Two Years of Life with PinePhone
linmob.net
Two Years of Life with PinePhone
1–10 of 139 posts
Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone
#2I 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, which I generally liked.
But then I noticed that the phone wakes up and turns on the screen at random intervals. And quite often. Never found a solution to fix this. The web is full of reports about it:
https://www.google.com/search?q=pinephone+wakes+up
I watched the development around it for a while and contributed some details about the issue. Checked back every few weeks and did not see any progress. Then forgot about the phone at some point.
Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone
#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 shipped and ending up with it in a state where at least the GUI wouldn't come up after all
> writing an update in gedit, running Firefox with ~20 tabs for hours would have been plainly impossible without multiple reboots and likely some unfortunate data loss in the meantime
If this blog post is trying to convince me never to get a PinePhone, it's doing an excellent job.
Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone
#4> 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.
Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone
#5> That said, the accessories seem to be plagued by hardware bugs
I received the Pinephone Keyboard a little more than a week ago. Ordered it because I thought it would revive my motivation to use the Pinephone, because it would turn it into a cool mini linux laptop.
However, since receiving it, I wasn't able to get it working. According to the community the pins don't always make a connection to the phone and you have to shim it, while risking to break something. The keyboard charges the phone and all the required drivers are installed, but typing just wont work.
Overall I still really like the idea of the Pinephone. But since receiving it in 2020 and recently receiving the keyboard I had to spend 90% of the time using it for debugging, fixing, reinstalling OS after breaking upgrades etc. and am now at a point where I just don't care about this device anymore. Because during the 10% when I can actually use it, it is just way to slow.
I of course knew what I was getting into and know that it's still in a dev phase.
My favourite OS to use is DanctNIX with SXMO, btw.
Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone
#6I 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.
Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone
#7I 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 probably just use Flatpak or web apps for a lot of things.
Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone
#8I 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 I have not regretted that decision.
Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone
#9> 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…
Almost all of that is referring to 2020 and no longer the case.
Multiple days of idle with Phosh on pmOS, for one anecdote.
Wake-up on notifications is still a WIP AIUI, though.
I recently got back to mine with a fresh install and a lot has improved since last year.
Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone
#10I got one, never managed to get the phone to call. 4g wasn’t working either. I think I managed to receive a text at some point. I was disappointed to say the least.