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The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

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Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#91

Post by errantspark »

My only phone is a Pinephone. I don't "daily" drive it because I'm not really much of a phone user but it's still loads better than the experience I had with Android/iOS.

I feel like the phone respects me. It's a computer and when I decide that I want to do [X thing a computer can do] it lets me do that. It feels much better to struggle against real problems I can solve than it does to struggle against fake problems inflicted upon me by other people in order to extract value from me.

I would seriously much rather deal with "Which file do I pipe `1` into using a shell on a phone screen in order to turn on the flashlight LED?" than having to deny Google location tracking privileges for the millionth time because they will just keep asking me until I accidentally hit yes instead of no one day.

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#92

Post by hakfoo »

grawprog wrote: post #23
tetrisgm wrote: post #5

I want the PinePhone to work. The Librem too. In fact I had preorders for both. I canceled them looking at the performance. They’re excellent toys. Great effort to ship such a difficult product. But if your phone is going to struggle with running things besides terminal, it’s not going to be a great daily phone. I’d love them to be on par with the latest Android flagships in terms of power. Cost is not an issue. I ju…

Personally, I'd rather something equivalent to a mid-range android phone. Something that works decently well, but still affordable enough adoption isn't limited only to the wealthy looking for toys. I see most flagship phones that way myself. For me, i need more than what the pinephone offers, but it doesn't need to have all the features of a high end phone. A decent processor and RAM would make the pinephone a lot m…

I don't need much performance-- my present phone is a 2-year-old $220 Umidigi F1, and it's entirely performant for my needs-- but the problem is the likelihood of showstopper app needs.

I don't want to carry two devices, or have to reboot twice daily, so that I can still the weird 2FA app my employer uses. I wonder if the ideal endgame is a VM style model-- you have an Android VM that you give 2% of CPU to, just enough to keep that app alive, but normally spend your day in LumeOS or whatever your flavour is.

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#93

Post by ocdtrekkie »

amelius wrote: post #70

What sandboxing/app-deployment systems does Linux offer today, and which one is the most promising? Are they secure, and do they offer fine-grained permissions?

Sandstorm.io is a sandboxing/app-deployment system that runs on Linux servers, which uses capability-based security and fine-grained permissions. (As a note, it sandboxes individual "grains", which are single-documents/instances, not entire apps.

Of course, Sandstorm is built to present a cloud-like web app interface, not local desktop or mobile apps.

I still think personal servers are the eventual way to go, such that people's mobile devices they carry with them aren't the definitive location of lots of their valuable data.

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#94

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Bancakes wrote: post #58
squarefoot wrote: post #55

One point that should be repeated ad infinitum for those reading about the Pinephone for the 1st time: it's all about the freedom, not performance. One doesn't buy the Pinephone to brag about its technical achievements with friends, but rather to contribute building an ecosystem, even just by spreading the word, of people who put freedom and privacy above everything. I also should be repeated ad infinitum why its har…

It's sad to see free hardware is so comically behind commercial one.

FOSS and OSH will always sit a few years behind companies which are investing billions of dollars in R&D. But we can try to lift what we can and catch up sooner or later.

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#95

Post by blihp »

Bancakes wrote: post #58
squarefoot wrote: post #55

One point that should be repeated ad infinitum for those reading about the Pinephone for the 1st time: it's all about the freedom, not performance. One doesn't buy the Pinephone to brag about its technical achievements with friends, but rather to contribute building an ecosystem, even just by spreading the word, of people who put freedom and privacy above everything. I also should be repeated ad infinitum why its har…

It's sad to see free hardware is so comically behind commercial one.

That's a function of the state of the SoC options currently. There are very few options for an open source phone design to choose from that have sufficient public documentation. The ones that do tend to be several generations behind on process nodes and have more modest capabilities generally as they are often targeting the low end of the market.

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#98

Post by spankalee »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #82
spankalee wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuchsia is a much more secure and updatable platform. It'd be wonderful if there was a Pine-like for Fuchsia, especially if they can use open drivers.

It will definitely be more secure, but probably drastically less open, since there won't be any GPL code underneath for people to demand copies of. Fuchsia, once it reaches the level of polish required of proper Google products, will be as closed as iOS. And security will be the justification for it.

The Fuchsia code itself is open, and while a vendor could make changes and not release them, a project like Pine wouldn't do that. That would indeed be a major motivation to use a Pine-like over other vendors.

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#99

Post by testific8 »

mhitza wrote: post #72
meristohm wrote: post #17

Since 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.

The biggest performance issue is going to be the browser. Because for any type of rendering performance hardware acceleration is a must. And Firefox disables that by default on Linux (needs to be manually enabled in about:config). The second issue, which I saw based on reviews alone was a very slow camera interface. One surprise with PinePhone optimized distros is Ubuntu Touch (ubports). Not sure what type of magic t…

Speaking from experience with the pinephone, the browser situation is actually pretty good on postmarketOS because they have a custom firefox configuration for mobile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co6qnlw4hgE

I can also confirm that the camera interface is slow. It takes like 30 seconds to dump a single image and render it into a jpeg. The main camera app is called "Megapixels". I'm not sure, but i've heard there are some paralellism changes coming downstream that may improve performance somewhat now that they have updated to gtk4.

Re: The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life

#100

Post by spankalee »

posguy wrote: post #76
lupire wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is something wrong with using Fuchsia kernel insted of Linux? It's open source and it has a modern, secure capability architecture. Running Linux binaries , not just source code, is a design goal of Fuchsia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26104667

Fuchsia has separated the drivers from the kernel[1], enabling proprietary drivers that are never updated to become acceptable. This can result in Blueborne[2], GPU vulnerabilities[3], and any other proprietary driver remaining permanently vulnerable as the hardware manufacturer has no incentive to update the driver. In Fuchsia's model, you can run the latest OS with these vulnerable, non-updated drivers, or your dev…

Those types of driver vulnerabilities are exactly why Fuchsia's sandboxed driver model is needed.
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