week on my blog [0]. If you‘re wondering about apps, check out this app list [1].

[0] https://linmob.net

[1] https://LinuxPhoneApps.org

Let's go back to your original point: That the PinePhone and Librem 5 are mentioned too often, and that (sorry if I get this slightly wrong) people should pay more attention to the Planet Computer Products, and devices supported by the UBports and postmarketOS projects.

Why are PP and L5 mentioned so often? They are available as new devices and that apparently has some value of its own in our society. They also have "unique" hardware features of arguably questionable usability (hardware kill switches), and are being used by many mobile Linux developers. That's why they are popular. It's not a conspiracy.

Regarding the Gemini and the Cosmo: While nice products in principle, they by design only attract a niche of users that want this form factor. While they in theory have Linux ports, these (except for the Sailfish X port for the Gemini) are unmaintained. Debian 9 "Stretch" is just not enough these days. Therefore and because the main Android OS also feels rather abandoned, there's not much interest in these devices. I would love to use them more, but there's just no interesting software and I don't have the time and resources currently to get that Debian port back to an acceptable state.

With regards to postmarketOS or Ubuntu Touch devices, especially those that also run postmarketOS stable (Community devices) I wholeheartedly agree. They do deserve more attention. These are really nice devices that are well supported and cheaply available.

But, sadly, having been a content creator in that field for a while I can tell you: Videos about these devices get way less clicks. This might be the self-amplifying effect that leads to less interest into these devices. It's sad, and if I ever make another video, I'll make it about a non-PINE, non-Librem phone only to then be asked in the comments why I don't share an update on the PinePhone or Librem 5 instead.

But PinePhone (and likely this is going to apply to the PinePhone Pro, too) is THE development platform for so many mobile Linux projects/distributions. Unless you go the Halium route (Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish OS, Droidian) and use an aged, often vulnerable vendor kernel, what’s the benefit of having multiple cameras, but none of it works? (I am not too sure about multiple camera support on Ubuntu Touch, afaik, the secondary camera of the Volla Phone is not being used, but I may be wrong there.

Hardware features do not matter if there’s no software support.

Also, at least the OG PinePhone works. It’s slow, screen-on battery life is lackluster, and some carriers are a pain, but it’s usable if you know what you’re doing.

This. The OnePlus 6 is a great choice. The Cosmo.. not so much. The available Debian is just broken at this point and has not been maintained for a while.

Sigh. How could they? Have you ever considered economies of scale and that PINE64 don’t make extra money from preinstalling crapware that tracks you?

It’s less bleak than one might think:

For tracing, at least Sailfish OS has an app called Contrac [1]. I looked into porting it over to other PinePhone OS, but with the CRUST and deep sleep, it would not really be useful there anyway (as it would not be active most of the time).

Regarding QR certificates, there’s Vakzination [2].

[1] https://www.flypig.co.uk/contrac

[2] https://invent.kde.org/plasma-mobile/vakzination

From reading OP I it sounds more like mobile-config-firefox is not installed and thus Firefox does not work properly.

I have two PinePhones and a Librem 5. I mostly use my 3GB/32GB postmarketOS CE PinePhone, running Arch Linux ARM, as I do blog [0] and try to maintain an app list [1] and testing new features or apps on Arch is just way easier, than on Debian (PureOS, Mobian) or on postmarketOS. The PinePhone is slow, but works mostly fine, so does the Librem 5, which is a tad faster spec wise, but generally feels more smooth.

Sadly, on both devices, the battery life is not what it should be. On the PinePhone, active use trashes the battery (no surprise if you have knowledge of ARM SoCs), but it lasts pretty long if you don't use it too much. With the Librem 5, active use is better, but as long as Purism don't implement a standby mode, 8-11 hours is all you get until you need to find an electrical outlet.

P.S.: I also have the Gigaset hardware that the Volla Phone is derived from, and run Ubuntu Touch on it. It's fine, but it does not run a mainline kernel, so it's a different kind of Linux phone and does not really compare 1:1 to Librem 5 and PinePhone.

[0] https://linmob.net [1] https://linmobapps.frama.io

Um, they are maintaining a distro. It’s called PureOS [0].

[0]: https://www.pureos.net

I don't think so, but I really should try running that on my PinePhone. Chatting might work, video chat would certainly require tons of tinkering with a slow Electron app.

Newer GPU = different SoC -> solving many solved problems once again.

Likely candidate SoC for a "PinePhone 2" is the RockChip RK3566, but I would not expect that before 2023 (if not later).

> Also, a large part of using a smart phone is the apps. Without apps the phone is just really a phone.

I attempt to list them all at https://linmobapps.frama.io.

