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PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

pine64.org

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Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#71

Post by abawany »

oriesdan wrote: post #9

For the record, I received yesterday the new mainboard that will be in those phones to replace the one of my pinephone UBport edition. The boost in RAM (3gb instead of 2gb) does the trick for me, allowing to use firefox. Not to the point that the experience is even close to android, but at least usable (before that, I used elinks on the phone). The system I use (mobian/phosh) still feels sluggish, but I suspect it's…

I tried Mobian but eventually switched to https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch - the phone is much more usable for me including Firefox. I am waiting to receive my updated board and look forward to further improvements.

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#72

Post by fxtentacle »

Aw, it's 6" screen and 160.5mm tall ... so too big for one-handed operation. I hope they'll eventually make either a 4" 125mm size or a flip phone, because that would be exactly what I would want to use. It's for the same reason that I'm also holding on to my old iPhone SE because the new SE is too large.

Like this, it's sadly more like "Linux that almost would have fit into your pocket".

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#73

Post by blendergeek »

LeonM wrote: post #58

Does anyone here have experience with actually using the pinephone as a daily driver? I know plenty of people that ordered one, but they are all laying on a drawer somewhere with the intention to play with it a bit. Basically how most RPi's end up. Just curious if this phone is actually competitive with android devices in the same price class.

> Does anyone here have experience with actually using the pinephone as a daily driver?

I do. I have been using my pmOS edition as my daily driver since the day i gott it.

> Just curious if this phone is actually competitive with android devices in the same price class.

That depends on your needs. It is not going to have any of the proprietary app that are on Android. So, what works?

- Camera: stills only

- Phone calls: Yes. Sometimes calls don't come through but it usualy works.

- Messaging: SMS works, unless you need MMS. If people send you group SMS or picture messages, these are MMS. MMS not only don't work but disable the ability to receive SMS. The user must use command line tools to fix this.

- GPS works. However the default pmOS maps app only works with an active internet connection. Further it does not do navigation. You can get directions but you cannot do turn-by-turn navigation on the road. There is an app that works for this called PureMaps. It works as expected.

- Web browsing works great with desktop firefox even on mobile.

- Convergence. The phone advertises that you can plug in a monitor. This is technically true, however it only works while the phone is running from battery power. Further using the dock drains battery extremely quickly and is therefore only recommended on wallpower. So this is still a work in progress.

- Bluetooth. Bluetooth headphones work for music but not for phone calls.

If you have any questions, ask and i'll try to answer. Whether its "competitive" with Android phones is opinion. For me, its way better and i am glad to have it.

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#74

Post by jcun4128 »

Well I got mine. I'm torn between "will it just sit on the counter/will I use it" as I use a Moto 5 already(low end phone with 3GB ram). Still it is a dream of mine to have everything on a phone as far as dock/develop on it. I mean I don't know if you'd ever be able to do vms but if you could run generic environments, pull down a repo/work on it, that would be pretty cool. Also will try to get more into Linux specifically I'm after some kind of i3-wm toggle for performance gain. Mostly hoping my support can help speed up the 8GB device ha.

A bunch of my old phones are sitting around doing nothing.

Edit: I guess maybe part of it is a "future development/emerging market" thing maybe I can develop apps people would want on Linux phones in the future.

In particular Qt/some native GUI/hopefully cross platform and to get more into C++ as I'm coming mostly from JS "wHy CaNt I uSe DyNaMiC tYpInG" ha that was a struggle.

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#75

Post by jcun4128 »

fsflover wrote: post #66
Ardon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Daily use" might be a biiit of a stretch with this hardware, but it'll be functional. I think Pinephone 2, whenever that happens, will be a much more practical convergence device. Pine64's plans to upgrade to the RK3566 SOC in their low-power devices look very promising.

If you are waiting for "Pinephone 2", take a look at Librem 5: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5

$800? The ram is 3GB so wondering what the huge jump in price is.

