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Librem 5 Evergreen vs. Pinephone

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Re: Librem 5 Evergreen vs. Pinephone

#41

Post by AnthonyMouse »

freeopinion wrote: post #20
baybal2 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are solutions to this. Obvious solutions. But it would imply paying more for stuff. Well, even if you do, you are up to myriad of other issues. The progressing general business unfriendliness of the West will not go anywhere. If it does not go, the situation will not change even if you put 1000000% tariff on Chinese goods. I myself been working on setting up a small knock down kit assembly factory 6 years ago…

Trump just fought China with tariffs. That is not the answer and I don't think is one of the "obvious solutions" referenced. Let me put it this way... Should we allow a factory in Indiana to avoid environmental regulation if they just pay a 30% tariff? Is it ok to have a 5% mortality rate at a factory in Alabama if they pay a 60% tariff? Should U.S. companies be allowed to just pay fees to become exempt from FDA/EPA/…

> Should we allow a factory in Indiana to avoid environmental regulation if they just pay a 30% tariff?

There are problems that tariffs are a solution to, like currency manipulation. Lack of environmental rules is not really one of those problems.

> The answer is to ban them just like we should ban U.S.-made products that don't follow the rules.

The real problem is that there are two problems, which currently sort of cancel out.

The first problem is that the existing rules in the US are effective but prohibitively burdensome. The second problem is that the same rules don't apply to China. Businesses solve the first problem by invoking the second.

We can't solve just one. If you imposed the existing rules on China, things would become unreasonably expensive. If you stopped imposing them on the US, there would be as much pollution in the US as there is in China. We need more efficient rules. Which is hard. Worse, it's not sexy and nobody wants to do the work.

But in a sense we can have one solve the other in the opposite direction too. Apply the same rules to other countries and they can't be avoided by leaving the US, which then creates pressure to fix the rules so that they're not prohibitively inefficient, since they can no longer be avoided.

Re: Librem 5 Evergreen vs. Pinephone

#42

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

I'm impressed with the rate of progress in the Linux distros for smartphones due to these devices, especially the Pinephone as it's more accessible.

But I honestly expected few major phone manufacturers to join these development effort in some manner after seeing the fate of Huawei with Android or specifically Google Play Services/OHA(Open Handset Alliance), I'm surprised it didn't happen yet or perhaps it's because of OHA it's not happening.

Tizen didn't work out for smartphones although it seems to be gaining market share in wearables, why not direct the smartphone investment part of it to PostmarketOS, UBPorts etc. I presume Linux Foundation has to play a role in it.

Re: Librem 5 Evergreen vs. Pinephone

#43

Post by ThatGeoGuy »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #39
O1111OOO wrote: post #27

> For the vast majority of people, the Librem 5 and Pinephone are probably not worth even considering. The GNU userspace and associated “mobile” paradigms within it are very much not ready for daily use. > Linux phones are definitely not yet ready to be daily drivers Despite the author making this point twice and some of the negativity regarding Purism's pricing - I still feel very good about the state of Linux phone…

> It’s as easy as loading the distro onto an SD card, and then booting the phone. You don’t even have to flash anything to the internal eMMC in order to run it! FWIW while the Librem 5 can't run the bootloader straight from the SD card, the kernel can use the rootfs from SD card just fine - I have multiple distros installed on SD card there this way. The Librem 5 also supports booting via fastboot (uuu), which person…

This is good info, I didn't know this!

Shame though, because among all the Pine devices I have (Pinebook Pro, Pinephone) I've gotten very used to booting from the SD card to swap things out.

Have you written / do you have any links to documentation for how to use fastboot?

Re: Librem 5 Evergreen vs. Pinephone

#44

Post by ansible »

> Both phones can run fairly hot. I think given how I hold the phone (closer to the base of the phone) I tend to notice the Librem 5 more often than I notice the Pinephone getting hotter. This is mostly because the frame / chassis for the Librem 5 is metal, and conducts the heat around the sides of the phone. So you’ll notice it getting hot after you’ve used your phone for a good bit.

Power management is complex these days. You'll often get a minimal implementation from the chip vendor, and it is a fair amount of work to really polish the lower level support. On top of that, you have to integrate this with the rest of the OS, so that active apps can increase the clocks, which then get automatically scaled back as system load decreases. So there's a lot to do on the userspace side as well.

