They made an entire Linux-powered portable game system that's revolutionizing Linux gaming at the moment...an embedded engineer is not the same skillset as an app developer. Not even close.
SteamOS is open source with some closed sources component. But most important think you seems not being able to understand is that Valve provide high support to Open source community, which means it wouldn't be surprising if they decided to drop a open source phone.
SteamOS is open source with some closed sources component.
So it is not free software. It's proprietary, unethical software that takes away your freedom. Just like Windows, Android, etc.
But most important think you seems not being able to understand is that Valve provide high support to Open source community, which means it wouldn’t be surprising if they decided to drop a open source phone.
By doing what? They only want to lock you in their proprietary platform. Most of heir software is proprietary, their games are proprietary and they restrict users with DRM. It's a terrible company, which abuses their users. If Steam Deck contains proprietary software, why would their phone by anything different?
A lot of the libcamera work done on Raspberry Pi boards is going towards improving the camera support on linux phones like the PinePhone, which is great!
Aside from that, sadly a lot of people (including myself) are kind of fed up with Raspberry Pi, after they essentially abandoned their mission during Covid to please corporations, and are preparing to go public despite being a "charity". Broadcom, their SoC supplier, also has left a sour taste in my mouth after their purchase and mass layoffs at VMWare.
If they created a phone it would likely end up being scalped to death, and maybe pretty pricey compared to a PinePhone
Aside from that, sadly a lot of people (including myself) are kind of fed up with Raspberry Pi, after they essentially abandoned their mission during Covid to please corporations
Just out of curiosity, could you state what you think their mission was?
(I'm just wondering if anybody even remembers their original original mission.)
AFAIK their original mission was along the lines of making computers accessible at a low price point, particularly targeting the education sector in parts of the world where computers weren't very accessible or affordable. Comparable to the OLPC, but not on an individual basis
Don't forget that Raspberry PI can't run a mainline Linux kernel. You can't install an official Debian build on it for example. I don't get why people are ok with that.
They seem to have resolved their supply chain issues for now. I could buy a Pi 5 and have it dispatched tomorrow, and I did buy a Pi 4b recently, no issues with delays or lead times.
Maybe it'd be the first "specialty" phone with decent specs. I always get excited for these "specialty" type phones like "Linux on my PHONE? Fuck yea!"
Until I look at the specs and it's crap every single time and then I'm just disappointed, like the PinePhone Pro has just 4GB LPDDR4 (No not even the good LPDDR4x) lmao like what is this, 2015?? Lolol
Everything that matters is open source and upstreamed or on the way there. Haven't kept up with the state of things but as far as I am aware you can already run a mainline kernel on the Deck. Would love to see an open phone you can easily run your own distribution on without jumping through hoops.
But phones are hard. An x86 phone with decent battery life is even harder. But one can dream.
It's certainly great that you can install any distro with mainline kernel on the deck (even if some things don't work). But my point was that Valve doesn't care about user freedom. Their OS and the Steam client are proprietary. If they made a GNU/Linux phone, there is no guarantee that you would be able to install a free distro and it almost certainly would come with non free software by default, which would be bad.
Would love to see an open phone you can easily run your own distribution on without jumping through hoops.
I think PinePhone Pro and Librem 5 can run a mainline kernel. It's possible that some things won't work, but a lot of stuff has been upstreamed. I'm curious if you can easily install an ARM build of Debian on them, but couldn't find any information last time I looked it up.
But phones are hard. An x86 phone with decent battery life is even harder. But one can dream.
Oh yeah, that is the dream. I wonder how are the current mobile Ryzen CPUs. I'm curious if there is any that could work well in a phone.
There is a Debian spin for the Pinephone called Mobian. I ran that for quite a while with Phosh as the front end. It's probably still installed on the device.
What I hate about ARM is that you basically need a separate image for every device instead of one for everything like with x86.
I use Mobian with Phosh too! What I love about Mobian is that it's just a small overlay on top of Debian. The project's goal is literally to upstream everything into Debian and to stop existing. You can see that it doesn't add a lot of packages: https://packages.mobian.org
Yeah, you are right about ARM. It seems to be true about RISC-V as well. It's so weird that so many people think those kinds of devices will be good for us. Sometimes I watch reviews of single board computers on YouTube and the reviewers never mention that the device can't run mainline Linux. They can't install Debian from debian.org on them. So instead they install some distro provided by the manufacturer and for some reason they are just fine with that. Raspberry PI is the same and almost nobody seems to be talking about this. So that's why I'm not sure if you can install a normal distro on PinePhone Pro or Librem 5, even though they can run mainline Linux.
Also ARM SoC manufacturers don't seem to try to have upstream Linux support. So I think that's why PinePhone uses a 2010 SoC (if I remember correctly) and Pro uses a 2016 SoC. It's a bad platform.
Linux phones will need to run established Android apps to get users, devs won't move where there is no users, users won't move there if there aren't apps. It's almost cyclical
Right now we're working with people who are exceptions to this, users who want to experiment and devs who don't care about money.
Then you run far, far away from that app. Even on an Android phone I don't trust garbage apps that require locked bootloader and no root. There are plenty of banks out there and paying with your phone is not a necessity.
I went through probably 20 different iterations of keycaps and got close to one I liked, but haven't gotten back to finishing the project since I haven't been using my PinePhone much. I think the main remaining thing is to make an Enter key model and a Tab key model. I want to get back to that project eventually but haven't had time.
Not really, it's been a hassle to get them consistent enough to match the default ones. The small scale makes printing them difficult even after I got a resin printer for the project. I settled on a two piece design that works pretty well but the resin material is not as smooth as the injection molded stock caps.
LineageOS doesn't support Play Integrity either. Custom ROMs seem to be doing just fine.
There's the stories about "I have to have Windows because the school's exam proctor software requires Windows and doesn't work with Linux" but ultimately that's not the thing that stops the year of the linux desktop. And banking apps won't be what breaks the year of the linux phone.
Thats a fair point, i never tried banking on waydroid. Most of the stuff i would need on the go seemed fine though.
Although, as far as tap to pay goes, i could see that getting baked into linux properly. I dont believe apple pay and google pay tap pay are using a different protocol. I may very well be wrong though.
It's not about the protocols. It's about business. We can have all the tech we want but until someone is willing to establish relationships with and pay the 3-4 middlemen involved in every single card payment it ain't happening.
We have Waydroid which is close enough. It needs some quality of life improvements for better integration with the native Linux ecosystem but it runs Android apps just fine on Linux phones.
Agreed. Classic story that has been repeated several times over the years. Ecosystem is everything.
Microsoft's Windows phones were fantastic. They had super nice hardware, high refresh rate screens, better cameras on their flagship models than iPhones at the time.
They were sleek, fast, the Windows tile UI actually worked great on a phone touchscreen. But it didn't matter to most consumers because they didn't have apps. MS had their own business apps...and that was about it. Didn't matter that every other aspect of the phones were great, people couldn't do what they wanted to on the Windows phones, so they didn't buy them.
I would love to see something like Proton but for .apks instead of Windows executables. If it were as easy to install and run android apps on a mobile Linux OS as it is now to install and play Windows games on Linux, we would be in a great place to see a proper Linux phone.
GNU/Linux is not aimed at people who want the most features. It's made for people who value freedom above everything else.
I would love to see something like Proton but for .apks instead of Windows executables. If it were as easy to install and run android apps on a mobile Linux OS as it is now to install and play Windows games on Linux, we would be in a great place to see a proper Linux phone.
You mean Waydroid? I've read that it works pretty well.
Absolutely yes! I think this is what killed the reasonably good Windows Phones. I liked them anyway. They did what phones were supposed to do and were dirt cheap. But if you searched for any of the top 50 apps you'd find some fake BS. Like when I searched for Pandora you got an app that was nothing more than a 3-4 page summary about how Pandora was the planet in James Cameron's Avatar.
The goal of GNU/Linux is not to make it possible to run proprietary apps (but if you really need to run Android apps you can use Waydroid). It's to create a fully libre operating system that people can use.
Linux phones just need good linux software support. And then the linux user base will switch over, and everyone who isn't simply won't use it.
I actually genuinely do not want android developers on linux. I refuse to pay for a launcher. My entire workstation OS is developed by volunteers. Genuinely every single android app i have ever interacted with has pretty much exclusively disappointed me. It's just a bad ecosystem.
In the same way that the linux community doesn't need the developers of every application ever on it to thrive amongst itself, the linux phone doesnt need android developers to develop apps for it. It just needs better support for linux applications that already exist.
The only reason I will disagree: there's already a major FOSS ecosystem on Android. There are tons of high quality free apps that aren't FOSS
Linux isnt even that popular on desktop, my point is that people will not move if their pre established software use case is not avaliable. I won't. I know many people who won't.
And if there aren't users, there won't be people making quality software to cover wide variety of usecases and get support, if there isn't quality software that covers a wide variety of use cases and get support there won't be users. You need to start somewhere, it's why the windows phone failed. No devs, so no users, and because no users, no devs.
I still don't see your point. You're assuming that android users will want to use a linux phone in the first place. They don't and they wont. And that's fine.
The only market that the linux phone has to cater to in order to develop successfully is the existing linux desktop market. The vast majority of those people are likely to want and use a linux phone. Which will actually improve the phone. And possibly even in the future bring in android developers and apps.
I don't understand why you're fixing on it growing, it's just a hardware market, system76 already exists, pine already exists, linux users already exist. We exist as a bubble in a larger space and that's ok. That's the beauty of the unix/linux philosophy.
Realistically this is like releasing a 10,000 dollar workstation/server cpu and then having the general public complain about it being inaccessible, even though it literally wasn't meant for them.
I'm sure there's a lot of good apps. I've used a few good ones, but it's objectively worse than software on linux.
File browsers have almost universally just been awful. Horrid, and almost completely unusable. I've tried more than should exist really.
There are other questionable apps, which exist, do what they claim to do perfectly well, but have no utility for anything particularly useful. Even stuff like jerboa is just generally lacking in features. That is also an experience on linux so not really a huge complaint, but i really genuinely don't see why people like android so much.
Everyone saying Android is completely missing the point. I mean yeah, it runs the linux kernel, but i feel like most of yall wouldn't call ChromeOS linux on the other hand.
The obvious connotations are privacy, choice, wayland/x11 support, a useful terminal, a rich foss ecosystem, and arch btw.
I'd agree with you in the context of standard (google) android.
One caveat that I'd like to highlight, though, is that for me GrapheneOS and F-Droid handily achieve the privacy and rich FOSS ecosystem parts. Useful terminal depends on your definition :) but for my use case Termux fills the void.
It doesn't feel like Linux (you can't even use Wifi and Ethernet at the same time for crying out loud) but for a relatively cheap low-power device, I like the flexibility.
It's far enough from being a foot gun that I can give a Pixel 5 with GrapheneOS and some F-Droid apps to my grandmother and know she'll have no problems. Balancing that with having enough extensibility to scratch the itch for 99% of tinkerers is a feat to appreciate in my view.
My point is really just that it is an entirely different software stack than the traditional linux experience. I cant just download the source for a standard linux app and compile it for android, it needs to be ported.
I think pinephone and librem are the closest we have gotten to a proper linux phone. But the specs suck, and the mobile optimized app ecosystem isnt there yet. Thats the point of the op meme.
I can confirm that my PinePhone runs the same software that I run on my desktop. I usually don't even need to compile anything, since a lot of packages in Debian repo have an ARM version. Not all apps have responsive UIs and some of the old ones lack touch support, though. But that is something that keeps improving over time (GNOME 4 and libhandy for example). You can also use CLI programs if you want.
Daily drivin Manjaro (Plasma mobile) on my Pinephone Pro for over a year now. If you are not into the whole "taking pictures all the time" thing you can easiy use it as a daily driver. (This message was typed on it)
Android devices run deprecated Linux kernels that have a bunch of proprietary binary blobs plopped onto them, so technically "Linux", but not an easily updateable mainline kernel like most people are referring to when talking about "Linux."
Debian is GNU/Linux and that's what almost always people mean when they say Linux. Android is not GNU/Linux and doesn't even use the mainline Linux kernel - just some old, heavily modified version.
Mobian or Manjaro ARM on the other hand are GNU/Linux distributions. They run the same software that you can run on your desktop distro.
I thought you could just use the Android open source project? I thought the tracking was mostly baked into Google's flavor of Android not the open source product
I don’t know if a phone that uses the open source version as base. Usually they build off open source or google and add in all the manufacturer/carrier bloat. For me to get off One Plus’s built in OS I had to go through this whole process on their website to get the code to unlock the boot loader.
I have lineage os as a replacement and it’s really cool. My mobile internet stopped working on it though :( my next phone is gonna roll with Graphene
Same, on desktop and mobile. I don't know if it's funny or sad that a community called "linuxmemes" can't tell the difference between Linux, GNU/Linux and Android.
I mean not technically.. those products use a separent kernel that has its own development path away from the Linux kernel. Linux is just a compatible Unix kernel but I wouldn't classify it as a Unix operating system since it diverges into its own thing.
