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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

#481

Post by velocity3230 »

NamTaf wrote: post #143
DaSHacka wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not also keep your ID on you at all times? That's why I don't mind carrying around plastic cards, they just go in my wallet with my ID and a small amount of cash anyway. Even if I was willing to use GPay, I don't like the possibility of my phone dying locking me out of my apartment and preventing me from paying for things.

I do not keep ID on me at all times. I dont even own a wallet any more. Moving to GrapheneOS and not having virtual cards for contactless payment has been struggle, not going go lie.

It's possible. I run GrapheneOS and pay with it via NFC. The issue is finding the right provider and app.

In the UK we have Curve and, I believe, plenty of European banks have apps that work natively too.

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

#482

Post by handedness »

jolmg wrote: post #474
handedness wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Me: We need a phone.

You: We're there. It's a bad phone. This thing works as a laptop replacement. You'll even be able to use it as a trackpad some day!

This reads like satire. You guys are so out of touch with consumer expectations that you can't even string together a coherent argument in favor of these devices you so love.

Even if it was a viable phone, are we really calling mid-tier 2016 performance, from a device which was discontinued due to being under-supported by its manufacturer and dev community, as being "there"?

We are most certainly not "there".

On the JS, a strident supporter is saying he has to disable JS. Convince him his experience isn't real, not me.

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

#483

Post by handedness »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #477
handedness wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In that thread you're stating just months ago that Librem 5 owners no longer need to manually develop raw photos to get decent results. Truly atrocious video quality. I say the camera's not good enough for me, and I suspect the market agrees.

The tram photo is arguably the best output of the lot and it's got a ton of problems by contemporary standards. Fun photo, if you didn't buy the phone for the camera and you want to hot rod it to get the best you can out of it, great.

Send that to any of the typical phone reviewers and the camera's going to get panned, probably universally unless someone wants to stake out a contrarian position for publicity.

"It's not bad for a Linux phone" isn't the expectation, we need a genuinely reasonably good device with good components.

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

#484

Post by handedness »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #478
handedness wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every time someone says we need a better open Linux phone, the Librem 5 and PinePhone crowd shows up to tell us not to believe our lying eyes, that our standards (which are already more open to tradeoffs than the general public's are) are wrong, that they love daily driving a device and therefore extrapolate that into some kind of viability as a commercial offering for anything other than novelty hobbyists.

They're fun photos and some of them are of pretty decent technical quality considering the device used, but switching from iOS/Android to Linux phone of the Librem 5 or PinePhone (/Pro) variety is a bag of hurt for anyone who isn't so committed they're willing to craft their personality around it with an almost religious-like zeal.

That's what's up with me here. Still, I appreciate your photos.

Edit: Check the comments. You've got a guy saying the PinePhone Pro is "there." Except, it's bad as a phone. Minor detail.

I stated the camera isn't up to snuff for me, your photos are the best counterexample anyone's posted, and they still aren't up to snuff for me. Also, decent video isn't optional in 2026. I remember upgrading a BlackBerry to finally get decent video. The whole thing is so fundamentally constrained that it will never be more than a niche novelty, barring new hardware and massively better supported.

But that doesn't stop the shilling. It's bizarre.

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

#485

Post by jolmg »

handedness wrote: post #482
jolmg wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Me: We need a phone. You: We're there. It's a bad phone. This thing works as a laptop replacement. You'll even be able to use it as a trackpad some day! This reads like satire. You guys are so out of touch with consumer expectations that you can't even string together a coherent argument in favor of these devices you so love. Even if it was a viable phone, are we really calling mid-tier 2016 performance, from a devic…

> Me: We need a phone.

You:

>> I would genuinely carry my Linux ThinkPad with a cellular radio everywhere before [..] PinePhone or Librem 5

If you're thinking of M.2 modems, they generally can't do calls AFAIK. A ThinkPad isn't really going to serve you as a phone...

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

#486

Post by seba_dos1 »

handedness wrote: post #480
seba_dos1 wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sorry? Pixel 1 was a 2016 high-end mainstream phone that costed about the same as a niche and low-volume Linux phone in its crowdfunding campaign just a year later. It's actually fairly similar spec-wise to Librem 5, with exception of its noticeably more powerful GPU. Both these phones have some features the other doesn't.

Some owners disagree, others agree. For what it's worth, I don't disable JavaScript on my phone's browser.

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

#487

Post by seba_dos1 »

handedness wrote: post #483
seba_dos1 wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In that thread you're stating just months ago that Librem 5 owners no longer need to manually develop raw photos to get decent results. Truly atrocious video quality. I say the camera's not good enough for me, and I suspect the market agrees. The tram photo is arguably the best output of the lot and it's got a ton of problems by contemporary standards. Fun photo, if you didn't buy the phone for the camera and you wan…

> and it's got a ton of problems by contemporary standards

No shit Sherlock. A processing pipeline written in a few weeks by someone who was just learning what color actually is while writing it, with lots of TODOs left around, can't compete with the state of the art? Who would have thought?

The post that started this subthread simply asked "Is this a good enough camera for you?", which is a valid question. For some (like me), the answer will be yes; for others, no. That's fine. I appreciate this link being posted because there's lots of really bad photos circulating out there coming from misconfigured software stacks that don't even do the most basic things you're supposed to do with pixels to get a viable picture, giving a much worse impression of hardware than deserved simply because of poor software. It was you who then suddenly showed up with your false "massive amounts of post-processing" claims and iPhone comparisons, as if anyone was claiming that it was comparable to iPhones. Take a short break and re-read what you wrote and what you've been replying to.

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

#489

Post by seba_dos1 »

handedness wrote: post #484
seba_dos1 wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every time someone says we need a better open Linux phone, the Librem 5 and PinePhone crowd shows up to tell us not to believe our lying eyes, that our standards (which are already more open to tradeoffs than the general public's are) are wrong, that they love daily driving a device and therefore extrapolate that into some kind of viability as a commercial offering for anything other than novelty hobbyists. They're f…

It's just as if people weren't a single hive-minded entity and they all had differing needs and opinions.

Of course we need better phones. Librem 5, the one I personally still consider the best out there right now, is now 6-7 years old! It wasn't a low-end device back then, but it wasn't high-end either, and time flies. Yet at the same time I keep seeing people going "I wish we had XYZ" when XYZ was something I was enjoying all these years already. And you know, these better phones won't come out of the Santa Claus' bag. If all the people complaining about the need of better Linux phone had actually bought one, we would already have their successors in our hands.

There's still a lot of work to do, but the usual reaction when people are playing with my phone is being surprised at how usable it appears ("this is a Linux phone? it looks like a normal one!"), so I do think we need to put more effort into informing people of what's already there, even if it won't satisfy everyone's needs.

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

#490

Post by fooqux »

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…

Thanks for writing all that!

Of course I knew that the Librem5 existed, but at the time I was thrown off by the price and the smell of "impending shitstorm" the device reeked of. Afterwards, I was too deep into the Pine side of things to pay attention to what was going on over at the Librem side.

It's sad that these two devices have derailed open phones so much. Obviously there's a ton of things to figure out, radio chief among them. But I fear that the corporations have learned from what happened during the "PC compatible" era of computing and openness will be a thing of the past.

I hope I'm wrong about that.

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