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PinePhone – Open Source Smart Phone Supported by Major Linux Phone Projects

pine64.org

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Re: PinePhone – Open Source Smart Phone Supported by Major Linux Phone Projects

#141
post #51

I carry around a Pinephone with my personal SIM and use it for most personal activities. I also carry about a work phone, which I use for work, and personal activites that I can't yet do on the Pinephone (maps, chromecast, etc.) It's liberating to have plain old Linux on my phone. My phone is now introspectable, behaves like my other computers, and only runs software that does not track me. I hack on these and am exc…

You are still being tracked if you carry that other phone though.

Carriers in the US were recently caught selling e911 location data so you should probably assume that you're being tracked while carrying any device with an active cell network connection.

Re: PinePhone – Open Source Smart Phone Supported by Major Linux Phone Projects

#142

The pinephone is great, in fact I'm typing this comment from mine. That said, fair warning to anyone thinking about getting one: it's slow, buggy, and flat out unreliable if you need to be able to receive / answer calls and texts for anything important (e.g. work). Once they get the software worked out over the next few years though, it'll be the best thing out there. No ads, no bullshit, just a phone with a mainline…

Like any other failed attempt so far, assuming that they manage to keep enough money around for delivering those improvements over the next few years.

Re: PinePhone – Open Source Smart Phone Supported by Major Linux Phone Projects

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is not true. As far as I am concerned Linux is clearly superior OS for my laptop over commercial alternatives. I love Linux. I'm a Linux desktop user but I can 100% say my experience is degraded compared to mac and windows users. Not just in apps that are there but in small things like sometimes it changes which mic is being used without telling me. Driver support is also a thing. I have my GUI crash on me on…

> I have my GUI crash on me on a semi regular basis That's true for me at 16.04 or below. I don't really remember encountering one on 18.04 or 20.04 though. May share your use case?

20.04 on a Dell XPS.

Possible causing factors, java, spotify, or slack.

Re: PinePhone – Open Source Smart Phone Supported by Major Linux Phone Projects

#144
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Under-resourced” is a good way to put it. There’s often a lack of UX design and thus a lack of polish – since there’s often no money to be made, there’s little to no incentive to bring it up from “works for me” to “works for everybody seamlessly“. (I’ll spare us all the Pareto 80%/20% theory here, although I am pretty sure that it applies here.) The upside is that open source or free software features fewer (and oft…

There’s also quite a scorn in parts of the open source world for UX and design in general. Attempts at making software more approachable are accused of dumbing down or prioritising form over function. There’s an attitude that it’s not ‘real work’ if you don’t have to memorise tonnes of inscrutable commands or spend ages tinkering with config files.

There are many big ego dudes that think they know what good UX is , they never do any usability tests. From my memory only Unity did real usability tests and for GNOME many-many years ago some student attempted to do something.

So IMO a dude that read some UX book is not entitled to "know better" what actual users need, especially people that do UX design for an app that they don't even use , so they apply dogmatic principles , remove features that were added because users asked for them( this happened at my work in the past too, designrers removed stuff , stuff that users asked for and developers spent a lot of effort to implement it , ex deleting more items at a time, because they think that repeting same 3 click operation over and over again is enoug.

UX should be done by competent people that actually used the programs or even better that test their designs with actual users.

Re: PinePhone – Open Source Smart Phone Supported by Major Linux Phone Projects

#145
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading the comments, and weighing your comment, you say we need to have Android to be successful. Before that you say “we need apps”, that’s the heart of your comment. It can be successfully argued that we don’t need more of what we already have (aka closed walled, ad ridden, privacy off by default - solutions) We (as in developers) should start believing in these projects and adopt them. Blender for a long time cou…

Blender also had a massive investment that PinePhone does not have.

Investments do not come out of nowhere.

Re: PinePhone – Open Source Smart Phone Supported by Major Linux Phone Projects

#146
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The common Linux interfaces are very easy to decipher and have a good usability. Usability is measurable property, so that's not a guess, just a fact. Add to that the higher task purpose you can get with Linux (partly boosted by not having annoying blockers to get work done, like Windows ads and forced reboots) and the infinitely higher customizablity (for the user's needs and wants) and for general computer usage, t…

> common Linux interfaces are very easy to decipher and have a good usability Then you are an absolute god of IT and have a very skewed perception of things as a result; alternatively you've made up your own definition of the word "usability" that absolutely no one else uses. I think Linux is great. I love the customizability it brings to the table and get a lot out of it. The time and effort invested to get here has…

Gnome 40 is just about as usable as anything I’ve ever used. I honestly find it more intuitive than Mac or Windows at this point. My mom uses Linux now with zero problems, so it passes the anecdotal non-technical old lady test.

Re: PinePhone – Open Source Smart Phone Supported by Major Linux Phone Projects

#147
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a strange definition of "great." If any other phone exhibited those characteristics, I would write it off as garbage, not excuse its faults with a promise that they'll be fixed Real Soon Now™

Don't forget about the price: $200 doesn't get you flagship experience.

OTOH about $200 gives you much more from some other ... err ... proprietary vendors, lets say Xiaomi/Poco M3 Pro, with the possibility of alternative firmware.

Re: PinePhone – Open Source Smart Phone Supported by Major Linux Phone Projects

#148
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL, so true. I often need to have online meetings with engineers that for some reason prefer Linux as their desktop OS. Guess which meeting participants _always_ delay the meetings because they can't get their audio/video working for routine meetings? If that happens to pretty tech savvy software engineers, the average user has zero chance of using Linux as a desktop effectively.

Funny, my experience has been that windows users had trouble to connect their fancy bluetooth headsets with the proper profile, or they forgot to charge their airpods and had to scramble to get a replacement earphone... all the linux devs on my team (myself included) manage to connect to zoom, slack or google meet without any issue. The difference is we know already what works with our equipment and what doesn't, so…

Maybe when this crisis is over, those Linux devs should come one day earlier when trying to do presentations on our beamers, instead of showing us the configuration mighty of xrandr.

Re: PinePhone – Open Source Smart Phone Supported by Major Linux Phone Projects

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have the bandwidth to contribute I'm sure the people working on the camera app ( https://git.sr.ht/~martijnbraam/megapixels ) would love any assistance you could give them on postprocessing the RAWs. From my limited experience with it, there's a huge amount of focus lag on the sensor itself, massive shutter lag, and then several seconds of postprocessing lag. I'm sure the last two can be improved in software,…

The latest version of megapixels has pretty much realtime preview now. The postprocessing still takes 30 seconds though which is why it's done in the background (just like android phones) The focus speed just won't be great, it's old-school contrast detection autofocus.

Any chance for built-in live image stacking to get rid of the noise in still images?
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