Android still uses the Linux kernel not some piece of code that they developed and not some commercial Unix product
GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix!",[6][12] chosen because GNU's design is Unix-like, but differs from Unix by being free software and containing no Unix code.[6][13][14] Stallman chose the name by using various plays on words, including the song The Gnu.[4]: 45:30
See, this is why, yet again, Stallman was right: insisting on "GNU/Linux" is necessary in order to disambiguate between the fully-Free Software OS and bastardized half-proprietary stuff like Android.
Exactly. Even in this community and in this post people keep mixing Linux, GNU/Linux and Android. It's crazy that even people who use this operating system are confused. Almost always when they say Linux they really mean GNU/Linux. Linux Mint or Arch Linux are GNU/Linux. But Android isn't and it doesn't even use the mainline Linux kernel.
The issue of freedom is a separate thing, because even most GNU/Linux distros contain proprietary software just like Android.
I guess most ppl who are supporting the gnu/linux phone are the ones who want a similar apple like features like how the prism os had promised to provide.
gnu/linux is ironically a fair point in this context. But to uhm ackshually you, chromeos is technically based on chromiumos which is technically based on the linux kernel.
Fair but Ubuntu Touch is not mainline Linux. It's a hack to get a GNU/systemd Userland working with an Android kernel (which arguably is also a huge feat)
Sure, but PMOS is by far the most complete and "daily-ready" mobile mainline Linux distro out there. In fact I'm pretty sure both Mobian and MoA use the PMOS kernels...
I haven't used postmarketOS, but I don't see why it would be any better than Mobian or Manjaro (Manjaro might not be the most stable though). Maybe you are talking about Android phones, in which case you are probably right - other distros might not support those so well. postmarketOS and other distros don't use mainline Linux, so I don't know why you would call them that, though. For me this is the biggest flaw of GNU/Linux phones.
I know that postmarketOS developers contribute a lot in different areas, but so do Mobian developers. I think the kernel we use was initially developed by Megi.
In the US store it costs 200$ for the original PinePhone and 400$ for the Pro version. The EU store is a little more expensive.
I'm not the person you asked, but I've had mine for 2 years.
Pros:
free software and freedom (and with that increased privacy and security)
runs the same software that you can run on desktop as long as it has an ARM build (a lot of Debian packages do) or you compile it yourself - this includes not just apps, but also terminal programs and servers
killswitch to power off the proprietary modem for when you don't want phone carrier tracking you
like in other modern phones the modem is isolated (here it's connected over USB)
multiple distros to choose from
multiple desktop environments to choose from
replacable battery
headphone jack
replacement parts available in case you break something
you can boot from the microSD card, so distro hopping is easy
can run Android apps through Waydroid
Cons:
slow - you are running modern software on an old SoC (the Pro version is faster, but still slow compared to modern phones)
not all GNU/Linux apps have a responsive UI that works well on mobile
some old apps might not have touch support
short battery life - the SoC is not very energy efficient. Possible workarounds: get the keyboard addon with builtin battery (but it makes the phone bigger and heavier), carry spare batteries with you, or buy/3D print a bigger case and use a bigger battery
runs hot
GPS isn't super accurate
audio quality during phone calls isn't great
the non-pro version might not be able to run a mainline kernel, so you might not be able to install a desktop distro on it
the Pro version should be able to run a mainline kernel, but there might be things that don't work
experience with GNU/Linux is required
sometimes workarounds are needed - for me, on Mobian stable sometimes the modem or wifi don't wake up from suspend and I have to reset it with a script (I added it to the apps menu for quick access, but it's still annoying)
[on original PinePhone] bad camera and the default app can only take pictures - there is a script for recording video, but then there is no preview
I'm not sure if you can use the camera as a webcam in most software
[might depend on the model] video playback is not GPU accelerated, so it makes the CPU hot and drains battery and you might be limited to 1080p@30fps or 720p
you can run a stable distro with old software and old bugs (and sometimes things change very fast) or a less stable one with current software, but then things will sometimes break after update and you will have to fix it (probably more than on desktop)
on Mobian stable (old software) the proximity sensor acts weird during a call and sometimes you can't see the screen
no Xbox gamepad support in Mobian stable (but Playstation gamepads work)
they keyboard addon isn't perfect and requires some setup
with the keyboard addon I can't plug in any USB devices to the phone and I don't know why - charging works though
[original PinePhone] uses micro SIM standard instead of nano SIM
sometimes there is screen flickering in non-pro version
killswitches could be a bit easier to flip (they are very small)
[on original PinePhone] poor 3D performance (even SuperTuxKart doesn't run smoothly), WebGL doesn't seem to work (at least for 3D)
not a lot of RAM, so you can't run too many apps at once or have too many browser tabs open - you can still run Electron apps, though (just not too many at once)
no push notifications, so if you want to be notified when you get a message in some app, while the phone is suspended, you would have to setup a script to wake the phone up periodically
Edit: I corrected a mistake with the SIM card. I turns out that PinePhone Pro uses nano SIM and it's only the original PinePhone that uses micro SIM
Youre a treasure trove of information my friend. One of those lemmings that really keeps this place running with content and helpful stuff at that. Thanks mate! :)
They are all equally capable in my opinion. I really think it’s down to personal preference. I’m not sure if it’s still a thing, but the multiboot SD card images wereVERYhelpful for me.
I used mine on T-Mobile almost daily. It worked okay. Think of early Android days where everyone had their own custom rom and none of them were as smooth as you felt they should be.
Yeah it just means if someone rang the phone would still be routed to my e-sim. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I am waiting for the right combination of time and energy to add all my chats into matrix bridges on my server. Not having a direct phone to call would almost be ideal... 🤔
I haven't used it on the PinePhone or PinePhone Pro in a while, but Waydroid is solid on my OnePlus 6T with postmarketOS. Android apps that only need an Internet connection work fine. I installed microG and have push notifications working for Discord and Teams. However, notifications don't get passed through to the Linux side so they only show if you open the Android UI. Screen rotation doesn't work on Waydroid which can be very annoying. Apps that use other hardware features such as location, Bluetooth, vibration, access to calls/texts won't work properly.
I was downvoted before for suggesting the Pinetab is not a viable Android or iPad replacement. That thing doesn't even have a working wifi driver yet, you have to plug in a dongle just to connect to wifi. I'd love to have good smart devices running Linux one day, but we're not there yet.
I'm quite optimistic about a usable Linux phone in the near future, maybe 5 years from now or so. When smartphones were a new thing, it was really hard for open source projects without a major company backing them to keep up with all the new developments. Hence all the projects that died out. But innovation on smartphones has basically come to a halt these days. Sure, your phone can get a little bit faster and have round displays now, but nobody cares anymore. Nothing of all that is essential. So, give it some time, we'll get there.
I'm optimistic about the apps and desktop environments. We have made huge progress. But the problem is the hardware support. It seems that there are very few ARM SoCs, which work well with the mainline Linux kernel. So PinePhone uses a 2010 SoC and PinePhone Pro a 2016 SoC. And after all that time and despite community's efforts to upstream everything, the mainline support is still not complete and we still use custom kernels.
Yes, but that's exactly my point. The need for hardware support shrinks if the hardware doesn't change every few months. A chip from a few years ago is still very fine. That was not the case in 2009.
Yeah, I guess specific would be a better word. Like if having a good terminal emulator and SSH client is more important to you than having access to Android apps.
Thats pretty much my use case. I run a legacy iphone (i know) and terminal apps arent great so far. I often need to work on the go and carrying a laptop everywhere is tedious. Having a phone with a „simple“ linux OS and terminal emulator would be awesome.
You can run any GNU/Linux program on it as long as it has an ARM build (a lot of them do) or you compile it for ARM. There is also the keyboard addon (https://pine64.org/documentation/Phone_Accessories/Keyboard/), but it makes the phone bigger.
Thats very cool. I‘m still wondering it the pinephone would work for me. I use like 5 apps regularly (obviously would find others I dont recognize as using):
Homeassistant (could use web interface)
Easypark (probably the most problematic to find)
Sonos (might be able to use an open source version such as on debian)
Fluffychat
Voyager for Lemmy
The rest is mostly functions I „need“ but dont need specific apps for.
Pictures (taking and viewing, maybe nextcloud upload but that could be done by a script as well)
Web browser
Music
Calls
I think thats about it… Do you think that could work?
Edit: I have a stupid idea! I fondly remember my blackberry from back in the day. Obviously its not for the mainstream but pinephone isnt either. Wouldnt a step back to a blackberry design be pretty awesome for us nerds? :)
It's hard to say if it will work for you. For some people it does and for others it doesn't. It's just something you would have to see for yourself and it might require some time to set everything up the way you want it. It's a device that requires tinkering. Voyager seems to have a web version and so does FluffyChat. I use Nheko Matrix client (available in Mobian/Debian repo) - it's a native app that works pretty well. I don't know about the other apps, but in general you can run Android apps through Waydroid. Maybe those would work too.
There are no push notifications, so if you want the phone to suspend and still receive Matrix notifications, you would have to setup a script that will wake the phone up periodically.
Pictures (taking and viewing, maybe nextcloud upload but that could be done by a script as well)
This works on the original PinePhone, but the camera itself is pretty bad. PinePhone Pro has a decent one, but I'm not sure what the current state of that is. My understanding is that it works, but the pictures might not look that great. I think it's only one guy working on the camera app and he is currently working on a new version: https://blog.brixit.nl/fixing-the-megapixels-sensor-linearization/. For syncing files with a desktop I use SyncThing, but Nextcloud should probably work too. For sending just a few specific files from time to time you could use KDE Connect or even just SSH.
Web browser
That works. I use Firefox. PinePhone doesn't have a lot of RAM, though, so you won't be able to have a lot of tabs open at once.
Music
Definitely works. I use Lollypop app (available in Mobian/Debian), which works well on a mobile screen. The phone has a headphone jack if you need it. The speaker isn't very good.
Calls
This works, but audio quality during phone calls isn't always good. There also seem to be some modem issues on PinePhone Pro: https://zerwuerfnis.org/daily-driving-the-pinephone-pro. I think it's currently recommended to install the free modem firmware and I'm not sure if the author was using that (the phone doesn't come with it installed).
I'm not sure if MMS works (SMS does), since I don't use that. Support for emergency broadcasts is now being added to Phosh: https://phosh.mobi/posts/cellbroadcast/
You should also know that the battery life isn't very good. So if you use the phone a lot, you might need either an extended battery case or spare batteries (the battery is replaceable) or the keyboard addon.
Edit: I have a stupid idea! I fondly remember my blackberry from back in the day. Obviously its not for the mainstream but pinephone isnt either. Wouldnt a step back to a blackberry design be pretty awesome for us nerds? :)
I don't know which one you mean, but I would love to have a slider keyboard! Technically you could make one and I've been wondering how hard that would be. PinePhone has some pins on the back that you could use - one of them is i2c. The keyboard addon from Pine64 uses them (they have other addons too). It's probably a lot of work to make something like that, though.
I've been daily driving Ubuntu Touch on the Fairphone 4 for over a year. I love it, even if some features are lacking. Calling and text is stable, but unfortunately Volte support is still missing. Waydroid is also working great.
ironically, the fact that i would genuinely rather spend my money on a pinephone as opposed to an android should go to show how little i care for android devices.
it's a fun toy, not super useful but probably fun to tinker with
I've done some ungodly stuff to my android phones (even non-rooted ones, I'm totally abusing them) and I can't even imagine all the possibilities with a proper linux distro. Having a pocket pc with a full arm64 linux sounds awesome
There seems to be some progress with the call audio issue, so it might get fixed soon. As for WhatsApp you can probably run that with Waydroid (but eventually you should switch to some free software messenger).
My bad I have not phrased my sentence properly, I am already using signal and with hopes that WhatsApp allows ppl to send messages to another WhatsApp number from my preferred app here signal then I can communicate with my friends and colleagues
Between October 2018 to April 2023 I used as my daily drivers a series of phones (OnePlus One, Meizu Pro 5, Volla Phone, Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro) all flashed to running Ubuntu Touch. During this time UT (Ubuntu Touch) was less developed than it is now, in that Waydroid (which allows using some Android apps over a Lineage OS container that boots on top of UT) did not yet exist, and Libertine (which allows some Linux desktop apps built for Ubuntu arm64 deb to be installed) was not as functional. And yet is still worked great for my modest needs (e.g. I don't do banking, or any kind of more advanced gaming, on my phones).
The reason I reverted last year to de-googled Android ("vanilla" Bliss ROM on a Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro) is that being in the USA, the carriers here have closed or are closing down all their 3G/2G networks, and requiring VoLTE for phone calls. While UT supports LTE for mobile data without a problem, given that VoLTE is a proprietary closed protocol with implementation varying between carrier, oem and device, the only device which UT currently has VoLTE support for (and which is still shaky) is the PinePhone Pro.
Anyhoo - the UT dev community is pretty small, but definitely dedicated, and still offers some promise into the future for a nice privacy respecting alternative OS for mobile devices and tablets. Hopefully at some point VoLTE, and a few other issues gets figured out for it so I can return to using it for my daily driver - in the meantime I've got it on a OnePlus 5t as a secondary device, and on a Lenovo x306f 10" tablet.
The loss of Dalton Durst from that team from burnout was a big hit. They've been doing work on it but I haven't seen anything approaching the output they had when he was heading it up.