Re: Librem 5 Evergreen vs. Pinephone

#45

Post by dleslie »

O1111OOO wrote: post #27

> For the vast majority of people, the Librem 5 and Pinephone are probably not worth even considering. The GNU userspace and associated “mobile” paradigms within it are very much not ready for daily use. > Linux phones are definitely not yet ready to be daily drivers Despite the author making this point twice and some of the negativity regarding Purism's pricing - I still feel very good about the state of Linux phone…

The PinePhone is _so close_.

Some suggestions, as a user, to get it over the edge:

1. Every app in the Manjaro distribution that ships pre-installed should at least fit on the screen; many apps have popups that do not.

2. Dialing should never cause a reboot; calling voicemail has crashed the phone for me.

3. Either give up on having a camera or make it _fast_.

4. Some kind of loading indicator for apps would be nice.

5. Either don't allow X apps to be installed or make the X wrapper work; I can install gtk emacs but it doesn't run.

Re: Librem 5 Evergreen vs. Pinephone

#46

Post by Valkhyr »

ansible wrote: post #44

> Both phones can run fairly hot. I think given how I hold the phone (closer to the base of the phone) I tend to notice the Librem 5 more often than I notice the Pinephone getting hotter. This is mostly because the frame / chassis for the Librem 5 is metal, and conducts the heat around the sides of the phone. So you’ll notice it getting hot after you’ve used your phone for a good bit. Power management is complex thes…

This is the major reason I deferred my Evergreen Librem 5 order for the Fir batch (set to ship in ~1 year), which will (a) have a smaller process size (14nm vs 28nm currently) and (b) allow for more time for optimizations.

Re: Librem 5 Evergreen vs. Pinephone

#47

Post by Valkhyr »

m463 wrote: post #36

> It too has kill-switches, but these are not easy to access on the side of the phone and instead are inside the case of the phone. Ha, I can't help but think this is something linux folks won't even think twice about. :)

Hmm, I would not underestimate the convenience of having them out the outside easily accessible, especially when you consider that switching off radios at the moment should also help with battery consumption? (<- this is an assumption; I don't own either device and cannot test this)

Re: Librem 5 Evergreen vs. Pinephone

#48

Post by pjmlp »

O1111OOO wrote: post #27

> For the vast majority of people, the Librem 5 and Pinephone are probably not worth even considering. The GNU userspace and associated “mobile” paradigms within it are very much not ready for daily use. > Linux phones are definitely not yet ready to be daily drivers Despite the author making this point twice and some of the negativity regarding Purism's pricing - I still feel very good about the state of Linux phone…

A fantasy that exists since OpenMoko, released in 2007, 13 years ago, just as long as the iPhone exists in the market.

Re: Librem 5 Evergreen vs. Pinephone

#49

Post by [deleted] »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #5
renewiltord wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any? It costs the Earth to build in America. It might not even be possible. Maybe you can assemble in America but it seems like a fool's errand. Like five people want this and they're also so obsessive about other things that they won't buy your stuff unless it's perfect anyway.

The problem in the US is that everything is aligned against making stuff here. The unions have been in damage control mode for decades, trying to avoid losing the factories that employ two hundred to the more automated factories that employ twenty, but then as a result losing 100% rather than 90% of the jobs to China. We impose labor and environmental rules on products made in the US but don't require the same standa…

[deleted]

Re: Librem 5 Evergreen vs. Pinephone

#50

Post by Valkhyr »

Causality1 wrote: post #13

I'm all for more variety of hardware and more control over software. That said, what makes these a better option, for anyone, than buying an android phone with an unlockable bootloader and loading a Google-less version of Android on it?

Just speaking for myself, as somebody who has preordered a Librem 5, but may not be representative at all of the wider community around it:

I want a pocketable Linux device I can take with me everywhere. That's it. I don't care how well it works as a phone. I want a fully-featured, honest-to-god GNU/Linux terminal in my pocket that I can use to do anything that I could do on a (massively underpowered) Linux laptop, especially on the command line (i.e. I don't even care too much about GUI apps except some basics like web and PDF display).

If it can someday replace my phone, that's a massive bonus of course, but realistically I don't think it will within the next decade, for my specific smartphone needs. But that's OK - I don't mind carrying alongside it an Android device that is my actual "smartphone".

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