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I give up on free software phones (2019)

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Re: I give up on free software phones (2019)

#201

Post by coldpie »

moqmar wrote: post #175
maratc wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The meaning of the word "phone" has shifted in the recent years, and your requirements are a good representation of what that word meant in circa 2007; recently however the requirements 1-8 have so little relevance that it's possible to operate a device without satisfying any of them [0]. The new meaning of the word is an expanded version of #9 whereas it's a connected gadget that runs apps from the well-stocked buil…

I think that's exactly the point: someone sells something as a phone, but doesn't even have the most basic features every phone since way before 2007 has . Sure, for an actually marketable product, you also need wifi & bluetooth, a good camera, a nice design, a UI/UX people actually want to use, apps for at least a couple common things and probably quite a bit more, but you also have to get the baseline of being a ph…

> You simply can't skip those if you want to sell a "phone".

I recognize that's true for you, but it's definitely not true for me, and I expect many others, too. I'd honestly be fine if my "phone" dropped the "phone" part entirely. The only purpose of that feature is for spammers to make my phone vibrate a couple times per week. In the very rare (less than once per month) instances I need to actually talk to a human on the device, I'm sure someone could invent an app that allows for that.

Re: I give up on free software phones (2019)

#202

Post by KMnO4 »

harry8 wrote: post #141
AndyKelley wrote: post #75

I got my librem in the mail last week after waiting several years(!!) for shipping. It's complete trash. The software is shit, the battery is shit, it's expensive, low specs, completely unusable. I'm willing to compromise a lot in order to go with the free software approach, but my god, just do better. There's no excuse for how un-functional this thing is. Try harder. I had the same reaction with the pine phone a cou…

Reminder whenever this comes up that the Nokia N900 was a beautiful, functional thing running linux and Free software 10 years ago. No really. Best phone I've ever owned. Better than apple or android. It's loss was immense.

I picked up an N900 for next to nothing as-is. The charging port was damaged (but that wasn’t really an issue, this was when you could swap batteries so I just kept two with an external charger) and the software was... damaged. For some reason a lot of packages were broken or removed. Not sure what the previous owner did.

But I didn’t really care. No calculator? No problem, I just fired up Vim while I was bored in class and wrote my own. Contacts book would crash? Again, a simple program I wrote let me quickly grep through a CSV file and add/update/call people.

It was such a joy to use I would carry it around even though I ended up using an iPhone as my daily driver.

Re: I give up on free software phones (2019)

#203

Post by Arnavion »

gigel82 wrote: post #46
user_7832 wrote: post #18

On a similar note I've been wanting to buy and use a fully "free" phone - one where I have complete control over most if not all things. But it appears to me that unless you use a regular "phone", there is no way you can DIY your way into building a "modern" phone bit by bit like how a desktop could be made.* Calling/4g/5g require specific hardware that seems difficult to integrate at a hobbyist level (unlike say ins…

Are you saying you can build a modern desktop without any binary blobs? Full control of all firmware (including the CPU microcode and things like Intel ME)? What about WiFi cards? I'd say that hasn't been true for at least 20 years.

>What about WiFi cards?

For this specifically, ath9k cards don't have blobs. You can get upto a/b/g/n with them. Depends on whether you consider n to be modern enough or not.

Re: I give up on free software phones (2019)

#204

Post by agloe_dreams »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #146
muppetman wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that Google haven't updated for years and is at this point abandoned[1]. 1: https://twitter.com/MishaalRahman/status/1669026188399112192

Alright. Yes. now it is. This is all I've been trying to point out- is that there is a built in messaging app as part of AOSP. My recollection is that Google can't turn this into gMessage because then it would be distributed as part of the base OS and would require a Google account to use. Now it's abandoned so it definitely won't be anything now.

Zero phones in the US ship with AOSP. 100% ship with Google Play Services. AOSP, in the US, is dead as far as any reality is concerned. China is different but Google wouldn't want to even be there.

Re: I give up on free software phones (2019)

#205

Post by ttarr »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #148
xethos wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I open the app store it just fails to load things sometimes. Considering how many desktop linux distros fall down with this, you may be expecting too much of your beta-level phones. It's been years, yes, but power management isn't exactly easy. Just look at how bad Linux laptops were even just a few years ago - hell, look at how long it took the multinational mega-corporation to get Android's background power…

> You're right, FLOSS phones currently aren't good. But they finally exist, and that's enough for me to be excited about Also people forget that android is still FLOSS. You don't need to be running upstream/mainline linux to be FLOSS. It's mentioned kinda off hand as "oh well running android without google sucks" in the article but graphene OS has proven that you can get a very pleasant, well ironed, and secure/harde…

You raise a good question, unfortunately I asked the same and no one seems to know the answer.

My other question was, why the first iPhone is significantly faster than a recent PinePhone.