Dalton is an amazing and very cool guy, and when he left it was indeed a big hit to dev speed at first, but recently a few super smart and dedicated guys have been able to do a big jump in updating the base from 16.04 to 20.04 (which involved moving from upstart to systemd) and they are getting close to rebasing to 24.04 (target for this is this June in fact). Plus Waydroid support has gotten really good in the time since Dalton moved on, and snap support is getting worked on now as well.
I am talking about VoLTE (Voice over LTE) which is the protocol just for making phone calls over 4g networks - NOT 4g/LTE mobile data! Ubuntu Touch has worked well with 4g/LTE mobile data for 10 years now.
Yes, while you can still do 3g/2g phone calling in most of Europe, the only hold out in the US for this is that T-mobile still has 2g calling in some areas, but they have announced that this will be shut down sometime in the soonish future (it was scheduled to be all shutdown of April this year, but they announced this was delayed to a time tbd, likely in order to continue to serve all the ATM's and iot devices that are still running "legacy" systems being used beyond supposed eol). Which is why I reverted to using de-googled AOSP for my daily driver - I like to be able to use my phone as a phone after all.
My Nokia N900 ran Linux back in the day, and was a more polished experience than the iPhone it was then contemporary with. Too bad that particular line went precisely nowhere.
Not officially, from what I recall. That was possibly one of the plans for it's alleged successor, the N950, which turned out to be vaporware. Sailfish OS then went to be used on the first Jolla Phone, which probably sold in single digit numbers. Jolla now manufactures nothing, although they apparently continue to develop Sailfish for licensing to embedded applications, and their main deal seems to be the "Appsupport" compatibility layer for Android apps to run on Linux.
Starry-eyed me bought a pine phone and a librem5, and for both of them it was pretty much turn it on, about 5 minutes of navigating the UIs and suffering the performance, and putting it right back in the box for my own personal museum where they'll be safe and sound and kept in prime condition until they're thrown away some day when I'm dead.
Purism has contributed a lot to the software development. They hire developers who work on Phosh (mobile desktop environment). So by buying their phone, you have at least contributed to the cause.
It would be really hard to get an established manufacture to pick up Linux as an operating system. Most people get a Samsung phone if they can afford it and a Motorola if they can't in the states.
I'd be surprised if my family has done any research before picking up a phone outside of is it a Samsung.
I tried to daily drive a PinePhone for a long time, then a PinePhone Pro. It is not really ready. Too many dropped/failed to answer calls and missed texts. I love having a fully capable Linux PC in my pocket and am typing this on my OnePlus 6T with postmarketOS, but as a phone it is not ideal. My setup now is that I have a OnePlus 6 with stock Android and my main SIM for doing phone stuff (calls, texts, some apps, Bluetooth handsfree) and the OnePlus 6T with pmOS for Linux experimentation and doing pocket computer things (browsing, coding, SSH, VPN, testing Waydroid). I got a second cheap SIM so I can have service on both devices, but as the 6T with pmOS can't receive calls in 4G mode it really doesn't work as a phone. The PinePhones can work as a phone but the modem dropouts make it less than ideal and their battery life and performance leave much to be desired while the OP6T has fairly good performance and battery life on pmOS.
I daily drive mine and haven't noticed any missed calls, but maybe I'm just lucky or it's the Pro version that has the issue. The battery life can be increased with extended cases, but the performance will always suck and there are lots of annoying software issues too.
I had call drops on both the original and the Pro. They both use the same USB-attached modem and the modem has (had?) an issue where it would lose USB connection to the main processor sometimes, so you would just randomly lose cell connectivity. Sometimes the USB connection would restart right away and sometimes it would not and you'd have to restart eg25 manager to reboot the modem.
Ah, I see. It's often hard to tell if some issue is still there if I don't experience it myself. Some things get solved eventually, but you have to run the latest software (and I'm not) and then test things to see it. I think nowadays people recommend to install the libre modem firmware, so that's also another variable.
I had this issue using the libre modem firmware on both phones. I'm not sure if it's a modem side issue or a Linux side issue. I haven't used either PinePhone with a SIM card in almost a year though so my knowledge could be outdated.
Thanks for clarifying. I also use the libre firmware and sometimes the modem doesn't wake up from suspend when I unlock the phone (I sometimes also have to restart wifi with a script). So maybe I just didn't notice the missed calls or something.
Lately I found that there is some USB controller and I saw some messages about it when running dmesg:
So maybe that causes the modem issues. When I use the keyboard addon, I can't get any USB device to work when plugging it to the phone and I suspect that might be a connected problem too. I don't know much about hardware, tough.
Wifi keeps waking up the phone, draining the battery, then craps out when you want to use it. The camera has like 5fps with 1998 flip phone quality. Forget about multi tasking. It connects to the cell network so calling and texting should work. Want to use an app for something? Too bad.
That’s my experience from two years ago, I had the distro hopping sd card and tried all os versions at the time. It’s just not there yet.
The only use I see is dropping it somewhere and then using it as a jump host over lte, but I haven’t tested that.
I have a PinePhone Pro and if the battery would last longer than a few hours, it would totally work as a daily driver. Fast enough and can do everything I need it to do, but 3-4 hour battery life. If someone can figure that part out, I think it'll be good enough for at least early adopters.
I bought the keyboard addon with the extra battery and that has increased my og PinePhone's battery life a lot. So maybe give that a try. The downside is that it makes the phone pretty big and it might not always fit in your pocket. But it might be useful while traveling for example.
For PinePhone Pro there is also some proprietary firmware, which is supposed to help. Are you using that? I probably wouldn't want to install it, but it's supposed to increase the battery life to that of the original PinePhone.
A lot has changed in 2 years. But the camera on the original PinePhone will always be bad, since it's a 5 megapixel camera. For that reason nobody has even bothered to implement video recording, but there are scripts, which will let you do that.
Can't do anything about the camera, but there are extended battery cases that you can get. I got the keyboard addon with the battery and that helps, but it's also pretty big and heavy.
What are we doubting? That their friend runs a pinephone? I agree.
I have a pinephone and pinephone pro. and neither one has felt good enough to be a daily driver. but then again, i havent really tried using it since like february 2022 when I got the pro. maybe the software has gotten a ton better since then. (I dont have high hopes. Drew Devault has a real nice blog post about pine64 chasing devs away: here)
Realistically all I need in a phone is password manager, phone app, camera, signal. And I dont think I ever had any of those things work in a "actually reliable and smooth enough for daily driving" state.
I believe you, but the hard part about "It was good enough for me" is that an old Nokia brick phone is "good enough" for some people. I have no idea what your standards are.
Maybe there's a way to get it to that state. But the lock screen on my pinephone pro stutters, much less "making apps work". I was able to do all the things I wanted to do, it just was a horrible experience.
I bought two pinephones. I REALLY want this to work out. I'm not some sort of anti-linux phone antagonist. I've tried to make it work personally. I would love to know what the setup (what OS, phosh, etc?) I need to make my devices work great, if they are truly that usable.
The "official" state of the software from pine64.org itself states the modem crashes often and results in missed calls, camera still a WIP, and no push notifications when the phone sleeps (so the phone just never sleeps, thus the terrible battery, i presume).
"Good enough" feels like it's only true if you're the kind of person who otherwise argues that smart phones are bad, and not if you're the kind of person who uses your phone as a multi-tool in your pocket.
I believe you, but the hard part about “It was good enough for me” is that an old Nokia brick phone is “good enough” for some people.
The main difference is that the old Nokia phone runs proprietary software. You also can't run any desktop programs or apps on it. But PinePhone requires GNU/Linux experience and sometimes workarounds are needed.
The “official” state of the software from pine64.org itself states the modem crashes often and results in missed calls
I haven't noticed any missed calls on my original PinePhone, so this is surprising. I don't have the Pro version to check, but the cited bug report is a year old, so it might be no longer the case. On the other hand, this recent blog post says there are some issues with the modem and some other strange bugs. That would be a shame, because it's been 2 years since its release and I was hoping to switch to it at some point.
no push notifications when the phone sleeps (so the phone just never sleeps, thus the terrible battery, i presume).
There are no push notifications. So you won't be notified when you receive a message in some app, while the phone is suspended. As a workaround you can use a script to wake the phone up periodically. Short battery life is caused by an old and inefficient SoC, not by software, so there is nothing we can do about that other than getting a bigger case and a bigger battery (some people do that).
The main difference is that the old Nokia phone runs proprietary software.
The point was that different people have different standards. There are a lot of people on places like HN that will say things like "People use their phone too much, a Nokia has everything that everyone needs! That's what I use!" without accounting for other people's use cases. That's a very self centric view. I need X, some people might need X+Y or X-Z. If you have to hedge your "it's good enough" with "if you can handle these 100 workarounds" then it's more accurate to say "it's not good enough, unless you're ok dealing with these 100 workarounds."
I haven’t noticed any missed calls on my original PinePhone
That's awesome. I rarely answer phone calls anyway, so that doesn't impact me much. This was purely reflective of the state of things. "Probably fine" and "definitely works" can be a MAJOR difference in the scope of daily driver readiness for most people.
camera
The camera on my pinephone actually opens and can take pictures. it just looks terrible. To the degree that I'm at least 75% sure that it's a sensor issue, and no amount of software tuning is going to bring the sensor up to the level of other phones. Considering my primary use for my phone is taking pictures, "the camera works, but its terrible" doesn't fit my use case (admittedly, this may be a specific to me use case).
no push notifications
Oh. yeah. That's probably a deal breaker for most people too.
And to re-iterate. I can totally see this being a usable device. I own two. I've seen how it can perform. and I'm excited for the possibilities. It just feels a bit too jank for me still, and im pretty tolerant of jank. If other people are more tolerant than me, I applaud them.
The point was that different people have different standards.
Ah, you are right about that. But I do wish that freedom was the main goal for people, because that's the point of the Free Software movement. Switching to GNU/Linux is inconvenient too and there might be things that a person won't be able to do on it. Obviously an average person won't be able to handle a PinePhone, so I don't have hope they will try (and they probably shouldn't), but an average GNU/Linux user might. It all depends on how much a person values freedom. But at the same time I understand that getting freedom is usually a gradual journey, which might take a lot of time.
That’s awesome. I rarely answer phone calls anyway, so that doesn’t impact me much. This was purely reflective of the state of things. “Probably fine” and “definitely works” can be a MAJOR difference in the scope of daily driver readiness for most people.
I also don't answer many phone calls, so it's possible I was just lucky or haven't noticed.
The camera on my pinephone actually opens and can take pictures. it just looks terrible. To the degree that I’m at least 75% sure that it’s a sensor issue, and no amount of software tuning is going to bring the sensor up to the level of other phones. Considering my primary use for my phone is taking pictures, “the camera works, but its terrible” doesn’t fit my use case (admittedly, this may be a specific to me use case).
If you are talking about the original PinePhone, then yes, it's a 5 megapixel camera and it will always be terrible. PinePhone Pro's camera is much better, though. There seems to be a lot of very technical stuff that goes into making pictures look good. For example stuff like auto-exposure and color correction. Here is a quote from the developer of the Megapixels camera app from the blog post that I linked:
Making a piece of software that dumps camera frames from V4L2 into a file is not very difficult to do, that's only a few hundred lines for C code. Figuring out why the pictures look cheap is a way harder challenge.
I have a separate camera for taking photos, but I understand the need to have one in a phone that you can take with you everywhere.
Oh. yeah. That’s probably a deal breaker for most people too.
Yeah, push notifications probably won't be solved for a while. There is some hope, though:
Internal WDS (Wireless Data Service) Client (in BETA!, expect problems)
Allows you to connect to the internet directly from the modem's userspace (only IPv4 for now, sorry!)
Allows for always on networking in the modem no matter if your PinePhone is sleeping
2 years is a lot of time. Things have changed a lot since then. The community and Purism are the ones developing the software. Pine64 has nothing to do with it.
Out of all the things you just mentioned, Signal is the only one that won't work, because it requires an Android/iOS app. You can't use it on desktop by itself either. But you could try running the Android version with Waydroid. I use Matrix instead.
I'm sure it has. Pine64 has nothing to do with it, but it's their hardware, so they should. And the point of Drew's blog was that they did a nice job of disincentivizing the community. so the community is smaller than it could have been.
And "work" here being a shorthand for "work to satisfactory levels".
The camera works on my pinephone, and it takes pictures that remind me of the digital camera I had in 1999 that saved images to floppy disks.
Bitwarden would run, but it was running as a desktop app and was a pain to use (no lib handy here), and it obviously wasn't going to offer to auto fill across the entire OS.
Phone worked, but I don't receive enough calls to validate it, and pine's own wiki states that the there are modem issues. It may be perfectly fine for me, but not something i fully trust, and that's a factor in acceptance.
and signal I would assume I would have to waydroid. But I never got waydroid set up. Hopefully that's something that has gotten easier in the past 2 years. 2 years ago there was multiple hoops to jump through with installing kernel modules or something, and seeing a list of steps to take (and not just being able to install it from a repo in 1 go), when I was already dealing with performance issues, I just assumed it wasn't going to be worth it.
Who knows, maybe I'll give it a try again and come to a more favorable "it's fine i guess, but still not as good as my 2017 android phone in any capacity except 'not google'"
Pine64 has nothing to do with it, but it’s their hardware, so they should.
