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I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux

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Re: I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux

#471

Post by inigyou »

horsawlarway wrote: post #436
inigyou wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the point was to keep Android proprietary.

I think it was one of those cases where "the road to hell was paved with good intentions". I'm old enough and was very pro-android in the early days when it first released. I absolutely remember the frustrations around having vendors just REFUSE to update the OS on devices. Even things that were brand spanking new often got left to rot, and the OS updates in those days were genuinely meaningful software updates - Lot…

Why would you want a forced selection of app store? Just make it so you can execute executables. If the user wants an app store, they'll install one.

Re: I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux

#472

Post by seba_dos1 »

fsflover wrote: post #433
MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised even those things work for you considering how unbearably slow Phosh and Linux apps are on the Furiphone with much more modern everything.

The slowness of Phosh is purely a consequence of the current, unoptimized software state. When I run Waydroid on PureOS on my Librem 5, it feels much smoother, despite being another layer on top of the OS.

I bet the vast majority of that slowness people complain about comes purely from GTK renderers. A motivated contributor could do wonders there.

Re: I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux

#473

Post by handedness »

fooqux wrote: post #467
handedness wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Despite endless assertions from someone that Pine and Purism are where we should place our hope for better mobile devices, I can't put my trust in either company. Their track records are too hard to overlook.

> Purism I haven't heard much bad about Purism. I was always more on the Pine side. A quick search online didn't find anything. Can you give me a quick breakdown or link?

> I haven't heard much bad about Purism.

That's surprising. They burned through a ton of goodwill by holding many people's money for many years, while being non-responsive to depositors, refusing refunds if they did respond, and so on. A lot of ink and footage has been spilled over it. Their laptop effort seems to have evolved into something almost reasonably non-scummy, but the Librem 5 put a lot of people off.

Current complaints, from what is (by all appearances) a tiny user base, about the state of the device and its lack of usefulness are also common enough, e.g.:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/1foblyu/daily_drivi...?

https://forums.puri.sm/t/im-giving-up-on-the-librem-5/18399/...

The more-viable alternatives are not without their own tradeoffs, but they are at least actually viable for normal people. I can't see putting family members on a Librem 5 or a PinePhone (much less a PinePhone Pro) without it being an absolute train wreck of a time for anyone but the most extremely basic and patient user.

Even their most prolific and downright stubborn true believer of a booster on HN admits he has to disable JS to load a number of web pages, given how anemic the SoC is. As others have pointed out it would have been a midrange Android chipset well over a decade ago. How exactly that works when one needs to use a site requiring JS to function has me feeling like I'm daily driving Nokia N-series tablets in the late 2000s again, except Nokia tablets were somehow a more polished experience two decades ago than one gets today out of either the Librem 5 of PinePhone due to the lack of real manufacturer and community support.

We need a viable Linux slab with a radio, and I want one to exist. It'd be nice if it was fully free of proprietary device blobs and was reasonably power efficient, but that's currently a fantasy completely out of touch with the state of available radios. I would carry my Linux ThinkPad with a built-in cellular radio or an external hotspot everywhere before it would make sense for me to try to pretend the PinePhone or Librem 5 meet even a basline level of utility value.

For someone who wants to check simple IMAP email, send and receive SMS messages and load basic websites, and are satisfied with poor camera performance, size, weight, battery life, and durability, while feeling good about the hardware they run (even if its hardware and software security is poor), then they may be quite happy with it.

Re: I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux

#474

Post by jolmg »

handedness wrote: post #473
fooqux wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Purism I haven't heard much bad about Purism. I was always more on the Pine side. A quick search online didn't find anything. Can you give me a quick breakdown or link?

> I haven't heard much bad about Purism. That's surprising. They burned through a ton of goodwill by holding many people's money for many years, while being non-responsive to depositors, refusing refunds if they did respond, and so on. A lot of ink and footage has been spilled over it. Their laptop effort seems to have evolved into something almost reasonably non-scummy, but the Librem 5 put a lot of people off. Curr…

> We need a viable Linux slab with a radio. It'd be nice if it was fully free of proprietary device blobs but that's currently a fantasy totally out of touch with the state of available radios. I would genuinely carry my Linux ThinkPad with a cellular radio everywhere before it would make sense for me to try to pretend the PinePhone or Librem 5 meet even a baseline of utility value.

The PinePhone (Pro) is there. They work as a laptop replacement. Their problem is more on working as a phone. There's even a repo out there to turn the touchscreen into a touchpad. With a bluetooth keyboard, it's basically a laptop.

> Even their most prolific and downright stubborn true believer of a booster on HN admits he has to disable JS to load a number of web pages

YouTube works on the PPP. If YouTube works, likely any JS works. Google Maps on Firefox also works.

Re: I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux

#475

Post by handedness »

hayleox wrote: post #455
fsflover wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a good enough camera for you? https://social.librem.one/@dos/tagged/shotonlibrem5

Those are probably the best I've seen from a Linux phone, but still far too much of a downgrade for my uses. Even some of the photos taken in decently well-lit locations are noticeably grainy, so I can only imagine how poorly it'd fair in worse lighting. Tons of props to this photographer -- I have great respect for the art of getting good shots out of low-end equipment, but it's not what I want for my daily carry de…

Beyond the forgiving lighting, note the huge amount of post-hoc post-processing being done.

