Linux phones
Linux phones
Anyone use one of those Linux phones like pine phone or librem.
I was looking at a few months ago but settled on a deggooled phone. Are there user friendly distros for them?
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I have a Pine phone that I bought some time ago.
I tried a couple of distros/environments:
- Mobian
- Manjaro + Plasma Mobile
- Manjaro + Phosh
My experience: As a basic phone, it mostly works. Everything else is pretty bad. The Pine phone is underpowered, the environments are not very well optimised and polished, basic browsing was almost unusable, things didn't work properly, I had to use the CLI to get around UI issues (which is very sucky on a phone), etc. Battery life is bad, the camera is a joke (if it works), the screen has dead pixels after less than a year, it's not a great picture.
I fully support what Pine phone is trying to do, in fact I bought 2 of them and I don't regret buying them, but know what you are getting into. It's nowhere near ready for mass adoption. If you're a hobbyist then it's a fun toy to play around with.
Purism is more expensive/better hardware and uses the Phosh graphical shell. I haven't tried it but I imagine the experience is a lot more polished. You could probably use that as a daily driver if you were happy to give up most of the apps / quality of life stuff your spyware phone currently does for you.
If you're not, then going the degoogled route is probably your best choice.
I owned a Pine Phone Pro for a while and it was a disaster. The software is still coming together, which is expected, but the hardware was also hobby project grade. As the previous poster mentioned, battery, camera, and screen were all bad, and on top of that the phone would refuse to charge with most chargers and could not charge at all while not booted, so once the battery was dead you had zero recourse beyond an external charger. The clamshell keyboard also wouldn't work without shimming the pogo pin connectors forward, and even then it was hit or miss. The company was terrible to deal with and only finally accepted a return after escalating a dispute with Paypal. I hate dumping on a company providing hardware for mobile Linux, but these guys seriously do more harm than good.
Strongly disagree. All things you mentioned are software issues. And they providing a phone with a bad specs intentionally. Because no one will buy an expensive GNU/Linux phone. We simply do not have software. The idea is to provide relatively cheap hardware, so developers can start working on it. And another reason was to provide hardware that have some GNU/Linux support already to avoid asking community to start from scratch. Very few phones can run GNU/Linux because of lack of drivers.
And yes, the keyboard is bad hardware-wise, I not satisfied with it either. But Pine did a lot for GNU/Linux on phones. Enthusiasts started writing software seriously only after PinePhone appearance.
All things you mentioned are hardware issues. [...] Because no one will buy an expensive GNU/Linux phone.
There's a difference between budget or low end components and flawed implementation or design. I didn't go in expecting a newer Snapdragon and a 144hz display- but neither did I go in expecting that it couldn't charge when dead. I didn't go to Denny's expecting filet mignon, but neither was I expecting a dirty tennis shoe on a plate. That was the whole point of my comment. The last thing mobile Linux needs is for people's first experience of it to be a semi-functional piece of hacked-together hardware- even if someone's willing to deal with in-dev software, when the thing straight up won't work it's not a good look.
All things you mentioned are hardware issues
Oh, I'm so sorry, I wanted to write "software". Edited. For example, charging when the phone is dead will be fixed soon with proper bootloader, megi already submitted patches to u-boot. It will also reduce power consumption in suspend.
the original post was about the PinePhone Pro though, and I think the high price of it, versus the low built quality and subsequent low number of developers trying to improve the software side, is a real shame.
IMHO, Pine64 tried to up-premium their products with the PineNote and the PinePhone Pro, but that totally failed and at least for the PineNote they admitted the sales were atrocious.
and I think the high price of it
I wouldn't call PPP expensive. It's a just more powerful version of PP for those developers (yes, for developers, it's written in bold on their website) who want a more powerful unit. Yes, you can buy a more powerful phone for this price, but it's not because Pine64 greed. They simply doesn't have as big production capacity as other rich companies. The more phones you produce, the cheaper price for unit, this is how it works.
low built quality
PP(P) have okay build quality. I have complains only about keyboard.
subsequent low number of developers trying to improve the software side
It's a community project, Pine does not develop the software at all. They only providing hardware and relies on community to build software for it. It's kinda unique business model, but it's the only way to make GNU/Linux phones popular. They are not Google, they can't invest billions of dollars to develop the software. Thanks to Pine64, developers (including me) can port and write their software for Linux on phones. I have both phones and I see how much the situation has improved. We are still far from Android, but it makes me happy to see progress in this direction.
I am well aware, but the PPP included some expensive "premium" features like licensed gorrilla glas and so on, which do nothing for the developer experience and made the price unattractive for a impulse buy to tinker with it. If they can sell the Pinebook Pro for around 250€ they could have also made a Pinephone Pro for 300€, but it actually costs double that.
Compared to the original PinePhone the developer uptake of the PPP has been really slow and as a result the software support is severely lacking even now, more than a year after the initial availability.
I am well aware, but the PPP included some expensive “premium” features like licensed gorrilla glas and so on, which do nothing for the developer experience
It's great when developers daily drive what they write since it's a community project and there is no quality control. I personally was happy when PPP was announced and bought it because I couldn't daily drive PP, the hardware is too outdated for me. I honestly would prefer even RK3566, its more powerful and less hungry. But users can still can buy PP.
Compared to the original PinePhone the developer uptake of the PPP has been really slow
PP is around since 2020. And it was in a similar state. Also initial GNU/Linux support were different. Especially camera.
And I also made a mistake in my first comment. I wanted to write that all issues are software issues. I'm so sorry.
Purism is more expensive/better hardware
Purism somehow has even worse hardware than the pinephone pro.
You pay about 50-100 dollars for the specs and between 1200 and 2000 dollars for phosh, the gnome-based phone shell. Which is free to use, but when you buy form Purism, you're paying for its' development.