I agree. I wish we had better companies making GNU/Linux phones, but this is all we have for now. It's either Pine64 or Purism.
The camera works on my pinephone, and it takes pictures that remind me of the digital camera I had in 1999 that saved images to floppy disks.
Yeah, the original PinePhone has only a 5 megapixel camera. PinePhone Pro's camera is way better, but I'm not sure about the current state of software support. The author of the Megapixels camera app is working on a new, improved version, but it seems very complicated: https://blog.brixit.nl/fixing-the-megapixels-sensor-linearization/
Bitwarden would run, but it was running as a desktop app and was a pain to use (no lib handy here), and it obviously wasn’t going to offer to auto fill across the entire OS.
I use Gnome's Secrets (available in Mobian Bookworm). It works well on mobile, but I don't know about autofill. For 2fa you can use Gnome Authenticator (not available in Mobian Bookworm) or Numberstation (available in Mobian Bookworm).
Phone worked, but I don’t receive enough calls to validate it, and pine’s own wiki states that the there are modem issues. It may be perfectly fine for me, but not something i fully trust, and that’s a factor in acceptance.
You would just have to test it. I only have the original PinePhone with the libre modem firmware and I haven't noticed any missed calls, but I don't get a lot of calls in general. According to this recent blog post there seem to be some modem issues with PinePhone Pro (but I'm not sure if that includes missed calls): https://zerwuerfnis.org/daily-driving-the-pinephone-pro
and signal I would assume I would have to waydroid. But I never got waydroid set up. Hopefully that’s something that has gotten easier in the past 2 years. 2 years ago there was multiple hoops to jump through with installing kernel modules or something, and seeing a list of steps to take (and not just being able to install it from a repo in 1 go), when I was already dealing with performance issues, I just assumed it wasn’t going to be worth it.
Ah, that sounds painful. I've never used Waydroid, but a lot of people say it works well for them. I don't see it packaged in Debian or Mobian, but 2 years is a lot of time in software development, so maybe it's easier now. There is also some alternative Signal client called Axolotl. Some people use it, but I don't fully understand how it works, so you would have to investigate on your own.
Who knows, maybe I’ll give it a try again and come to a more favorable “it’s fine i guess, but still not as good as my 2017 android phone in any capacity except ‘not google’”
Yeah, it probably won't be as good. It requires GNU/Linux experience and some workarounds. But if you manage to set it up in a way that makes you use Android less, that would be pretty great.
"megapixels" aren't always the right metric either. a super high pixel count, but noisy camera isn't great either. I think in general, neither model has a camera that is going to generate great photos, even if the pro is much better
I'm already invested enough in bitwarden, and not interested in migrating back to keepass. This is a prime example of "I could make it work, but also, they need to meet me where Im at, I'm not redoing my entire life for a phone"... Could probably also use waydroid for this
I'm already not just using Android as is, and use LineageOS on my phone. Which isn't GrapheneOS (which isn't available for my phone) but at least allows me to not need to have gmail installed on my phone, etc.
In conclusion, I want to thank you for such a cordial and friendly conversation. I've borderline forgotten how decent people on the internet can be. I can't imagine a "debate" remaining this civil on reddit. (And if I was anything less than civil, I apologize! The broader internet has trained me for a fight or flight response for replies.)
The camera isn't going to be as good as modern high-end smartphones, but it should be usable. But I have a separate camera for taking photos and don't know that much about mobile cameras, though.
I’m already invested enough in bitwarden, and not interested in migrating back to keepass. This is a prime example of “I could make it work, but also, they need to meet me where Im at, I’m not redoing my entire life for a phone”
You wouldn't be doing it for a phone, but for freedom (and with that comes better privacy and security). That should be your goal. But I understand that it's difficult.
Could probably also use waydroid for this
Yeah, sounds like that could work.
I’m already not just using Android as is, and use LineageOS on my phone. Which isn’t GrapheneOS (which isn’t available for my phone) but at least allows me to not need to have gmail installed on my phone, etc.
Nice, that sounds like a big improvement over normal Android.
In conclusion, I want to thank you for such a cordial and friendly conversation. I’ve borderline forgotten how decent people on the internet can be. I can’t imagine a “debate” remaining this civil on reddit. (And if I was anything less than civil, I apologize! The broader internet has trained me for a fight or flight response for replies.)
Thank you too, I don't always meet nice people either (even on Lemmy). Have a nice day!
Edit:
I checked and the instructions for installing Waydroid don't look that complicated nowadays, but this might depend on the distro:
I have a "braveheart" pinephone (one of the first ones) and I just use it to play around with it's features, do distrohopping etc.)
Most of the time i used an arch build with phosh. But actually I highly recommend postmarketOS, the installer is straight forward and let you build whatever you want. Actually I run postmarketOS edge with encrypted f2fs and gnome-mobile on it. gnome-mobile works better on newer phones but it is still usable.
I prefer my grapheneOS phone because it is faster has more apps, apps are scaled correctly etc. Not too much battery drain...
PS. I managed to run Thunderbird usable on pinephone, I just play around with the look&feel and now I simply have just the mail cards and I am able to interact with it without too much scaling issues.
What is the current state of Gnome mobile? I thought that it wasn't finished yet. Is it as good as Phosh?
PS. I managed to run Thunderbird usable on pinephone, I just play around with the look&feel and now I simply have just the mail cards and I am able to interact with it without too much scaling issues.
Phosh comes with Geary. I haven't used it, but it looks like it should work well on mobile.
Phosh is definitely more polished and an attempt to make gtk mobile friendly. I actually prefer gnome-mobile for testing purposes. It's exactly like gnome-desktop and apps are opened each in an workspace, which is an impressive solution. It also needs more resources, and its not recommended for the first pinephone.
I know about Geary. But it's not the same as a complete Thunderbird install. There I can use my smime/openpgp certs and tags are also synchronised.
I think Linux phones needs more time. My dream would be a phone I can plug into a docking station and work on where I stopped. Most platforms gave this dream up. But Linux is on it's way to do it. It's actually possible, thx to gtk4, libadwaita etc.
Yes. When people talk about a Linux phone, they mean a Linux like experience where the user is in charge and there is no data harvesting or other shitfuckery. That's not something any Android phone delivers out of the box.
They weren't wrong. Linux technically is the kernel. The toolkits used to build the apps are really what most people think of when they use the term though.
That works if youre kinda an enthusiast. Not saying its perfect. But it works.
for context I've run a librem 5 and a pinephone and they both are not there yet imho.
True. It was absolutely useful in the Android 4 era when it first came out. Jolla phone was more advanced and useable than contemporary android devices. Android simply has far more resources to truck on.
Hey linux friends, what are you doing on your phones that a pinephone doesn't cut it? If I have a DSLR and don't give a shit about mobile social media, is there an issue?
I'd say the big issue is how much extra effort things take to do. You are relying a lot on web pages instead of applications and a lot of them don't feel really well optimized. Actions that would normally take a minute might take four minutes.
There's some issues with native apps too. When I was using my PinePhone I don't think I was able to get music to play in the background for example. I imagine this has been fixed by now but it was still frustrating.
I have a pinephone and a pinephone pro, and they are basically just fun linux toys. I keep it in my bag in case my regular phone breaks during travel. It does text and make phone calls. Battery life is pretty bad, but i always have battery banks on me.
The only real daily use ive found is as a security camera monitor at work. Also I run easytether on it and my android to skirt tethering fees when needed.
Occasionally when on the road, i need a proper linux install to do something. Ive used it to troubleshoot networking things as well.
If anything its been more of a raspberry pi replacement than a phone replacement for me.
When I was using my PinePhone I don’t think I was able to get music to play in the background for example. I imagine this has been fixed by now but it was still frustrating.
I've never had such issue and I've never heard of it, so it must be some old bug that was fixed long time ago.
A device you can comfortably use in your everyday life to do what you would want from such a device. In this case a phone you can do telephone calls with, write instant messages, take photos, browse the internet, play some games. And everything without the battery dying on you. And in a manner that is not too hacky ir frustrating.
It is possible to daily drive a Pinephone. But it's not a pleasant experience. It's better suited for unpleasant tinkering.
I feel like people that unironically tout Linux phones as stable enough are the same people that think we can ditch Xorg, not true even though I obviously would like it to be.
I know, I got the wording from some online website. Linux phones doesn't make too much sense to me, I would prefer to just call them GNU phones. The kernel can't be what defines this group of OSs when the main OS you're trying to exclude from this group runs the same one. GNU-like is a compromise.
Using the word Linux to describe the operating system makes no sense in general. You never know if someone is talking about the OS or the kernel. GNU was developed by different people with a different philosophy and goals. When people say Linux, they usually mean GNU/Linux (Linux Mint, Arch Linux, etc). But there is also Alpine Linux, which doesn't use GNU at all, so it's not exactly the same thing. And why even name the OS after the kernel? Doesn't the name Alpine Linux sound like it's just a fork of Linux? It's super confusing and people mix it up all the time, even this community of GNU/Linux users and under this post.
Android uses a heavily modified fork of Linux, so it doesn't use the same Linux that we use on desktop and it's definitely not a GNU/Linux operating system. So I don't know if we can call it "Linux".
Then there is Ubuntu Touch and I don't even know how to call that. GNU/Android maybe?
But the phones that we are talking about here I would say that those are GNU/Linux phones. Because even though many people run postmarketOS on them, they are designed to run GNU/Linux and they are shipped with it. But the phones designed to run Ubuntu Touch are something else. Maybe we should just call them Android phones, because I think that's what they are mostly designed to run.
I feel like I might've exaggerated the chasm between ditching Xorg and adopting Linux phones, Waylands only problems are really VR (just seems to be dead end outside of SteamVR) and Nvidia feature parity though that's less to do with Wayland and more to do with Nvidia dragging their feet on Linux, theres also the odd edge case like unrecognised inputs.
Oh, come on. Wayland is shipped by default by a lot of distros now because it's perfectly stable and usable in the vast majority of use cases and hardware. For every story about wayland falling down, I can come up with a dozen "stupid shit X11 does now because it's unmaintained and dev X tries to do something new with his app" stories. I do silly things like run 6 monitors on 2 GPUs on a Core 2Duo, and it runs like a top. If there's a problem, it's always something dumb i've done like knocked a cable than it is that Wayland has shit the bed. And it's been working like that for 2 years.
I ran a Pinephone for a year as a DD back in the early days, it was a pain in the ass but it was possible if you were stubborn enough. But it was no Android. But then again, it wasn't Android.
I would totally daily drive a Linux phone if performance wasn't so awful. I don't care if it doesn't a have any apps. In fact, the inability to install apple or android apps is actually a positive point in my view.
Meanwhile me absolutely running a dualboot Oneplus 6 with lineage and droidian that has had kupferos, mobian and postmarketos in the past... (yes, i distrohop my phone, so what?)
Linux people tend to forget, that people want something that just works, why I love Linux, I have a mac and later bought an Iphone, the UX difference of using and airpod pro with an Android phone and an Iphone is just miles apart, I can literally have it in my ears, click on a video on my mac and the sound transfers, then as I go out for a walk with my dog and start a podcast, the airpods switch back to my phone without any hassle.
Before that I would have to disconnect and reconnect bluetooth multiple times to switch between the android phone and the macbook.
Granted I maybe care a lot more about good UX than normal people, but good UX like that just makes me hard.
I'd call the based department, but I don't have a rotary un-smartphone™
That's cool af
I gotta say that even though it’s not for me, I’m glad this device exists!
I wish Valve would make a Steam Phone. They seem to know how to do Linux devices.
Valve laptop to revive the thinkpad glory days
they don't know to make a good android app, and you want them to make an entire cellphone💀💀
They made an entire Linux-powered portable game system that's revolutionizing Linux gaming at the moment...an embedded engineer is not the same skillset as an app developer. Not even close.
They made a device with a proprietary operating system and proprietary software. If you really want that, why not just use Android?
Since when is Arch proprietary?
Steam OS is proprietary.
But Arch contains proprietary firmware, so technically it's not fully free software either.
SteamOS is open source with some closed sources component. But most important think you seems not being able to understand is that Valve provide high support to Open source community, which means it wouldn't be surprising if they decided to drop a open source phone.
So it is not free software. It's proprietary, unethical software that takes away your freedom. Just like Windows, Android, etc.
By doing what? They only want to lock you in their proprietary platform. Most of heir software is proprietary, their games are proprietary and they restrict users with DRM. It's a terrible company, which abuses their users. If Steam Deck contains proprietary software, why would their phone by anything different?
They can do the hardware and let someone else compile the os
Idk SteamOS seems pretty ok to me
Good point, now I'm wondering why the steam mobile app sucks
they prob put 0 effort into it because they see almost 0 ROI
Well, I don't want it to be android powered anyways. That's the entire point.
Hell, I think even Raspberry Pi Foundation getting into the phone market would be a game changer too.
A lot of the libcamera work done on Raspberry Pi boards is going towards improving the camera support on linux phones like the PinePhone, which is great!
Aside from that, sadly a lot of people (including myself) are kind of fed up with Raspberry Pi, after they essentially abandoned their mission during Covid to please corporations, and are preparing to go public despite being a "charity". Broadcom, their SoC supplier, also has left a sour taste in my mouth after their purchase and mass layoffs at VMWare.
