The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by zozbot234 » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 9:16 PM UTC

m463 wrote: post #114

zozbot234 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the PinePhone and other Linux phones are also about performance. Yes the MVP prototypes will always suck and you would only buy these for freedom's sake, but a truly unified software platform encompassing both mobile and mainstream computing all running on openly documented reference hardware, will be far superior technically to what we have today.

As a purism owner, and a long-time linux user... I think that is a fantasy statement. Theoretically, there could be an open platform like the PC (with usb + pcie + ATX case/power supply + etc..) with open interfaces. However the reason this came into existence was by microsoft's design to commoditize the hardware to drive software sales of its (closed) operating system. With cellphones all of those interfaces are bei…

> I think Linux will always be behind commercial/proprietary platforms. One could arguably say that the iphone is a multi-billion dollar platform

One could have expected the same wrt. proprietary *NIX workstation and server hardware in the 1980s and 1990s, and where are those today? Linux is dominating that market. Embedded brings more trouble because the hardware, far from being a "multi billion dollar" endeavor, is all-too-often entirely undocumented and sloppily hacked together, where a barely workable state is considered "good enough" for shipping. But even there, Linux is easily gaining ground over proprietary OS's. The underlying dynamic is clear enough.

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

#132

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 9:16 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#133

Post by mbreese » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 9:17 PM UTC

kazen44 wrote: post #108

api wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FOSS UI/UX is at least two decades behind and the gap is growing. A major problem is that people almost always underestimate the difficulty of a good UI. Good UIs can be a lot harder than the rest of a system and a modern UI toolkit has a feature set and difficulty level approaching that of a good 3D game engine like Unity.

i disagree, KDE has one, if not the best ui out there. it is consistent, customizable and not a resource hog. windows's UI has been a mess since the XP days, and osx is atleast consistent, but hides a lot of functionality in name of clean design.

And I disagree with you. And it’s not because I think KDE is horrible… it’s not. I prefer the Gnome style but KDE is quite polished.

But I disagree because it is really rare to have a completely unified UI with Linux. We have separate applications for Gnome and KDE for most tasks. Sometimes one is better than the other, or one has a feature you need, but you have many different competing applications. If you want to use the “best”, you end up with a mix of different styles.

Or, if you want to use an office suite, Libre Office is a different style altogether!

So, you say KDE has a unified style. That’s great. But KDE != Linux. And Linux is never going to have a unified style. That’s just the nature of the beast. There isn’t one group out there that can make UI/UX decisions for all of Linux. No group that can set priorities and make decisions about what features stay and what can be removed.

But that’s okay. That’s the trade off we get when working with FOSS software. We get to make those decisions for ourselves. But it rarely results in a “unified” UX. Powerful, yes. unified? No.

I am interested to see how the new KDE/pine64 relationship plays out though. Hopefully it will be great. And maybe I’m just a bit pessimistic after the last time with Nokia/Qt.

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

#134

Post by axiolite » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 9:21 PM UTC

eric__cartman wrote: post #111

xhkkffbf wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, it's also priced dramatically lower. It's not fair to compare a current iPhone, priced at more than $1200 on the open market, with the Pine Phone priced at $150. This is where they chose to bring a phone to market and I think it's a smart move. They'll attract a bigger audience and make it easier for people to sim-swap and experiment. When the distros get good enough, they can price out higher end hardwar…

I'm all for having tuxphones but even a $100 Android phone creams the Pine Phone in every aspect regarding performance. The sad truth is until the soc vendors don't start properly supporting a mainline Linux kernel and offer open source drivers we will be stuck with devices that haven't left the "wow this is cool but I wouldn't use is as my only phone" territory.

> even a $100 Android phone creams the Pine Phone

That $100 Android phone is going to be carrier locked (subsidized by the carrier) and probably an older model where the R&D has already been paid-off, not an all new device. Once the Pine64 has been out for a few years, it's possible its price will drop to similarly competitive levels.

