Live data from Hacker News

My Pinephone Setup

hamblingreen.gitlab.io

11–20 of 120 posts

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#11
While PinePhone is definitely an interesting product, GrapheneOS + Termux is such a versatile combination I've stopped looking at these "real Linux" phones.

You get access to modern power-efficient hardware with a Google Pixel, a proper touch interface, a ton of hardening under the hood, and then to top it all off, Termux offers a very usable Linux environment.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#12
post #11

While PinePhone is definitely an interesting product, GrapheneOS + Termux is such a versatile combination I've stopped looking at these "real Linux" phones. You get access to modern power-efficient hardware with a Google Pixel, a proper touch interface, a ton of hardening under the hood, and then to top it all off, Termux offers a very usable Linux environment.

That's hardening against the user being able to do things, not against corporate or government threat models. Software can only do a little bit on megacorp smartphone hardware even if it tries to help the user instead of locking them out.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#13

I don't think I can handle a CLI-based phone.

I want it to be a dockable computer [0]

This is Pinephone Pro Explorer Edition able to run VS Code. External display is buggy though. On Pinephone the lag is really bad for VSC but not so on PPP.

Mobian Phosh has best external display performance I found

KDE Plasma Mobile is the one that is closest to a phone IMO regarding UI/UX.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/MhSB1us.jpg

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#14
post #11

While PinePhone is definitely an interesting product, GrapheneOS + Termux is such a versatile combination I've stopped looking at these "real Linux" phones. You get access to modern power-efficient hardware with a Google Pixel, a proper touch interface, a ton of hardening under the hood, and then to top it all off, Termux offers a very usable Linux environment.

That's hardening against the user being able to do things, not against corporate or government threat models. Software can only do a little bit on megacorp smartphone hardware even if it tries to help the user instead of locking them out.

> Software can only do a little bit on megacorp smartphone hardware

That isn't true at all. Do you have a source for your implication that the Pixel's trusted boot chain is compromised, or that remote attestation of software+hardware is backdoored?

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#15
post #11

While PinePhone is definitely an interesting product, GrapheneOS + Termux is such a versatile combination I've stopped looking at these "real Linux" phones. You get access to modern power-efficient hardware with a Google Pixel, a proper touch interface, a ton of hardening under the hood, and then to top it all off, Termux offers a very usable Linux environment.

Thank you for this. Can you please link to any resources for getting started in this vein? I did a quick Google search and didn't come up with a clear path forward to explore this option.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#16
post #11

While PinePhone is definitely an interesting product, GrapheneOS + Termux is such a versatile combination I've stopped looking at these "real Linux" phones. You get access to modern power-efficient hardware with a Google Pixel, a proper touch interface, a ton of hardening under the hood, and then to top it all off, Termux offers a very usable Linux environment.

Android in general has broken more of termux every version; does GrapheneOS fix that?

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#17

> All this time I was aware that the core of my phone, it's kernel, was closed source and probably out-of-date. Android runs the Linux kernel which is GPLv2 (and thus open source). For a couple reasons this isn't seen as "true" Linux or open source. 1. Drivers are often proprietary 2. SoC manufactures release their versions of the Linux kernel without integrating them into the "upstream" manage by Linus Torvalds so e…

Note that both PinePhone and pmOS have yet to reach "daily driver" status, especially if you actually care about using the phone featureset, want to run a proper mainline (not vendor) kernel and (as for pmOS) want to go outside the narrow subset of hardware that's endorsed by that project as 'working properly'.

Also, many users have noticed that phone/tablet/mobile hardware in general tends to become super flaky when you actively try to use it for intensive general-purpose workloads, as with mainstream Linux apps. It seems that some power and/or thermal limits are easily exceeded with no real warning, and lockups/reboots can result. Dealing with this would require extra features in the kernel and/or the basic system software to assess indicators of available resources, and throttle the system if it seems to be running outside "reasonable" conditions. Implementing this in a way that can work generally on different kinds of hardware is of course possible, but not easy by any means.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only CLI-based because the writer seems to be using the phone that way. That's how it appears to me anyway. Kind of like Linux on the desktop ... Everything I've seen about the PinePhone suggests that you can go full GUI.

Not in my experience with Arch on the pine phone. Arch was the only distro where almost everything worked, but I have to do CLI updates. The GUI isn't really there yet for all of the basic and necessary administration activities.

Okay, perhaps some qualification needed: There are Linux distros, both for mobile and desktop, that can probably be run completely from the GUI. Arch Linux is not one of them, and is vanishingly unlikely to ever be one of them - consider that on desktop, Arch doesn't even install a GUI by default, and this is not considered even remotely a bug.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#20
Advice for anyone considering it:

* There are rough edges, but the basics are there: calling/SMS/4G/WiFi/audio/browsing/suspend.

* If you want to try it, put https://xnux.eu/p-boot-demo/ on an SD card and plug that into your PinePhone. That has a bunch of different distros and UIs on it.

* To keep up to date, follow https://www.pine64.org/blog/ and https://linmob.net/

I'm excited to use a community driven phone!

Post reply on HN