If they created a phone it would likely end up being scalped to death, and maybe pretty pricey compared to a PinePhone
Just out of curiosity, could you state what you think their mission was?
(I'm just wondering if anybody even remembers their original original mission.)
AFAIK their original mission was along the lines of making computers accessible at a low price point, particularly targeting the education sector in parts of the world where computers weren't very accessible or affordable. Comparable to the OLPC, but not on an individual basis
I could be wrong though
Remember when they donated one pi for every one sold?
That's basically it. Here's the thing: if they followed through on that to the letter, most of the people complaining wouldn't have ever gotten one.
Don't forget that Raspberry PI can't run a mainline Linux kernel. You can't install an official Debian build on it for example. I don't get why people are ok with that.
If they did that, it would be sold out for years before you or I could get it.
They seem to have resolved their supply chain issues for now. I could buy a Pi 5 and have it dispatched tomorrow, and I did buy a Pi 4b recently, no issues with delays or lead times.
Raspberry PI can't run a mainline Linux kernel.
I don't think you could go fast enough to catch Valve as they ran screaming from that idea.
Maybe it'd be the first "specialty" phone with decent specs. I always get excited for these "specialty" type phones like "Linux on my PHONE? Fuck yea!"
Until I look at the specs and it's crap every single time and then I'm just disappointed, like the PinePhone Pro has just 4GB LPDDR4 (No not even the good LPDDR4x) lmao like what is this, 2015?? Lolol
Steam OS is proprietary, so what would be the point?
Everything that matters is open source and upstreamed or on the way there. Haven't kept up with the state of things but as far as I am aware you can already run a mainline kernel on the Deck. Would love to see an open phone you can easily run your own distribution on without jumping through hoops.
But phones are hard. An x86 phone with decent battery life is even harder. But one can dream.
It's certainly great that you can install any distro with mainline kernel on the deck (even if some things don't work). But my point was that Valve doesn't care about user freedom. Their OS and the Steam client are proprietary. If they made a GNU/Linux phone, there is no guarantee that you would be able to install a free distro and it almost certainly would come with non free software by default, which would be bad.
I think PinePhone Pro and Librem 5 can run a mainline kernel. It's possible that some things won't work, but a lot of stuff has been upstreamed. I'm curious if you can easily install an ARM build of Debian on them, but couldn't find any information last time I looked it up.
Oh yeah, that is the dream. I wonder how are the current mobile Ryzen CPUs. I'm curious if there is any that could work well in a phone.
There is a Debian spin for the Pinephone called Mobian. I ran that for quite a while with Phosh as the front end. It's probably still installed on the device.
What I hate about ARM is that you basically need a separate image for every device instead of one for everything like with x86.
I use Mobian with Phosh too! What I love about Mobian is that it's just a small overlay on top of Debian. The project's goal is literally to upstream everything into Debian and to stop existing. You can see that it doesn't add a lot of packages: https://packages.mobian.org
Yeah, you are right about ARM. It seems to be true about RISC-V as well. It's so weird that so many people think those kinds of devices will be good for us. Sometimes I watch reviews of single board computers on YouTube and the reviewers never mention that the device can't run mainline Linux. They can't install Debian from debian.org on them. So instead they install some distro provided by the manufacturer and for some reason they are just fine with that. Raspberry PI is the same and almost nobody seems to be talking about this. So that's why I'm not sure if you can install a normal distro on PinePhone Pro or Librem 5, even though they can run mainline Linux.
Also ARM SoC manufacturers don't seem to try to have upstream Linux support. So I think that's why PinePhone uses a 2010 SoC (if I remember correctly) and Pro uses a 2016 SoC. It's a bad platform.
Linux phones will need to run established Android apps to get users, devs won't move where there is no users, users won't move there if there aren't apps. It's almost cyclical
Right now we're working with people who are exceptions to this, users who want to experiment and devs who don't care about money.
Waydroid runs decently on the pinephone. On a phone with better specs, it might be downright usable for proprietary apps.
Potentially a proton-style layer could really ease transition, like on the steamdeck
BlackBerry 10 was actually a pretty slick OS that supported Android apps and you could even side-load Google Play services.
I worked in supporting those and I had an easier time helping people with windows phones. 🤢
Problems with BES?
What if the app also want's a locked bootloader, Play Integrity, and whatever else. Like a banking app or Google Pay?
Then you run far, far away from that app. Even on an Android phone I don't trust garbage apps that require locked bootloader and no root. There are plenty of banks out there and paying with your phone is not a necessity.
Hey, do you still plan on working on your RGB mod for PinePhone's keyboard? It looked really awesome, but it's probably a huge amount of work.
I went through probably 20 different iterations of keycaps and got close to one I liked, but haven't gotten back to finishing the project since I haven't been using my PinePhone much. I think the main remaining thing is to make an Enter key model and a Tab key model. I want to get back to that project eventually but haven't had time.
Wow, that sounds complicated. But I'm curious if your keycaps would work better for typing than the default ones.
Not really, it's been a hassle to get them consistent enough to match the default ones. The small scale makes printing them difficult even after I got a resin printer for the project. I settled on a two piece design that works pretty well but the resin material is not as smooth as the injection molded stock caps.
LineageOS doesn't support Play Integrity either. Custom ROMs seem to be doing just fine.
There's the stories about "I have to have Windows because the school's exam proctor software requires Windows and doesn't work with Linux" but ultimately that's not the thing that stops the year of the linux desktop. And banking apps won't be what breaks the year of the linux phone.
Thats a fair point, i never tried banking on waydroid. Most of the stuff i would need on the go seemed fine though.
Although, as far as tap to pay goes, i could see that getting baked into linux properly. I dont believe apple pay and google pay tap pay are using a different protocol. I may very well be wrong though.
It's not about the protocols. It's about business. We can have all the tech we want but until someone is willing to establish relationships with and pay the 3-4 middlemen involved in every single card payment it ain't happening.
I can use both just fine with unlocked bootloader on an official lineage 21 rom
Burn it with fire
Yes!
But if people still use proprietary software, then what's the point? Steam OS is a proprietary operating system. Is that really what we want?
Progressive Web Apps. Web programs broke the need for Microsoft Windows.
But they're talking mainstream support and windows is much more popular.
We need proton for Android apps
We have Waydroid which is close enough. It needs some quality of life improvements for better integration with the native Linux ecosystem but it runs Android apps just fine on Linux phones.
That's just a Dalvik (Java) emulator, should be viable.
Agreed. Classic story that has been repeated several times over the years. Ecosystem is everything.
Microsoft's Windows phones were fantastic. They had super nice hardware, high refresh rate screens, better cameras on their flagship models than iPhones at the time.
They were sleek, fast, the Windows tile UI actually worked great on a phone touchscreen. But it didn't matter to most consumers because they didn't have apps. MS had their own business apps...and that was about it. Didn't matter that every other aspect of the phones were great, people couldn't do what they wanted to on the Windows phones, so they didn't buy them.
I would love to see something like Proton but for .apks instead of Windows executables. If it were as easy to install and run android apps on a mobile Linux OS as it is now to install and play Windows games on Linux, we would be in a great place to see a proper Linux phone.
GNU/Linux is not aimed at people who want the most features. It's made for people who value freedom above everything else.
You mean Waydroid? I've read that it works pretty well.
You are right. But it seems to be just as easy to use.
Absolutely yes! I think this is what killed the reasonably good Windows Phones. I liked them anyway. They did what phones were supposed to do and were dirt cheap. But if you searched for any of the top 50 apps you'd find some fake BS. Like when I searched for Pandora you got an app that was nothing more than a 3-4 page summary about how Pandora was the planet in James Cameron's Avatar.
The goal of GNU/Linux is not to make it possible to run proprietary apps (but if you really need to run Android apps you can use Waydroid). It's to create a fully libre operating system that people can use.
The hell with android apps. In my last year with Droidian, I got better replacements for any single app I used on Android!
hot take: No.
Linux phones just need good linux software support. And then the linux user base will switch over, and everyone who isn't simply won't use it.
I actually genuinely do not want android developers on linux. I refuse to pay for a launcher. My entire workstation OS is developed by volunteers. Genuinely every single android app i have ever interacted with has pretty much exclusively disappointed me. It's just a bad ecosystem.
In the same way that the linux community doesn't need the developers of every application ever on it to thrive amongst itself, the linux phone doesnt need android developers to develop apps for it. It just needs better support for linux applications that already exist.
The only reason I will disagree: there's already a major FOSS ecosystem on Android. There are tons of high quality free apps that aren't FOSS
Linux isnt even that popular on desktop, my point is that people will not move if their pre established software use case is not avaliable. I won't. I know many people who won't.
And if there aren't users, there won't be people making quality software to cover wide variety of usecases and get support, if there isn't quality software that covers a wide variety of use cases and get support there won't be users. You need to start somewhere, it's why the windows phone failed. No devs, so no users, and because no users, no devs.
I still don't see your point. You're assuming that android users will want to use a linux phone in the first place. They don't and they wont. And that's fine.
The only market that the linux phone has to cater to in order to develop successfully is the existing linux desktop market. The vast majority of those people are likely to want and use a linux phone. Which will actually improve the phone. And possibly even in the future bring in android developers and apps.
I don't understand why you're fixing on it growing, it's just a hardware market, system76 already exists, pine already exists, linux users already exist. We exist as a bubble in a larger space and that's ok. That's the beauty of the unix/linux philosophy.
Realistically this is like releasing a 10,000 dollar workstation/server cpu and then having the general public complain about it being inaccessible, even though it literally wasn't meant for them.
There are tonnes of great foss android apps.
I'm sure there's a lot of good apps. I've used a few good ones, but it's objectively worse than software on linux.
File browsers have almost universally just been awful. Horrid, and almost completely unusable. I've tried more than should exist really.
There are other questionable apps, which exist, do what they claim to do perfectly well, but have no utility for anything particularly useful. Even stuff like jerboa is just generally lacking in features. That is also an experience on linux so not really a huge complaint, but i really genuinely don't see why people like android so much.
Everyone saying Android is completely missing the point. I mean yeah, it runs the linux kernel, but i feel like most of yall wouldn't call ChromeOS linux on the other hand.
The obvious connotations are privacy, choice, wayland/x11 support, a useful terminal, a rich foss ecosystem, and arch btw.
ChromeOS is Linux and even starting to become it's own full blown distro.
ChromeOS even uses Wayland now.
Lacros
But it's proprietary software, right?
Well yes, in the same way Android is; where it's based on an open source version of itself. (ChromiumOS)
I'd agree with you in the context of standard (google) android.
One caveat that I'd like to highlight, though, is that for me GrapheneOS and F-Droid handily achieve the privacy and rich FOSS ecosystem parts. Useful terminal depends on your definition :) but for my use case Termux fills the void.
It doesn't feel like Linux (you can't even use Wifi and Ethernet at the same time for crying out loud) but for a relatively cheap low-power device, I like the flexibility.
It's far enough from being a foot gun that I can give a Pixel 5 with GrapheneOS and some F-Droid apps to my grandmother and know she'll have no problems. Balancing that with having enough extensibility to scratch the itch for 99% of tinkerers is a feat to appreciate in my view.
My point is really just that it is an entirely different software stack than the traditional linux experience. I cant just download the source for a standard linux app and compile it for android, it needs to be ported.
I think pinephone and librem are the closest we have gotten to a proper linux phone. But the specs suck, and the mobile optimized app ecosystem isnt there yet. Thats the point of the op meme.
I can confirm that my PinePhone runs the same software that I run on my desktop. I usually don't even need to compile anything, since a lot of packages in Debian repo have an ARM version. Not all apps have responsive UIs and some of the old ones lack touch support, though. But that is something that keeps improving over time (GNOME 4 and libhandy for example). You can also use CLI programs if you want.
At least there's Termux. One of the very few things saving my already limited phone experience.
I would call anything running the Linux kernel "Linux". Granted my LineageOS phone isn't very much like my Debian PC, but they're both Linux.
Daily drivin Manjaro (Plasma mobile) on my Pinephone Pro for over a year now. If you are not into the whole "taking pictures all the time" thing you can easiy use it as a daily driver. (This message was typed on it)
Who's gonna tell him Android is based on Linux ?
Nobody because everybody knows this. Android is still not what people mean when they say linux
... or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux
Yes, but it is Linux. OP doesn't mention GNU.
That's like saying you run FreeBSD because you have a PlayStation 5 though.
It's so far removed people associate it as something different entirely.
It uses an ancient Linux kernel with millions of lines of code changed from the original.
Android devices run deprecated Linux kernels that have a bunch of proprietary binary blobs plopped onto them, so technically "Linux", but not an easily updateable mainline kernel like most people are referring to when talking about "Linux."
Linux is FOSS. Android is based on Linux. Android is not Linux.
Debian is GNU/Linux and that's what almost always people mean when they say Linux. Android is not GNU/Linux and doesn't even use the mainline Linux kernel - just some old, heavily modified version.
Mobian or Manjaro ARM on the other hand are GNU/Linux distributions. They run the same software that you can run on your desktop distro.
Almost all popular ones do.