Re: I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux

#476

Post by handedness »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #458
handedness wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not even close to good enough. Beyond the photos, the video he posted would have been disappointing in 2003.

The (hardware) camera quality is about what you'd expect from a phone from 2019. Software processing to get JPEGs out of raw data is worse (with a huge room for improvement), but you get the raw DNGs and can employ any processing you want afterwards. Video recording, however, is the real Achilles' heel of the Librem 5, at it lacks both hardware ISP and video encoder (there are only hardware decoders). This means that…

A Camp Snap is more than good enough to have fun with. That's an entirely different requirement.

I had an iPhone 11 Pro Max in 2019 and its camera quality was miles ahead of the linked photos, even if you assume raw output and post-processing. (The video, as you note, is even worse.) The link provided are shill posts of photos shot mostly under highly favorable conditions, with massive amounts of post-processing happening with much newer tech. I'm looking at casual photos straight out out of my 2019 device and they're vastly better than these.

Linux phones aren't going to get better by pretending the experience is something it isn't, and telling people not to believe their lying eyes. If everyone's cameras were suddenly replaced with the Librem 5's, the number of camera quality complaints would explode.

It's not good enough for anything beyond novelty use.

Re: I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux

#477

Post by seba_dos1 »

handedness wrote: post #475
hayleox wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are probably the best I've seen from a Linux phone, but still far too much of a downgrade for my uses. Even some of the photos taken in decently well-lit locations are noticeably grainy, so I can only imagine how poorly it'd fair in worse lighting. Tons of props to this photographer -- I have great respect for the art of getting good shots out of low-end equipment, but it's not what I want for my daily carry de…

Beyond the forgiving lighting, note the huge amount of post-hoc post-processing being done.

The majority of the photos on the first page came straight from the phone with no post-hoc processing whatsoever (and if you click on the post about Millipixels, there's more of unedited ones in the replies). Only tram, train and kernel ones had some, and even then I don't think opening the photo in Darktable and adjusting a few basic sliders counts as "huge amount".

If you didn't know, you could have asked.

Re: I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux

#478

Post by seba_dos1 »

handedness wrote: post #476
seba_dos1 wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The (hardware) camera quality is about what you'd expect from a phone from 2019. Software processing to get JPEGs out of raw data is worse (with a huge room for improvement), but you get the raw DNGs and can employ any processing you want afterwards. Video recording, however, is the real Achilles' heel of the Librem 5, at it lacks both hardware ISP and video encoder (there are only hardware decoders). This means that…

A Camp Snap is more than good enough to have fun with. That's an entirely different requirement. I had an iPhone 11 Pro Max in 2019 and its camera quality was miles ahead of the linked photos, even if you assume raw output and post-processing. (The video, as you note, is even worse.) The link provided are shill posts of photos shot mostly under highly favorable conditions, with massive amounts of post-processing happ…

The link provided points to my random photos and videos I was shooting in varying conditions as I went through my life, posted on my personal social media account, usually with minimal to no post-hoc processing. Not sure what is up with you here.

Re: I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux

#479

Post by mdp2021 »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #395
mdp2021 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> stopped using cash You stopped using cash? It is one of the most insane things I ever heard. You transactions are tracked, I assume? The rule in the eu (PSD2) is that a dozen private/public/hybrid/other databases, of unclear substantial identity, will record your transactions. And what if you had a an infrastructural shortage? No transactions then? How can people think of "cashless society" as something outside a d…

A great deal of shops in the Netherlands don't take cash. Some didn't before 2020, but during 2020 the trend accelerated, and many shops stopped taking cash. Aside from hygiene, it's also easier to deal with safety for the store (i.e.: nobody can steal the cash register). The supermarket in my neighbourhood has ~30 self-checkout machines. Only one of them takes cash. The human-checkout also takes cash, but is usually…

> A great deal of shops in the Netherlands don't take cash

There is a possibility that such practice violates EU legislation in the terms of "paper" Euro being legal tender on the territory.

Re: I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux

#480

Post by handedness »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #465
handedness wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish these devices were ready to be viable alternatives for anyone not possessing a religious extremist's level of zeal for it, but they's still so far from ready. It's a shame, since we need something like this to be viable. The promise of, 'it's FOSS and these issues will be addressed,' sure didn't pan out with the PinePhone Pro, and it isn't panning out for the Librem 5. And that's setting aside hardware specs t…

I'm getting tired of all this exaggeration. I don't think there's any significant component in the Librem 5 that has even existed a decade ago already. Perhaps the audio codec. Sure, it can be underwhelming today when it comes to performance, but it's still usable and was absolutely nowhere near "challenging" back when it was fresh - also, the software got significantly more usable and performant over time. I have re…

Then read more closely. I didn't say the components existed a decade ago. The performance level of that SoC would have been challenging to get what typical phone users would consider a good experience out of a decade ago. The 2016 Pixel 1, for example was a much higher performance device. Apple's iPhones from that era required considerable tradeoffs to achieve the performance they did.

Some owners apparently disagree with you that the Librem 5 still usable. One, who shills for it tirelessly, states the need to disable JS to render some modern sites, a tradeoff he's happy to make, and that's his right, but to recommend something with such a heavy caveat as the solution to nearly every problem is inane. If you're looking for exaggeration, there it is.

There are valid reasons very few people use them. The situation won't get better by pretending the device is something it isn't. We need an open modern device, and the Librem 5 just isn't it, despite the loud assertions of a few to the contrary.

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