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

#135

Post by amelius » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 9:39 PM UTC

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…

> in the meantime got their mini solder iron which works surprisingly well (and I have two Wellers).

Looks interesting, what temperature can it reach?

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

#136

Post by znpy » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

m463 wrote: post #114

zozbot234 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the PinePhone and other Linux phones are also about performance. Yes the MVP prototypes will always suck and you would only buy these for freedom's sake, but a truly unified software platform encompassing both mobile and mainstream computing all running on openly documented reference hardware, will be far superior technically to what we have today.

As a purism owner, and a long-time linux user... I think that is a fantasy statement. Theoretically, there could be an open platform like the PC (with usb + pcie + ATX case/power supply + etc..) with open interfaces. However the reason this came into existence was by microsoft's design to commoditize the hardware to drive software sales of its (closed) operating system. With cellphones all of those interfaces are bei…

> I think Linux will always be behind commercial/proprietary platforms.

the dumb thing of this whole situation is that 50% of the "commercial/proprietary platforms" in this market are android phones, still using Linux as kernel.

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

#137

Post by danielEM » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

Love the idea of Pinephone, but I don't see even remote plans/talks to get to 1/3rd of modern phones performance, my 300$ phone is literally 11 times faster (multicore).

Once you'll get decent hardware performance a lot of devs will happily give up on their laptops and switch to mobile. And that will bring a lot of traction to software for mobile linux...

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

#138

Post by Mediterraneo10 » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 9:50 PM UTC

fsflover wrote: post #123

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Linux desktop suffers from a lack of contributors. Even many core-infrastructure projects are shockingly dependent on 1–2 devs who have been unsuccessful in attracting more contributions. One example of where the manpower just isn’t there for both Linux desktop and the PinePhone is a solid maps app. All solutions are little more than tech demos compared to OSMAnd on Android. Yes, OSMAnd itself has grown through…

Purism puts a lot of effort in FLOSS development for Librem 5 (compatible with Pinephone). They are also working on the maps.

Sure, Purism puts in a lot of effort. But after a year of the PinePhone drawing on Purism's effort, the community can plainly see that it a drop in the bucket of what needs to be done.

Everyone I know working on something PinePhone-related is concerned about the small size of the dev community.

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

#139

Post by cptskippy » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 10:04 PM UTC

m463 wrote: post #114

zozbot234 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the PinePhone and other Linux phones are also about performance. Yes the MVP prototypes will always suck and you would only buy these for freedom's sake, but a truly unified software platform encompassing both mobile and mainstream computing all running on openly documented reference hardware, will be far superior technically to what we have today.

As a purism owner, and a long-time linux user... I think that is a fantasy statement. Theoretically, there could be an open platform like the PC (with usb + pcie + ATX case/power supply + etc..) with open interfaces. However the reason this came into existence was by microsoft's design to commoditize the hardware to drive software sales of its (closed) operating system. With cellphones all of those interfaces are bei…

> However the reason this came into existence was by microsoft's design to commoditize the hardware to drive software sales of its (closed) operating system.

Couldn't get past your rewriting of history just to paint MS in bad light because you don't like them.

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

#140

Post by UbrtrbNchDneRle » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

candiodari wrote: post #54

UbrtrbNchDneRle wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t you think we will see more general computing ARM chips with the M1’s success? Aren’t we approaching a world where your phone, tablet (hopefully eating the laptop…), desktop and server all run more or less the same chip?

CPU standardization is already here, your iPhone runs ARMv8-A does that allow you to replace the kernel on your iPhone? What it is about android that allows you to do so is the copyleft license on the linux kernel. Chips can be locked down, and they generally are.

Yes, but I don’t understand how Fuchsia prevents pine64 to offer a Linux compatible chip. Not being able to unlock an android/fuchsia/iOS phone doesn’t really matter, does it?

Either way, I was hinting at a possible liberation through the laptop/desktop/server ARM SoC market, which is certainly coming. I think x86 is “over”.