Not in the way they're talking.
Really a shame that Nokia gave up. The N900 was a well working Linux phone. I miss it dearly.
Ms did it to nokia
My favorite phone by far. Absolutely loved combined messenger built into OS and that GUI is still unmatched by any OS as far as I'm concerned.
I have fond memories of using my N900. But I would not have described it as well working :) It worked, sure, but not particularly well.
It definitely worked better than a Pinephone. And even with its puny RAM it was better at multitasking than a modern Android phone.
Okay look I get what we're trying to say here but would it be problematic if I pointed out that Android is also running Linux?
It’s a valid point, but unfortunately your non bullshit options are limited to replacing the OS with something like Graphene or Lineage.
The powers that be REALLY want your data.
I thought you could just use the Android open source project? I thought the tracking was mostly baked into Google's flavor of Android not the open source product
I don’t know if a phone that uses the open source version as base. Usually they build off open source or google and add in all the manufacturer/carrier bloat. For me to get off One Plus’s built in OS I had to go through this whole process on their website to get the code to unlock the boot loader.
I have lineage os as a replacement and it’s really cool. My mobile internet stopped working on it though :( my next phone is gonna roll with Graphene
lineage is significantly more polished than aosp
i use Arch btw
I use GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux btw
Same, on desktop and mobile. I don't know if it's funny or sad that a community called "linuxmemes" can't tell the difference between Linux, GNU/Linux and Android.
Isn't that like claiming all Linux, Android and MacOS are just UNIX?
I mean not technically.. those products use a separent kernel that has its own development path away from the Linux kernel. Linux is just a compatible Unix kernel but I wouldn't classify it as a Unix operating system since it diverges into its own thing. Android still uses the Linux kernel not some piece of code that they developed and not some commercial Unix product
Not if they don't share any heritage with Unix. Osx is the only one that fits the bill there.
It also counts in the other way: Apple licensed the UNIX™ trademark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU
See, this is why, yet again, Stallman was right: insisting on "GNU/Linux" is necessary in order to disambiguate between the fully-Free Software OS and bastardized half-proprietary stuff like Android.
Exactly. Even in this community and in this post people keep mixing Linux, GNU/Linux and Android. It's crazy that even people who use this operating system are confused. Almost always when they say Linux they really mean GNU/Linux. Linux Mint or Arch Linux are GNU/Linux. But Android isn't and it doesn't even use the mainline Linux kernel.
The issue of freedom is a separate thing, because even most GNU/Linux distros contain proprietary software just like Android.
I guess most ppl who are supporting the gnu/linux phone are the ones who want a similar apple like features like how the prism os had promised to provide.
Android is Linux.
Modified Linux kernel, but you very well know what people mean don't you
Every distro has a modified Linux kernel, Android is no different.
Android is the first thing I think of when I hear Linux phone
chromeos is the first thing i think of when i hear linux workstation
Well um actually a Linux workstation would be GNU/Linux and chromeos is only the Linux kernel. /s
gnu/linux is ironically a fair point in this context. But to uhm ackshually you, chromeos is technically based on chromiumos which is technically based on the linux kernel.
I think when people say "Linux phone" they mean GNU/Linux.
No. Most people mean PostmarketOS, which is Busybox/musl/Linux
Fair but Ubuntu Touch is not mainline Linux. It's a hack to get a GNU/systemd Userland working with an Android kernel (which arguably is also a huge feat)
A lot of people use Manjaro and Mobian (mobile Debian).
Sure, but PMOS is by far the most complete and "daily-ready" mobile mainline Linux distro out there. In fact I'm pretty sure both Mobian and MoA use the PMOS kernels...
I haven't used postmarketOS, but I don't see why it would be any better than Mobian or Manjaro (Manjaro might not be the most stable though). Maybe you are talking about Android phones, in which case you are probably right - other distros might not support those so well. postmarketOS and other distros don't use mainline Linux, so I don't know why you would call them that, though. For me this is the biggest flaw of GNU/Linux phones.
I know that postmarketOS developers contribute a lot in different areas, but so do Mobian developers. I think the kernel we use was initially developed by Megi.
Ah, you probably right, I think it's more common.
I personally run ArchLinux on my PinePhone.
I have a PinePhone. ama
What do you miss the most?
Getting laid
I'm using Android and am iPhone for business and it's basically the same. Maybe it's os independent?
How much did it cost, how long have you had it and what are the most obvious pros and cons?
In the US store it costs 200$ for the original PinePhone and 400$ for the Pro version. The EU store is a little more expensive.
I'm not the person you asked, but I've had mine for 2 years.
Pros:
Cons:
Edit: I corrected a mistake with the SIM card. I turns out that PinePhone Pro uses nano SIM and it's only the original PinePhone that uses micro SIM
Very thorough list, thank you!
Awesome list indeed! In case I buy one I‘ll probably start a lemmy community for it.
There is already one: /c/[email protected]. But not a lot of activity there.
Youre a treasure trove of information my friend. One of those lemmings that really keeps this place running with content and helpful stuff at that. Thanks mate! :)
How is your battery life?
lol
Five
Phosh, gnome-mobile, plasma, sxmo or "unity"?
Plasma and unity both seem to be the ones I come back to. The other three I would mess with, but something about the other two always brought me back.
The good old Linux diversity. I am simply the opposite.
They are all equally capable in my opinion. I really think it’s down to personal preference. I’m not sure if it’s still a thing, but the multiboot SD card images wereVERYhelpful for me.
Phosh is pretty good. I don't think Gnome Mobile is finished yet.
what carrier are you using it on? sim or e-sim? Do you use it daily?
I used mine on T-Mobile almost daily. It worked okay. Think of early Android days where everyone had their own custom rom and none of them were as smooth as you felt they should be.
Do I need a sim? I'm on Google Fi [T-mo] but we're all e-sim. I have a data-only sim.
I am just assuming, but I believe a data only sim would work.
There is no e-SIM functionality I am aware of.
Yeah it just means if someone rang the phone would still be routed to my e-sim. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I am waiting for the right combination of time and energy to add all my chats into matrix bridges on my server. Not having a direct phone to call would almost be ideal... 🤔
Across what services?
How's the Android apps bridge? Do you even use it?
I haven't used it on the PinePhone or PinePhone Pro in a while, but Waydroid is solid on my OnePlus 6T with postmarketOS. Android apps that only need an Internet connection work fine. I installed microG and have push notifications working for Discord and Teams. However, notifications don't get passed through to the Linux side so they only show if you open the Android UI. Screen rotation doesn't work on Waydroid which can be very annoying. Apps that use other hardware features such as location, Bluetooth, vibration, access to calls/texts won't work properly.
I was downvoted before for suggesting the Pinetab is not a viable Android or iPad replacement. That thing doesn't even have a working wifi driver yet, you have to plug in a dongle just to connect to wifi. I'd love to have good smart devices running Linux one day, but we're not there yet.
I'm quite optimistic about a usable Linux phone in the near future, maybe 5 years from now or so. When smartphones were a new thing, it was really hard for open source projects without a major company backing them to keep up with all the new developments. Hence all the projects that died out. But innovation on smartphones has basically come to a halt these days. Sure, your phone can get a little bit faster and have round displays now, but nobody cares anymore. Nothing of all that is essential. So, give it some time, we'll get there.
I'm optimistic about the apps and desktop environments. We have made huge progress. But the problem is the hardware support. It seems that there are very few ARM SoCs, which work well with the mainline Linux kernel. So PinePhone uses a 2010 SoC and PinePhone Pro a 2016 SoC. And after all that time and despite community's efforts to upstream everything, the mainline support is still not complete and we still use custom kernels.
https://blog.mobian.org/posts/2023/09/30/paperweight-dilemma/
Yes, but that's exactly my point. The need for hardware support shrinks if the hardware doesn't change every few months. A chip from a few years ago is still very fine. That was not the case in 2009.
Ah, good point.
If your needs are very simple, and you’re willing to go without a lot of luxuries, then yeah, it could work for you.
I don't know, but I was thinking PinePhone would be more useful when your needs rather aren't simple.
Yeah, I guess specific would be a better word. Like if having a good terminal emulator and SSH client is more important to you than having access to Android apps.
Thats pretty much my use case. I run a legacy iphone (i know) and terminal apps arent great so far. I often need to work on the go and carrying a laptop everywhere is tedious. Having a phone with a „simple“ linux OS and terminal emulator would be awesome.
You can run any GNU/Linux program on it as long as it has an ARM build (a lot of them do) or you compile it for ARM. There is also the keyboard addon (https://pine64.org/documentation/Phone_Accessories/Keyboard/), but it makes the phone bigger.
Thats very cool. I‘m still wondering it the pinephone would work for me. I use like 5 apps regularly (obviously would find others I dont recognize as using):
The rest is mostly functions I „need“ but dont need specific apps for.
I think thats about it… Do you think that could work?
Edit: I have a stupid idea! I fondly remember my blackberry from back in the day. Obviously its not for the mainstream but pinephone isnt either. Wouldnt a step back to a blackberry design be pretty awesome for us nerds? :)
It's hard to say if it will work for you. For some people it does and for others it doesn't. It's just something you would have to see for yourself and it might require some time to set everything up the way you want it. It's a device that requires tinkering. Voyager seems to have a web version and so does FluffyChat. I use Nheko Matrix client (available in Mobian/Debian repo) - it's a native app that works pretty well. I don't know about the other apps, but in general you can run Android apps through Waydroid. Maybe those would work too.
There are no push notifications, so if you want the phone to suspend and still receive Matrix notifications, you would have to setup a script that will wake the phone up periodically.
This works on the original PinePhone, but the camera itself is pretty bad. PinePhone Pro has a decent one, but I'm not sure what the current state of that is. My understanding is that it works, but the pictures might not look that great. I think it's only one guy working on the camera app and he is currently working on a new version: https://blog.brixit.nl/fixing-the-megapixels-sensor-linearization/. For syncing files with a desktop I use SyncThing, but Nextcloud should probably work too. For sending just a few specific files from time to time you could use KDE Connect or even just SSH.
That works. I use Firefox. PinePhone doesn't have a lot of RAM, though, so you won't be able to have a lot of tabs open at once.
Definitely works. I use Lollypop app (available in Mobian/Debian), which works well on a mobile screen. The phone has a headphone jack if you need it. The speaker isn't very good.
This works, but audio quality during phone calls isn't always good. There also seem to be some modem issues on PinePhone Pro: https://zerwuerfnis.org/daily-driving-the-pinephone-pro. I think it's currently recommended to install the free modem firmware and I'm not sure if the author was using that (the phone doesn't come with it installed).
I'm not sure if MMS works (SMS does), since I don't use that. Support for emergency broadcasts is now being added to Phosh: https://phosh.mobi/posts/cellbroadcast/
You should also know that the battery life isn't very good. So if you use the phone a lot, you might need either an extended battery case or spare batteries (the battery is replaceable) or the keyboard addon.
I don't know which one you mean, but I would love to have a slider keyboard! Technically you could make one and I've been wondering how hard that would be. PinePhone has some pins on the back that you could use - one of them is i2c. The keyboard addon from Pine64 uses them (they have other addons too). It's probably a lot of work to make something like that, though.
This is a lot more than I could have hoped for! Thank you so much! :) I‘m somewhat convinced that I need to try this now. :)
I've been daily driving Ubuntu Touch on the Fairphone 4 for over a year. I love it, even if some features are lacking. Calling and text is stable, but unfortunately Volte support is still missing. Waydroid is also working great.
I'm not sure if Ubuntu Touch is GNU/Linux, since it uses the android kernel I think. But it's not android either.
ironically, the fact that i would genuinely rather spend my money on a pinephone as opposed to an android should go to show how little i care for android devices.
it's a fun toy, not super useful but probably fun to tinker with
I've done some ungodly stuff to my android phones (even non-rooted ones, I'm totally abusing them) and I can't even imagine all the possibilities with a proper linux distro. Having a pocket pc with a full arm64 linux sounds awesome
Hear me out: THEY ARE VIABLE TO ME
I hope its stable enough when i stop using my current phone
Well it is stable, but it lacks most of today's I would call it "comfort-usability" but the main features are definitely working.
Here is a recent blog post about someone's experience with PinePhone Pro: https://zerwuerfnis.org/daily-driving-the-pinephone-pro
I have the original PinePhone and it seems to have less issues, but it's also slower and has a crappy camera.
Looks like for me I will have to wait for WhatsApp to be cross-app, and the phone call audio quality will be an issue.
There seems to be some progress with the call audio issue, so it might get fixed soon. As for WhatsApp you can probably run that with Waydroid (but eventually you should switch to some free software messenger).
My bad I have not phrased my sentence properly, I am already using signal and with hopes that WhatsApp allows ppl to send messages to another WhatsApp number from my preferred app here signal then I can communicate with my friends and colleagues
Is Facebook planning to do that?
That’s what one of sources that I read has mentioned about it
That's very interesting.
Between October 2018 to April 2023 I used as my daily drivers a series of phones (OnePlus One, Meizu Pro 5, Volla Phone, Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro) all flashed to running Ubuntu Touch. During this time UT (Ubuntu Touch) was less developed than it is now, in that Waydroid (which allows using some Android apps over a Lineage OS container that boots on top of UT) did not yet exist, and Libertine (which allows some Linux desktop apps built for Ubuntu arm64 deb to be installed) was not as functional. And yet is still worked great for my modest needs (e.g. I don't do banking, or any kind of more advanced gaming, on my phones).
