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Two Years of Life with PinePhone

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Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone

#11

Post by whateveracct »

thematrixturtle wrote: post #3

> five to seven hours of idle battery life > a lack of notifications, something I as a "my phone is in silent mode, no it does not even vibrate, I mean it when I say silent" > when I dropped my PinePhones I was lucky enough to not break them, I am not affected by a failing WiFi/BT chip (an issue not too uncommon by my anecdata) > I remember attempting to bring the factory image up-to-date around the date devices ship…

I'm tempted to get it as a second phone and run NixOS Mobile on it.

It'll be awful for years. But if many people with my skills & elbow grease levels marinates with it for a few years, it could become special.

It takes guts to be amazing, after all!

Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone

#12

Post by cowtools »

ge96 wrote: post #6

I have og and Pro. One thing I wonder about is can the popular apps be made legally in an open source way, do you have to get the companies to make a Linux app for PP/PPP. This is with regard to get mass adoption.

You can run android apps in a waydroid container, albeit it will still be closed-source.

Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone

#13

Post by megous »

jandrese wrote: post #8
mg wrote: post #2

I also have one for two years now: https://twitter.com/marekgibney/status/1276881389091278848 I have to say that I never found a use case for it. I remember that I hated the OS it came with. I think it was some flavor of Ubuntu that did not let you install software in any normal way. If I remember correctly, I did not even manage to get vim running. After some reading up on mobile Linux distros, I switched to Mobian,…

I have a Pine64 board from an ancient Kickstarter. Some parts of it like video decoding have never worked. There was at one point something vaguely in the shape of a driver that was supposed to support it appeared in an undocumented zip file but I never managed to get it to work. Requests for specs so the community could write their own driver fell on deaf ears. I decided never to buy another Pine product again, and…

Allwinner A64 supports accelerated video decoding in mainline Linux for a few years already. (See the links I psoted elsewehere in the comments.)

Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone

#14

Post by hutzlibu »

TylerE wrote: post #4
thematrixturtle wrote: post #3

> five to seven hours of idle battery life > a lack of notifications, something I as a "my phone is in silent mode, no it does not even vibrate, I mean it when I say silent" > when I dropped my PinePhones I was lucky enough to not break them, I am not affected by a failing WiFi/BT chip (an issue not too uncommon by my anecdata) > I remember attempting to bring the factory image up-to-date around the date devices ship…

Well, to be fair, everything I read about PinePhine convinces me to never get a pinephone.

Well, I on the other hand was convinced, that I want one, as soon as it is stable and out of alpha.

I am just getting sceptical, if that ever will happen. I know that I am also not helping for it to happen, but sorry, I had my share of weird linux driver issues.

Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone

#16

Post by megous »

urthor wrote: post #15

Unfortunately the hardware is incredibly subpar. I see no real future for Linux mobile unless the EU makes some law that forces Apple/Samsung to make flashing easier.

HW is kinda fine, if you don't try to overstress it. Here it's running some optimized software via a convergence dock on an external monitor (1920x1080):

https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec5.mp4

https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec6.mp4

Here it's driving an even higher resolution screen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHOgVmxH_dA

And here it's driving Firefox on a 1440p screen (purely rendered via CPU with GPU disabled):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdKNugT-mTQ

What's subpar is software optimization of some apps, or some combinations of compositors and apps.

Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone

#17

Post by jokoon »

Why is battery life such a difficult thing to achieve? Is it hard to implement in a driver? Or is the battery just low quality?

I've heard energy management is often difficult to do right in Linux, but I just wonder why...

Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone

#18

Post by hun3 »

mg wrote: post #2

I also have one for two years now: https://twitter.com/marekgibney/status/1276881389091278848 I have to say that I never found a use case for it. I remember that I hated the OS it came with. I think it was some flavor of Ubuntu that did not let you install software in any normal way. If I remember correctly, I did not even manage to get vim running. After some reading up on mobile Linux distros, I switched to Mobian,…

I suspect this is due to incoming messages waking up the cellular modem, but the host being unable to recognize them. Either spurious, or dropped.

Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone

#19

Post by megous »

jokoon wrote: post #17

Why is battery life such a difficult thing to achieve? Is it hard to implement in a driver? Or is the battery just low quality? I've heard energy management is often difficult to do right in Linux, but I just wonder why...

What do you mean by battery life? That's just usually a function of temperature, number of charge cycles, not overharging, etc. And the battery will last you for a long time. Ceratinly for a few years.

Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone

#20

Post by TulliusCicero »

megous wrote: post #19
jokoon wrote: post #17

Why is battery life such a difficult thing to achieve? Is it hard to implement in a driver? Or is the battery just low quality? I've heard energy management is often difficult to do right in Linux, but I just wonder why...

What do you mean by battery life? That's just usually a function of temperature, number of charge cycles, not overharging, etc. And the battery will last you for a long time. Ceratinly for a few years.

They mean how long a battery lasts until depletion, not how long it lasts until it's no longer functional.
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