Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

pine64.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 204 posts

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#101

Post by blihp »

squarefoot wrote: post #95
blihp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're used to running on a low-end Chromebook as a daily driver, no.

I'd like to be optimistic wrt future software performance on this model as well. Linux isn't Android where user apps are written to run under a virtual machine and development has to deal with the Java monoculture (Android still doesn't have low latency audio for this exact reason). However, some Python apps that on a powerful desktop run at high speed might be taxed by the Pinephone comparatively slow hardware, so n…

C++ apps tax the Pinephone hardware. It's just not very fast vs user expectations today. More generally you can't just recompile desktop Linux apps on mobile and expect much in terms of responsiveness/battery life. While I'm with you re: not wanting to be stuck in a proprietary ecosystem, it does have one advantage: you must specifically target the platform in order to do much useful on it which typically includes platform-specific optimizations so it performs well.

It's an interesting conundrum: right now I can probably get 90% of Linux GUI software running on my Pinephone. The problem is, it's so slow and painful to use that I don't want to. I'd much rather see the critical 5% of the software (browsers etc) optimized for mobile. I think we'll get there in time, but it's still early days.

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#102

Post by Donckele »

hutzlibu wrote: post #97
kleiba wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in the C64 days - I still can't get my head around the fact that you need 3gb of RAM because 2gb is not enough to run a webbrowser these days. I know that what's going on on a typical website these days requires an enormous amount of computational power, but I mean, come on. That shouldn't be the explanation, it's part of the problem.

I did not know, that in C64 days you had a browser, with x WebAPIs to do various networking stuff, p2p, soundAPI, database, payment processing, complex - hardware accelerated styling and composite of layout, plattform irrelevant assembler subset, with a integrated IDE etc. etc. A Webbrowser these days is simply much, much more than a static document viewer, despite this might be, what you want it to be.

I don’t think you need all that for the important stuff.

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#103

Post by thatcat »

scns wrote: post #48
0x445442 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found KDE Neon to be WAY more stable than Kubuntu. And this has been the case on multiple LTS versions. I just think this is odd since, in theory, they should only differ by the KDE apps that are installed.

Primal Penguin explains the differences here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_rP3ZaTn5Y

tldw; neon has rolling release of packages and kubuntu uses lts packages.

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#104

Post by hutzlibu »

Donckele wrote: post #102
hutzlibu wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not know, that in C64 days you had a browser, with x WebAPIs to do various networking stuff, p2p, soundAPI, database, payment processing, complex - hardware accelerated styling and composite of layout, plattform irrelevant assembler subset, with a integrated IDE etc. etc. A Webbrowser these days is simply much, much more than a static document viewer, despite this might be, what you want it to be.

I don’t think you need all that for the important stuff.

But other people think different of "important stuff" thats why it is there.

And those who really want only simple HTMl rendering, I believe there are lightweight alternatives (?).

And if not, well then maybe there is simply not enough demand, because most people apparently want to be able to have a email client in the browser and do online banking, or edit Wikipedia articles in a rich html editor, or play games, or watch videos and share and comment them or even do video editing, ... all in the browser.

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#105

Post by hutzlibu »

Dahoon wrote: post #63
kleiba wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in the C64 days - I still can't get my head around the fact that you need 3gb of RAM because 2gb is not enough to run a webbrowser these days. I know that what's going on on a typical website these days requires an enormous amount of computational power, but I mean, come on. That shouldn't be the explanation, it's part of the problem.

Especially since on PC it doesn't even need 1gb. With 7 add-ons (one being an adblocker) and Firefox having spawned 9 processes in Win10 it still uses less than 1GB RAM for me (even though two tabs are chats, so background-active). Something is clearly either wrong in the Firefox he run, his add-ons or Phinephone.

Or maybe that the os needs some ram, too?

And no, the firmware and drivers are sadly not memory optimized (or barely run at all), as ar as I know.

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#106

Post by qwertox »

hobofan wrote: post #79
jegea wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I was using SL4A [0] back in the days, had a Twisted server running on it, until the development on it stopped.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scripting_Layer_for_Android

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#107

Post by blihp »

stazz1 wrote: post #90
blihp wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 remotel…

Hmmm great points. Is this a "call for mobile versions" of classic Linux programs in a way?

Definitely... that's part of the reason I chime in when this topic comes up. Having done both Linux and mobile development, I don't believe that the entirety of the answer is going to be 'just throw a more powerful SoC in the device'. Sure, that will help to a degree in some areas but there is a lot of work that has been put into iOS and Android to achieve a balance between battery life and performance that most developers who have only worked in/on Linux haven't appreciated. Which is understandable since it wasn't 'their' problem... now with the Pinephone/Librem 5, it is.

Something I have found worthwhile has been listening to the UBports podcast over the last 6 months or so. They really do seem to be 'getting it' faster than most re: what's left to be done. That's partly because they're in the rather unique position of coming from a place of having the Android kernel (which isn't just a vanilla Linux kernel) do a lot of things for them (i.e. UBports on Android phones) and now that they're running on bare metal (i.e. UBports on Pinephone) with (mostly) the same code base they are able to see 'oh, yeah... the kernel and/or apps need to be able to do Y' in order to replicate the functionality they get on Android phones.

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#108

Post by tomc1985 »

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…

The screen blacking out thing might be due to DRAM speeds or timings being too aggressive. I received a manjaro CE phone the other day that does the same thing.

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9832 has more info

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#109

Post by boogies »

hutzlibu wrote: post #104
Donckele wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you need all that for the important stuff.

But other people think different of "important stuff" thats why it is there. And those who really want only simple HTMl rendering, I believe there are lightweight alternatives (?). And if not, well then maybe there is simply not enough demand, because most people apparently want to be able to have a email client in the browser and do online banking, or edit Wikipedia articles in a rich html editor, or play games, or…

> And if not, well then maybe there is simply not enough demand, because most people apparently want to be able to have a email client in the browser and do online banking, or edit Wikipedia articles in a rich html editor, or play games, or watch videos and share and comment them or even do video editing, ... all in the browser.

IMO they largely just want to do all these things in an open core VM, without risking installing malware on the ridiculously insecure proprietary OS most of them use if/when they use desktop computers.

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#110

Post by unpixer »

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.

I tried using Mobian as a daily driver, and found it usable but not necessarily ideal. Audio calls were comprehensible but sounded tinny, and people I was calling complained of an echo. Text messages worked, although I would have preferred Signal, and voicemail notifications came through as semi-cryptic text messages. As a portable terminal and web client though, it was perfectly acceptable albeit a bit pokey.
Post reply on HN