The reason I reverted last year to de-googled Android ("vanilla" Bliss ROM on a Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro) is that being in the USA, the carriers here have closed or are closing down all their 3G/2G networks, and requiring VoLTE for phone calls. While UT supports LTE for mobile data without a problem, given that VoLTE is a proprietary closed protocol with implementation varying between carrier, oem and device, the only device which UT currently has VoLTE support for (and which is still shaky) is the PinePhone Pro.
Anyhoo - the UT dev community is pretty small, but definitely dedicated, and still offers some promise into the future for a nice privacy respecting alternative OS for mobile devices and tablets. Hopefully at some point VoLTE, and a few other issues gets figured out for it so I can return to using it for my daily driver - in the meantime I've got it on a OnePlus 5t as a secondary device, and on a Lenovo x306f 10" tablet.
The loss of Dalton Durst from that team from burnout was a big hit. They've been doing work on it but I haven't seen anything approaching the output they had when he was heading it up.
Dalton is an amazing and very cool guy, and when he left it was indeed a big hit to dev speed at first, but recently a few super smart and dedicated guys have been able to do a big jump in updating the base from 16.04 to 20.04 (which involved moving from upstart to systemd) and they are getting close to rebasing to 24.04 (target for this is this June in fact). Plus Waydroid support has gotten really good in the time since Dalton moved on, and snap support is getting worked on now as well.
I'm incredulous that this is the case. You're probably right but there's no way in hell I'm using a phone restricted to 2g or 3g.
I am talking about VoLTE (Voice over LTE) which is the protocol just for making phone calls over 4g networks - NOT 4g/LTE mobile data! Ubuntu Touch has worked well with 4g/LTE mobile data for 10 years now.
makes sense, but there’s no carriers in the US for voice calls over 3g.
Yes, while you can still do 3g/2g phone calling in most of Europe, the only hold out in the US for this is that T-mobile still has 2g calling in some areas, but they have announced that this will be shut down sometime in the soonish future (it was scheduled to be all shutdown of April this year, but they announced this was delayed to a time tbd, likely in order to continue to serve all the ATM's and iot devices that are still running "legacy" systems being used beyond supposed eol). Which is why I reverted to using de-googled AOSP for my daily driver - I like to be able to use my phone as a phone after all.
My Nokia N900 ran Linux back in the day, and was a more polished experience than the iPhone it was then contemporary with. Too bad that particular line went precisely nowhere.
Didn't it go to Sailfish OS which technically still exists?
Not officially, from what I recall. That was possibly one of the plans for it's alleged successor, the N950, which turned out to be vaporware. Sailfish OS then went to be used on the first Jolla Phone, which probably sold in single digit numbers. Jolla now manufactures nothing, although they apparently continue to develop Sailfish for licensing to embedded applications, and their main deal seems to be the "Appsupport" compatibility layer for Android apps to run on Linux.
also kudos to GrapheneOS social media people patiently explaining why both purism and pine64 are pretty mid at best when it comes to hardware security
Starry-eyed me bought a pine phone and a librem5, and for both of them it was pretty much turn it on, about 5 minutes of navigating the UIs and suffering the performance, and putting it right back in the box for my own personal museum where they'll be safe and sound and kept in prime condition until they're thrown away some day when I'm dead.
Purism has contributed a lot to the software development. They hire developers who work on Phosh (mobile desktop environment). So by buying their phone, you have at least contributed to the cause.
It would be really hard to get an established manufacture to pick up Linux as an operating system. Most people get a Samsung phone if they can afford it and a Motorola if they can't in the states.
I'd be surprised if my family has done any research before picking up a phone outside of is it a Samsung.
I tried to daily drive a PinePhone for a long time, then a PinePhone Pro. It is not really ready. Too many dropped/failed to answer calls and missed texts. I love having a fully capable Linux PC in my pocket and am typing this on my OnePlus 6T with postmarketOS, but as a phone it is not ideal. My setup now is that I have a OnePlus 6 with stock Android and my main SIM for doing phone stuff (calls, texts, some apps, Bluetooth handsfree) and the OnePlus 6T with pmOS for Linux experimentation and doing pocket computer things (browsing, coding, SSH, VPN, testing Waydroid). I got a second cheap SIM so I can have service on both devices, but as the 6T with pmOS can't receive calls in 4G mode it really doesn't work as a phone. The PinePhones can work as a phone but the modem dropouts make it less than ideal and their battery life and performance leave much to be desired while the OP6T has fairly good performance and battery life on pmOS.
I daily drive mine and haven't noticed any missed calls, but maybe I'm just lucky or it's the Pro version that has the issue. The battery life can be increased with extended cases, but the performance will always suck and there are lots of annoying software issues too.
I had call drops on both the original and the Pro. They both use the same USB-attached modem and the modem has (had?) an issue where it would lose USB connection to the main processor sometimes, so you would just randomly lose cell connectivity. Sometimes the USB connection would restart right away and sometimes it would not and you'd have to restart eg25 manager to reboot the modem.
Ah, I see. It's often hard to tell if some issue is still there if I don't experience it myself. Some things get solved eventually, but you have to run the latest software (and I'm not) and then test things to see it. I think nowadays people recommend to install the libre modem firmware, so that's also another variable.
I had this issue using the libre modem firmware on both phones. I'm not sure if it's a modem side issue or a Linux side issue. I haven't used either PinePhone with a SIM card in almost a year though so my knowledge could be outdated.
Thanks for clarifying. I also use the libre firmware and sometimes the modem doesn't wake up from suspend when I unlock the phone (I sometimes also have to restart wifi with a script). So maybe I just didn't notice the missed calls or something.
Lately I found that there is some USB controller and I saw some messages about it when running dmesg:
So maybe that causes the modem issues. When I use the keyboard addon, I can't get any USB device to work when plugging it to the phone and I suspect that might be a connected problem too. I don't know much about hardware, tough.
Bought a pine phone because it's cool.
It is not daily driver worthy at all
out of curiosity. What were the problems you ended up experiencing? Been tempted to get one being a linux user myself.
Wifi keeps waking up the phone, draining the battery, then craps out when you want to use it. The camera has like 5fps with 1998 flip phone quality. Forget about multi tasking. It connects to the cell network so calling and texting should work. Want to use an app for something? Too bad.
That’s my experience from two years ago, I had the distro hopping sd card and tried all os versions at the time. It’s just not there yet.
The only use I see is dropping it somewhere and then using it as a jump host over lte, but I haven’t tested that.
I have a PinePhone Pro and if the battery would last longer than a few hours, it would totally work as a daily driver. Fast enough and can do everything I need it to do, but 3-4 hour battery life. If someone can figure that part out, I think it'll be good enough for at least early adopters.
I bought the keyboard addon with the extra battery and that has increased my og PinePhone's battery life a lot. So maybe give that a try. The downside is that it makes the phone pretty big and it might not always fit in your pocket. But it might be useful while traveling for example.
For PinePhone Pro there is also some proprietary firmware, which is supposed to help. Are you using that? I probably wouldn't want to install it, but it's supposed to increase the battery life to that of the original PinePhone.
A lot has changed in 2 years. But the camera on the original PinePhone will always be bad, since it's a 5 megapixel camera. For that reason nobody has even bothered to implement video recording, but there are scripts, which will let you do that.
wifi wakes it up from suspend? Or sleep? I feel like that would be relatively easy to hack a fix for.
everything else sounds about what i would expect it to.
Been too long since I last tried it. I think my main complaint was lag and responsiveness
as a linux user my immediate reaction is that those are fixable with good software. Modern phones run like shit because software is bloated to hell.
Although other people have mentioned valid hardware issues too so.
I use it as my only phone. It all depends on how important freedom is to you and if you are willing to sacrifice some things to get it.
Asterisk counts as a Linux phone, right?
Lmao, yeah, that Linux phone is definitely production ready.
Counts as multiple Linux phones
Damn this is timely, I just got a second hand Pinephone today
I used a flip phone for years are you telling me linux phones can't make phone calls?
Mobile Linux is awesome, support it. Maybe just don't try to make money selling it as a finished product yet?
buy an iPhone
-Jobs 4:20
I just can't get over the walled garden and shit notifications. Like, fuck Google but why can't I own my device.
Grayjay is pretty cool too.
I run a pinephone daily during the first 5 or 6 months of covid but once I started going out again well... really poor camera and battery
Can't do anything about the camera, but there are extended battery cases that you can get. I got the keyboard addon with the battery and that helps, but it's also pretty big and heavy.
[X] doubt
(I say that as a PinePhone owner)
What are we doubting? That their friend runs a pinephone? I agree.
I have a pinephone and pinephone pro. and neither one has felt good enough to be a daily driver. but then again, i havent really tried using it since like february 2022 when I got the pro. maybe the software has gotten a ton better since then. (I dont have high hopes. Drew Devault has a real nice blog post about pine64 chasing devs away: here)
Realistically all I need in a phone is password manager, phone app, camera, signal. And I dont think I ever had any of those things work in a "actually reliable and smooth enough for daily driving" state.
I believe you, but the hard part about "It was good enough for me" is that an old Nokia brick phone is "good enough" for some people. I have no idea what your standards are.
Maybe there's a way to get it to that state. But the lock screen on my pinephone pro stutters, much less "making apps work". I was able to do all the things I wanted to do, it just was a horrible experience.
I bought two pinephones. I REALLY want this to work out. I'm not some sort of anti-linux phone antagonist. I've tried to make it work personally. I would love to know what the setup (what OS, phosh, etc?) I need to make my devices work great, if they are truly that usable.
edit: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Pro#State_of_the_software
The "official" state of the software from pine64.org itself states the modem crashes often and results in missed calls, camera still a WIP, and no push notifications when the phone sleeps (so the phone just never sleeps, thus the terrible battery, i presume).
"Good enough" feels like it's only true if you're the kind of person who otherwise argues that smart phones are bad, and not if you're the kind of person who uses your phone as a multi-tool in your pocket.
The main difference is that the old Nokia phone runs proprietary software. You also can't run any desktop programs or apps on it. But PinePhone requires GNU/Linux experience and sometimes workarounds are needed.
I haven't noticed any missed calls on my original PinePhone, so this is surprising. I don't have the Pro version to check, but the cited bug report is a year old, so it might be no longer the case. On the other hand, this recent blog post says there are some issues with the modem and some other strange bugs. That would be a shame, because it's been 2 years since its release and I was hoping to switch to it at some point.
I think there is only one guy working on the software. Here is his last blog post, if you are curious: https://blog.brixit.nl/fixing-the-megapixels-sensor-linearization/
There are no push notifications. So you won't be notified when you receive a message in some app, while the phone is suspended. As a workaround you can use a script to wake the phone up periodically. Short battery life is caused by an old and inefficient SoC, not by software, so there is nothing we can do about that other than getting a bigger case and a bigger battery (some people do that).
The point was that different people have different standards. There are a lot of people on places like HN that will say things like "People use their phone too much, a Nokia has everything that everyone needs! That's what I use!" without accounting for other people's use cases. That's a very self centric view. I need X, some people might need X+Y or X-Z. If you have to hedge your "it's good enough" with "if you can handle these 100 workarounds" then it's more accurate to say "it's not good enough, unless you're ok dealing with these 100 workarounds."
That's awesome. I rarely answer phone calls anyway, so that doesn't impact me much. This was purely reflective of the state of things. "Probably fine" and "definitely works" can be a MAJOR difference in the scope of daily driver readiness for most people.
The camera on my pinephone actually opens and can take pictures. it just looks terrible. To the degree that I'm at least 75% sure that it's a sensor issue, and no amount of software tuning is going to bring the sensor up to the level of other phones. Considering my primary use for my phone is taking pictures, "the camera works, but its terrible" doesn't fit my use case (admittedly, this may be a specific to me use case).
Oh. yeah. That's probably a deal breaker for most people too.
And to re-iterate. I can totally see this being a usable device. I own two. I've seen how it can perform. and I'm excited for the possibilities. It just feels a bit too jank for me still, and im pretty tolerant of jank. If other people are more tolerant than me, I applaud them.
Ah, you are right about that. But I do wish that freedom was the main goal for people, because that's the point of the Free Software movement. Switching to GNU/Linux is inconvenient too and there might be things that a person won't be able to do on it. Obviously an average person won't be able to handle a PinePhone, so I don't have hope they will try (and they probably shouldn't), but an average GNU/Linux user might. It all depends on how much a person values freedom. But at the same time I understand that getting freedom is usually a gradual journey, which might take a lot of time.
I also don't answer many phone calls, so it's possible I was just lucky or haven't noticed.
If you are talking about the original PinePhone, then yes, it's a 5 megapixel camera and it will always be terrible. PinePhone Pro's camera is much better, though. There seems to be a lot of very technical stuff that goes into making pictures look good. For example stuff like auto-exposure and color correction. Here is a quote from the developer of the Megapixels camera app from the blog post that I linked:
I have a separate camera for taking photos, but I understand the need to have one in a phone that you can take with you everywhere.
