The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
11–20 of 225 posts
Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
#12I would buy a pinephone at the moment but the performance is just not that much compared to Android phones. It's not good for a daily phone to use at the moment. Until then, I'll stick with my OnePlus 7 Pro until there's a linux phone with good performance, even if it costs more.
Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
#13This is probably gonna come as a shock to some people, but I wholly think I could live with a Linux smartphone today. I really only use my phone for two things: text/calling and staying connected to my desktop/laptop. As long as it supports the KDE/GDE connect protocol (I doubt it doesn't), I could see myself actually being one of the early adopters here.
I would be totally fine using such a phone for almost everything I do. The only big gap would be using Sweden's identification app BankID and the money transferring app Swish. Unless these were ported to the phone, I would unfortunately lose one of it's most important functionalities for me. Of course I could just have an Apple/Android phone sitting at home for such purposes, but it is definitely less convenient.
This is one of the things I worry about - a duopoly not just backed by two wealthy and shady megacorps but also effectively by law as it mandates a mobile app for some things yet the app only exists for iOS and Android & no public API is available.
Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
#14This is a good start.
Bring on the real spec Linux phones with flagship CPU / ram / cameras. If only to act as a catalyst to improve the other platforms. But mostly so I can run What I Want (tm).
But first, the market needs to be tested. So, these early devices are a good idea.
Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
#15This is probably gonna come as a shock to some people, but I wholly think I could live with a Linux smartphone today. I really only use my phone for two things: text/calling and staying connected to my desktop/laptop. As long as it supports the KDE/GDE connect protocol (I doubt it doesn't), I could see myself actually being one of the early adopters here.
KDEConnect is supported in KDE/Plasma-based distros. Work is in progress to add it to Gnome/Phosh. KDEConnect is definitely a killer app! Can't speak for the other distros, but Mobian/Phosh has reached a point where it's usable as a primary phone. Tons of work from the community has brought battery lifetimes up from ~1 hour to the point where it lasts me the day under normal use. Firefox is usable, and most every pie…
GNOME has gsconnect. It talks with KDE connect apps using their protocol. I've been using it for years until a couple of months ago, when it started to eat into CPU and make all my desktop lag. There is an open issue for that. I'll check if new releases fixed the issue. My devices can still talk between themselves.
Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
#16Reading the comments, everybody wants a Linux phone at a shit price but even that not just yet - first it has to gets close to Android and iOS performance. Such fans!
Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
#17Since I no longer play games on my mobile device, I’m comfortable with lower performance (to run Anki, a password manager, Firefox, text editing, play music and podcasts and audiobooks and text-to-speech ebooks—this might be resource-intensive?, record and view photos and videos, send and receive texts and calls). Battery life is also important, though most of my phone use is while it is plugged in.
Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
#18My Pinephone doesn't work for me as a primary phone (yet), but I think it's still a very capable device at home with good integration (via KDE connect).
Without millions of dollars in corporate support, hardware vendors like Pine64 and Linux on mobile developers need user support to make progress. If you want a performant Linux phone, put some skin in the game.
Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
#19This is probably gonna come as a shock to some people, but I wholly think I could live with a Linux smartphone today. I really only use my phone for two things: text/calling and staying connected to my desktop/laptop. As long as it supports the KDE/GDE connect protocol (I doubt it doesn't), I could see myself actually being one of the early adopters here.
I'm not convinced. I'd love a Linux phone but there must be some standard that ensures apps are easy to develop and the apps must grow significantly for this to catch on. Otherwise it'll be just like Linux on the desktop. It'll become a mess of 15 different standards and apps devs will not bother with that. I really hope it'll work out, but we'll see.
There are many standards on linux, but in my experience they are mostly inter-compatable. I have KDE/X11 programs running just fine in my GNOME/Wayland environment. I also have alsa, pulseaudio and pipewire playing nice on my laptop.
I've heard binary distribution is a problem, with many overcomplicated methods like Appimage, Snap, and Flatpack. But it doesn't matter because linux users will prefer installing from source code or a trusted repository anyways. And they should: This is the more secure way of doing things. Closed source programs need not apply.
Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
#20This is probably gonna come as a shock to some people, but I wholly think I could live with a Linux smartphone today. I really only use my phone for two things: text/calling and staying connected to my desktop/laptop. As long as it supports the KDE/GDE connect protocol (I doubt it doesn't), I could see myself actually being one of the early adopters here.
I would be totally fine using such a phone for almost everything I do. The only big gap would be using Sweden's identification app BankID and the money transferring app Swish. Unless these were ported to the phone, I would unfortunately lose one of it's most important functionalities for me. Of course I could just have an Apple/Android phone sitting at home for such purposes, but it is definitely less convenient.
Same for banking apps here in Italy and the OTP generator of our id system.
Plus some apps I don't strictly have to use but I want to: WhatsApp (to use the web app I should run the android one somewhere it can receive messages with my phone number, cough), Telegram (probably OK), OSMAnd, NewPipe as a YouTube adless replacement (YouTube web is not OK), Google Street View and satellite maps (the web app is vastly worse), car sharing apps (less of that now), random apps from my customers.
All considered I'll have to carry an Android phone anyway so I'm carrying only an Android phone. No Linux phone. But I've been using Ubuntu as my only OS since 2009.