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#76

Post by blihp »

enos_feedler wrote: post #59
oriesdan wrote: post #9

For the record, I received yesterday the new mainboard that will be in those phones to replace the one of my pinephone UBport edition. The boost in RAM (3gb instead of 2gb) does the trick for me, allowing to use firefox. Not to the point that the experience is even close to android, but at least usable (before that, I used elinks on the phone). The system I use (mobian/phosh) still feels sluggish, but I suspect it's…

I’ve been using Mobian on the UBport edition for the last month. Sluggish doesn’t even describe the usability. I bought a few data only sims in hopes of leaving the house for short errands with different devices. There is no way I could leave the house with the pinephone. It isn’t usable yet. Could an extra gig of RAM solve this? It seems like it needs years of work.

As you noticed, it's not just a RAM issue. The problem is that Linux GUI and apps generally expect laptop/desktop-ish levels of hardware capabilities because that's what they were developed on/for. You're literally running the same code base that the x86 versions run, just recompiled for ARM. Most mobile SoCs, especially the ones that are Linux-friendly in terms of being open enough to be viable, are not even remotely that. On iOS and Android, widely used apps such as browsers are extensively optimized for mobile.

On the Pinephone, and all other ARM-based Linux devices, we're still running applications like web browsers that were written expecting to run on multi-core I/O monsters with lots of RAM, beefier GPUs etc. (the main exception being the main GUI shell... it would be so much worse if you had to boot the phone into a full Gnome/KDE environment) We're still in the late stages of getting the pile of software that is a typical Linux distro running at all on a mobile device. Then assuming these devices get enough traction, you'll start to see more effort put into mobile-optimized software.

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#77

Post by kop316 »

peternicky wrote: post #39

Is there a summary of functionality for pinephone? I’m not clear if for example the degraded mms support is an issue in all variants of mobile gnu Linux distros or oif only some suffer.

Since there are so many distros, it is honestly hard to keep up with (even if you are involved with the commuity). In (very) broad strokes (i.e. if you use a well supported distro), you can expect:

- Calls and SMS seem stable, even when the phone is asleep

- Battery life Screen on time is measured in hours, and sleep time is measured in ~1 day

- Anbox is usable, but not easy to install

- convergance is stable

- MMS is non-functional: https://sr.ht/~anteater/mms-stack/

- GPS/location is only usable if you have a GPS signal

- Camera is pretty stable (though the front camera had a green tint)

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#78

Post by fsflover »

jcun4128 wrote: post #75
fsflover wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are waiting for "Pinephone 2", take a look at Librem 5: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5

$800? The ram is 3GB so wondering what the huge jump in price is.

https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...

and

https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/

Upd: from a consumer point of view, the answer would be "because it is innovative" [0] and it has much faster RAM and GPU [1].

[0] https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...

[1] https://forums.puri.sm/t/comparing-specs-of-upcoming-linux-p...

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#79

Post by hobofan »

jegea wrote: post #64
qwertox wrote: post #41

I could fall in love with such a phone. One where I can easily run Python processes inside screen sessions, which gather GPS and other sensor data for rapid prototyping, stream that data over a WebSocket connection, then some Bluetooth stuff in Go. Computing stuff.

I own the 3GB Manjaro edition of the PinePhone (same hardware as this one, AFAIK) and, while in theory you can do everything that you describe with it, it is hardly something you could use as your only smartphone for the day. (I still love it, though, and love hacking away with it!!) However, as of today, there's a much better way of achieving what you're describing in an Android phone: Termux (1) With Termux you can…

As of today yes, but who knows about tomorrow. Termux might be facing a harsh future given the changes in Android 10.[0]

Actually switching to a pure Linux phone and might be the more viable long-term solution.

[0]: https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/wiki/Termux-and-An...

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#80

Post by [deleted] »

fsflover wrote: post #66
Ardon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Daily use" might be a biiit of a stretch with this hardware, but it'll be functional. I think Pinephone 2, whenever that happens, will be a much more practical convergence device. Pine64's plans to upgrade to the RK3566 SOC in their low-power devices look very promising.

If you are waiting for "Pinephone 2", take a look at Librem 5: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5

[deleted]
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