Yeah, push notifications probably won't be solved for a while. There is some hope, though:
https://github.com/the-modem-distro/pinephone_modem_sdk/releases/tag/0.7.4
I have all those things working well on a Librem 5
2 years is a lot of time. Things have changed a lot since then. The community and Purism are the ones developing the software. Pine64 has nothing to do with it.
Out of all the things you just mentioned, Signal is the only one that won't work, because it requires an Android/iOS app. You can't use it on desktop by itself either. But you could try running the Android version with Waydroid. I use Matrix instead.
I'm sure it has. Pine64 has nothing to do with it, but it's their hardware, so they should. And the point of Drew's blog was that they did a nice job of disincentivizing the community. so the community is smaller than it could have been.
And "work" here being a shorthand for "work to satisfactory levels".
The camera works on my pinephone, and it takes pictures that remind me of the digital camera I had in 1999 that saved images to floppy disks.
Bitwarden would run, but it was running as a desktop app and was a pain to use (no lib handy here), and it obviously wasn't going to offer to auto fill across the entire OS.
Phone worked, but I don't receive enough calls to validate it, and pine's own wiki states that the there are modem issues. It may be perfectly fine for me, but not something i fully trust, and that's a factor in acceptance.
and signal I would assume I would have to waydroid. But I never got waydroid set up. Hopefully that's something that has gotten easier in the past 2 years. 2 years ago there was multiple hoops to jump through with installing kernel modules or something, and seeing a list of steps to take (and not just being able to install it from a repo in 1 go), when I was already dealing with performance issues, I just assumed it wasn't going to be worth it.
Who knows, maybe I'll give it a try again and come to a more favorable "it's fine i guess, but still not as good as my 2017 android phone in any capacity except 'not google'"
I agree. I wish we had better companies making GNU/Linux phones, but this is all we have for now. It's either Pine64 or Purism.
Yeah, the original PinePhone has only a 5 megapixel camera. PinePhone Pro's camera is way better, but I'm not sure about the current state of software support. The author of the Megapixels camera app is working on a new, improved version, but it seems very complicated: https://blog.brixit.nl/fixing-the-megapixels-sensor-linearization/
I use Gnome's Secrets (available in Mobian Bookworm). It works well on mobile, but I don't know about autofill. For 2fa you can use Gnome Authenticator (not available in Mobian Bookworm) or Numberstation (available in Mobian Bookworm).
You would just have to test it. I only have the original PinePhone with the libre modem firmware and I haven't noticed any missed calls, but I don't get a lot of calls in general. According to this recent blog post there seem to be some modem issues with PinePhone Pro (but I'm not sure if that includes missed calls): https://zerwuerfnis.org/daily-driving-the-pinephone-pro
Ah, that sounds painful. I've never used Waydroid, but a lot of people say it works well for them. I don't see it packaged in Debian or Mobian, but 2 years is a lot of time in software development, so maybe it's easier now. There is also some alternative Signal client called Axolotl. Some people use it, but I don't fully understand how it works, so you would have to investigate on your own.
Yeah, it probably won't be as good. It requires GNU/Linux experience and some workarounds. But if you manage to set it up in a way that makes you use Android less, that would be pretty great.
Speedrun reply:
In conclusion, I want to thank you for such a cordial and friendly conversation. I've borderline forgotten how decent people on the internet can be. I can't imagine a "debate" remaining this civil on reddit. (And if I was anything less than civil, I apologize! The broader internet has trained me for a fight or flight response for replies.)
The camera isn't going to be as good as modern high-end smartphones, but it should be usable. But I have a separate camera for taking photos and don't know that much about mobile cameras, though.
You wouldn't be doing it for a phone, but for freedom (and with that comes better privacy and security). That should be your goal. But I understand that it's difficult.
Yeah, sounds like that could work.
Nice, that sounds like a big improvement over normal Android.
Thank you too, I don't always meet nice people either (even on Lemmy). Have a nice day!
Edit: I checked and the instructions for installing Waydroid don't look that complicated nowadays, but this might depend on the distro:
https://wiki.debian.org/Mobian/How-to#How_to_run_Android_apps_via_Waydroid
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Waydroid
https://docs.waydro.id/usage/install-on-desktops
Not reliable as a daily driver but very cool
For those who have used each, which did you prefer, GrapheneOS or a Linux-based phone, and why?
I have a "braveheart" pinephone (one of the first ones) and I just use it to play around with it's features, do distrohopping etc.)
Most of the time i used an arch build with phosh. But actually I highly recommend postmarketOS, the installer is straight forward and let you build whatever you want. Actually I run postmarketOS edge with encrypted f2fs and gnome-mobile on it. gnome-mobile works better on newer phones but it is still usable.
I prefer my grapheneOS phone because it is faster has more apps, apps are scaled correctly etc. Not too much battery drain...
PS. I managed to run Thunderbird usable on pinephone, I just play around with the look&feel and now I simply have just the mail cards and I am able to interact with it without too much scaling issues.
What is the current state of Gnome mobile? I thought that it wasn't finished yet. Is it as good as Phosh?
Phosh comes with Geary. I haven't used it, but it looks like it should work well on mobile.
Phosh is definitely more polished and an attempt to make gtk mobile friendly. I actually prefer gnome-mobile for testing purposes. It's exactly like gnome-desktop and apps are opened each in an workspace, which is an impressive solution. It also needs more resources, and its not recommended for the first pinephone.
I know about Geary. But it's not the same as a complete Thunderbird install. There I can use my smime/openpgp certs and tags are also synchronised.
Thanks! I'll probably go with a grapheneOS build next, I prefer battery life over most things for my use case. Thanks for the info!
I think Linux phones needs more time. My dream would be a phone I can plug into a docking station and work on where I stopped. Most platforms gave this dream up. But Linux is on it's way to do it. It's actually possible, thx to gtk4, libadwaita etc.
That's exciting! Probably not my use-case, but certainly a functional role!
Or it still got old. I think its all of them.
The SoC is not very power efficient. There aren't many to choose from. In case of PinePhone Pro it's a 2016 SoC running modern software.
...are we ignoring android?
Yes. When people talk about a Linux phone, they mean a Linux like experience where the user is in charge and there is no data harvesting or other shitfuckery. That's not something any Android phone delivers out of the box.
Do they mean GNU/Linux?
Honestly F-droid has shown that Android has a lot of potential
Yup
GNU/Linux phones may not be, but Android/Linux is quite usable. Jesus should know the difference.
When Android was still new, lots of people thought of it as "Linux for phones".
They weren't wrong. Linux technically is the kernel. The toolkits used to build the apps are really what most people think of when they use the term though.
But it's not the same Linux kernel that we use on desktop.
That's the beauty of the Linux kernel, it can be stripped, modified, etc to suit its intended purpose.
I don't think there's really anyone who'd argue against that and actually mean it.
You could install a mobile GNU/Linux Custom Rom on your Android phone.
Assuming you have one that's supported ofc.
Is sailfishos linux?
Yes
That works if youre kinda an enthusiast. Not saying its perfect. But it works. for context I've run a librem 5 and a pinephone and they both are not there yet imho.
True. It was absolutely useful in the Android 4 era when it first came out. Jolla phone was more advanced and useable than contemporary android devices. Android simply has far more resources to truck on.
I mean you can run android on it thru containers. Setup Waydroid or just give jolla €50 (one time payment) and don't think about it.
that way you have control over your device and still have access to the android ecosystem.
Hey linux friends, what are you doing on your phones that a pinephone doesn't cut it? If I have a DSLR and don't give a shit about mobile social media, is there an issue?
Leaving my house for over an hour
I'd say the big issue is how much extra effort things take to do. You are relying a lot on web pages instead of applications and a lot of them don't feel really well optimized. Actions that would normally take a minute might take four minutes.
There's some issues with native apps too. When I was using my PinePhone I don't think I was able to get music to play in the background for example. I imagine this has been fixed by now but it was still frustrating.
I'll be honest, I don't know the UX and was looking to actually pick up a pine phone. I will continue my research!
I have a pinephone and a pinephone pro, and they are basically just fun linux toys. I keep it in my bag in case my regular phone breaks during travel. It does text and make phone calls. Battery life is pretty bad, but i always have battery banks on me.
The only real daily use ive found is as a security camera monitor at work. Also I run easytether on it and my android to skirt tethering fees when needed. Occasionally when on the road, i need a proper linux install to do something. Ive used it to troubleshoot networking things as well.
If anything its been more of a raspberry pi replacement than a phone replacement for me.
I wrote a comment that might help you with your research: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/9202570
This thread contains some information too: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/9166918
I've never had such issue and I've never heard of it, so it must be some old bug that was fixed long time ago.
What’s a daily driver?
A device you can comfortably use in your everyday life to do what you would want from such a device. In this case a phone you can do telephone calls with, write instant messages, take photos, browse the internet, play some games. And everything without the battery dying on you. And in a manner that is not too hacky ir frustrating.
It is possible to daily drive a Pinephone. But it's not a pleasant experience. It's better suited for unpleasant tinkering.
The device you use every day.
The origin is that your “daily driver” is your car for commuting to work, presumably to differentiate it from your sports car or farm truck.
I feel like people that unironically tout Linux phones as stable enough are the same people that think we can ditch Xorg, not true even though I obviously would like it to be.
I totally see what you mean with the GNU-like Linux phones. But what issue could you have with Wayland in the year 2024?
PinePhone and Librem 5 actually run GNU/Linux. Same software that you can run on desktop. Only Ubuntu Touch uses Android kernel I think.
Some people take offense in referring to Alpine/postmarketOS as GNU.
That makes sense, but there are other popular mobile distros too. For example: Manjaro ARM and Mobian (mobile Debian).
I know, I got the wording from some online website. Linux phones doesn't make too much sense to me, I would prefer to just call them GNU phones. The kernel can't be what defines this group of OSs when the main OS you're trying to exclude from this group runs the same one. GNU-like is a compromise.
Using the word Linux to describe the operating system makes no sense in general. You never know if someone is talking about the OS or the kernel. GNU was developed by different people with a different philosophy and goals. When people say Linux, they usually mean GNU/Linux (Linux Mint, Arch Linux, etc). But there is also Alpine Linux, which doesn't use GNU at all, so it's not exactly the same thing. And why even name the OS after the kernel? Doesn't the name Alpine Linux sound like it's just a fork of Linux? It's super confusing and people mix it up all the time, even this community of GNU/Linux users and under this post.
Android uses a heavily modified fork of Linux, so it doesn't use the same Linux that we use on desktop and it's definitely not a GNU/Linux operating system. So I don't know if we can call it "Linux".
Then there is Ubuntu Touch and I don't even know how to call that. GNU/Android maybe?
But the phones that we are talking about here I would say that those are GNU/Linux phones. Because even though many people run postmarketOS on them, they are designed to run GNU/Linux and they are shipped with it. But the phones designed to run Ubuntu Touch are something else. Maybe we should just call them Android phones, because I think that's what they are mostly designed to run.
For me steam VR doesn't work in Wayland
I feel like I might've exaggerated the chasm between ditching Xorg and adopting Linux phones, Waylands only problems are really VR (just seems to be dead end outside of SteamVR) and Nvidia feature parity though that's less to do with Wayland and more to do with Nvidia dragging their feet on Linux, theres also the odd edge case like unrecognised inputs.
Oh, come on. Wayland is shipped by default by a lot of distros now because it's perfectly stable and usable in the vast majority of use cases and hardware. For every story about wayland falling down, I can come up with a dozen "stupid shit X11 does now because it's unmaintained and dev X tries to do something new with his app" stories. I do silly things like run 6 monitors on 2 GPUs on a Core 2Duo, and it runs like a top. If there's a problem, it's always something dumb i've done like knocked a cable than it is that Wayland has shit the bed. And it's been working like that for 2 years.
I ran a Pinephone for a year as a DD back in the early days, it was a pain in the ass but it was possible if you were stubborn enough. But it was no Android. But then again, it wasn't Android.
I daily drive mine and it's not good, but I prefer that than running spyware.
Spoke on it at the top reply
it is very easy to stop using xorg, lol
I would totally daily drive a Linux phone if performance wasn't so awful. I don't care if it doesn't a have any apps. In fact, the inability to install apple or android apps is actually a positive point in my view.
pear phones > everything
I'm sure PinePhone is better than the Openmoko distro was back in the day.
I used my Openmoko for a few months and happily sold it to a friend after explaining the state of the OS.
I'm daily driving Droidian for more than a year!
Meanwhile me absolutely running a dualboot Oneplus 6 with lineage and droidian that has had kupferos, mobian and postmarketos in the past... (yes, i distrohop my phone, so what?)
Shiftphone?
Wait till bro finds out what android is
Linux people tend to forget, that people want something that just works, why I love Linux, I have a mac and later bought an Iphone, the UX difference of using and airpod pro with an Android phone and an Iphone is just miles apart, I can literally have it in my ears, click on a video on my mac and the sound transfers, then as I go out for a walk with my dog and start a podcast, the airpods switch back to my phone without any hassle.
Before that I would have to disconnect and reconnect bluetooth multiple times to switch between the android phone and the macbook.
Granted I maybe care a lot more about good UX than normal people, but good UX like that just makes me hard.