Signal apps are an issue, for sure. Signal desktop can run, but it's not fun, because it's not responsive at all. Currently, the best alternative available imho is Axolotl, which is what I use.[0]

[0] https://github.com/nanu-c/axolotl

Once one (most likely GloDroid) will be closer to “this is now a working Android phone” I expect others to follow.

“Under-resourced” is a good way to put it. There’s often a lack of UX design and thus a lack of polish – since there’s often no money to be made, there’s little to no incentive to bring it up from “works for me” to “works for everybody seamlessly“.

(I’ll spare us all the Pareto 80%/20% theory here, although I am pretty sure that it applies here.)

The upside is that open source or free software features fewer (and often no) antipatterns modern proprietary software suffers from.

I had a FreeRunner back in the day and have had a PinePhone for over a year now, and it has gotten me back to blogging [0] and creating videos after years of not doing that.

The hardware choices are in so far better, as this looks like a normal phone, is not limited to GPRS in a world where connected services based on 3G are taking off, and there‘s also no graphics decelerator built in. Imho, the biggest design flaw is the size of the battery: You don’t get much screen on time with this.

The AllWinner A64 is clearly not the most advanced piece of Silicon though, and support in Linux for that old chip is still advancing so things are a lot better than they were a year ago.

As far as user space software is advancing, there‘s more and more coming which I try to list at [1].

The key difference here is that PINE64 is just providing the hardware and is not very involved in software at all. Thankfully Purism make software for their Librem 5 (which would have been shipping for real by now, but than a component shortage hit the industry), which also runs on PinePhone and works quite well.

Projects like Plasma Mobile are catching up, and long standing Mobile Linux efforts like Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch have also been ported over.

[0] https://linmob.net

[1] https://LINMOBapps.frama.io

I am not aware of any Replicant build for the PinePhone, otherwise I would have had to try it out and make a video about it [0]. GloDroid [1] has incomplete support for the PinePhone (no support for anything the EG25-G does), that‘s all in terms of Android aside from Anbox or WayDroid that run on top of Linux.

[0] https://linmob.net/videos

[1] https://github.com/GloDroid/glodroid_manifest/releases

I have been writing and doing a number of videos about the PinePhone on https://linmob.net.

There is not one interface, there are many. I personally like Purism's Phosh the best, as Plasma Mobile has had more problems for me. The typing experience is overall ok, but it's not fancy (no autocorrect on Phosh, no swiping on any keyboard). I think watching videos can help you getting an idea on that.

What needs to improve? Overall reliably. I've inevitably always run into slowness and lockups after some time (postmarketOS Phosh did best, I could go a week without reboot). But things are slowly coming together, even video acceleration is coming with a future GStreamer release.[1]

[1] http://briandaniels.me/2021/06/27/hardware-accelerated-video...

Aside from the generic documentation on Flathub I am not aware of any. That said, on recent Manjaro Plasma Mobile Betas it was simply enabled by default.

Regarding the articles complaint about not being able to use Flatpak on Manjaro Plasma Mobile: You totally can, it works with Discover, it's just not enabled by default.

There are a few Snapdragon 845 phones (PocoPhone F1, OnePlus 6(T) that are getting closer and to fully working with postmarketOS and/or Mobian. Maybe that’s something to look out for, currently IIRC the OnePlus 6 is the closest.

There are a few more than just these: https://linmobapps.frama.io

I have heard rumors that something on a level of a mid-range Android phone would already be on sale, but the component shortage has introduced delays.

I don’t think Anbox is not so much about man power. It’s for proprietary services or services that don’t have a decent Linux app. I recall the early days of Android very well [0], it had a similar lack of apps (then compared to Symbian and Windows Mobile). I don’t think it’s wise to say “this is not going to happen” one year after the first Community Edition PinePhones were delivered.

For an overview of the current PinePhone app landscape I suggest a look at https://LINMOBapps.frama.io – contributions welcome!

[0] I recently brought back old posts to my blog https://linmob.net that I wrote 1.2 years after the G1’s initial US release.

It‘s early days and phone cameras are 90 percent software. The PinePhone shows that with decent software even a potatocam can produce okay-ish photos, so I would not judge these early pictures too harshly.

On my current plan MMS cost about 50ct US. I am in Germany, I use matrix, so Purism’s priorities align with mine here. Let’s also not forget that good Matrix support was promised in the Librem 5 campaign, where the phone was marketed as IP native.

There’s also been a lot of of work going on to enable MMS, it’s just that they want to do it properly, which takes more time.

For now, if MMS were used here, I’d try to get it working via the Matrix implementation in chatty as described in [0] or via [1].

[0] https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_MMS_with_Matrix [1] https://git.sr.ht/~anteater/vgmms