Re: I give up on free software phones (2019)

#206

Post by dreamcompiler »

saratogacx wrote: post #173
dreamcompiler wrote: post #161

This answers a question that's been bugging me: Why TF can I not find a Calendar app on the Play Store that does not depend on Google Calendar? I used to have one 5 years ago that was completely separate, but now I'm apparently not allowed to have a calendar app that does not send all my calendar info to Google. So now I have this very nice Android phone that does not have a Calendar app because Google won't allow su…

I know it is just trading one mega-corp for another but the Outlook app doesn't use Google calendar. I don't think the Samsung calendar uses google either unless you hook it up to gmail, I had mine against an exchange server.

That explains it. My previous phone was a Samsung and it came with an app called "Calendar" that's not present on my current [non-Samsung] phone. Wonder if I could copy it over with ADB? Guessing it wouldn't work on a non-Samsung phone though.

Re: I give up on free software phones (2019)

#207

Post by anonym29 »

jancsika wrote: post #169
anonym29 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.punkt.ch/en/products/mp02-4g-mobile-phone/ Not advocating for this, I do not own one, but I'm pretty sure this substantially covers all goals listed minus #8 (plus an unlisted one - Signal integration). I investigated and considered this option carefully. Ultimately ended up doing a Pixel running GrapheneOS (no microG) as a stop-gap until I buy either a Pinephone or Librem, once those are a little more us…

Says it can receive MMS but cannot forward them to other recipients. Does that hold for SMS or just MMS? Also, is it free software? I know I only said "Linux phone" but we are in the realm of FOSS on this thread...

I do not know enough about them or the phone to answer either of these questions, sorry.

Re: I give up on free software phones (2019)

#208

Post by CuriousCosmic »

ttarr wrote: post #205
CuriousCosmic wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're right, FLOSS phones currently aren't good. But they finally exist, and that's enough for me to be excited about Also people forget that android is still FLOSS. You don't need to be running upstream/mainline linux to be FLOSS. It's mentioned kinda off hand as "oh well running android without google sucks" in the article but graphene OS has proven that you can get a very pleasant, well ironed, and secure/harde…

You raise a good question, unfortunately I asked the same and no one seems to know the answer. My other question was, why the first iPhone is significantly faster than a recent PinePhone.

Honestly it depends. The PinePhone Pro (which I've only briefly interacted with and do not own) seems like it works well, if a bit buggy, and with a fairly unoptimised UX derived mostly from desktop linux. Given that there's a handful of supported OSes/images (between android and linux) and just as many unofficial ones, it could be that we have only interacted with less polished SW.

Also FOSS GPU support depending on what device/SOC you have really varies. So weak GPU support can end up handicapping the experience.

Personally I'd like to mess with an android pinephone pro (not the stock "linux with android containers") but I'm not willing to foot the bill to set one up to play with.

Re: I give up on free software phones (2019)

#209

Post by friend_and_foe »

timthelion wrote: post #171
friend_and_foe wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a similar setup and have no problems with online banking. I hear this from people, what exactly is the problem?

It shows a dialog that my phone is not secure on startup and closes when I close the dialog.

Is it specific to your bank? I have used a couple of the big name American bank apps on my phone and never seen a dialog whatsoever (the blue and the red bank just FYI). Or it could be specific to your setup. Are you using Microg and hiding root (if you have it)? Are you making sure that all of the microg checks pass? Does the microg signature spoof pass?

Perhaps as a last resort, after getting your install set up, close the bootloader again. I don't do that but I've heard of people having trouble from leaving the bootloader unlocked.

Re: I give up on free software phones (2019)

#210

Post by Arnavion »

not_your_vase wrote: post #197
Arnavion wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(beside the unusable modem in the Pinephones, which crashes all the time) Install the OSS firmware. Quectel firmware is shitty. For me the OSS firmware doesn't crash at all, though I've heard other people say it still crashes for them once a day or so (?). In any case eg25-m will bring it back so it won't be "unusable". >"if you don't like it, go away. we are happy with it as it is, there is no solution, and you sho…

I have tried each every available modem fw versions, including the closed source ones, and all possible versions from biktor also (I did run multi-day experiments with each of them, taking notes about their stability, looking for a working version). Every single one of them crashes, the only difference is the time spent between crashes. Maybe it is usable for you. My definition is different - if I can't rely on it fo…

>But I do see a lot of sentiments around the web saying things like "look how good phosh/kde/XYZ is running on the PP, wow, such speed, many responsiveness" - even though it is objectively not running good when tried in person. Such statements can definitely trick users who just want a novelty phone - they read these reviews, and think that finally there is a viable alternative.

Either you're saying those reviews are lying / wrong, in which case the problem is not the product but the reviews, or you're saying those reviews are accurate but don't reflect the use case of the buyer for whatever reason, in which case it's not the problem of the product nor the reviews.

In my very first comment I said that he was welcome to come onto the IRC etc and ask if the phone can do X, Y, Z that he needs it to do, and he would've gotten an honest answer for that. You've decided that you don't even want to do that because you've been soured from the community for whatever reason, and frankly I don't care to convince you otherwise.

In the same way, AndyKelley spending a $1000+ without doing the research and then whining about it is his loss, not mine. Even in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36414414 he's still going on about "The issue with librem is that they [Purism] put very little effort into the basic user experience of the software." because he thinks it's an iPhone or Android that only has one choice of OS or UI.

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