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PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

pine64.org

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Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#121

Post by zitterbewegung »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #115
zitterbewegung wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any content you see on the screen hasn't changed at all. On a typical website all of the analytics are causing page bloat. Sometimes there are frameworks like bootstrap but hypothetically those should be cached. If you are looking at a web application then it has a framework that is a magnitude higher and the rest of it you see a significant increase.

Website bloat isn't the explanation. Firefox on the original 2GB Pinephone board is painfully slow even if you have uBlock Origin and Noscript installed. It is slow even to open and browse to a minimalist text-only website with. I'm not sure how much of this is Firefox, and how much is the whole Mobian UI that depends on GNOME components that have not been optimized to save RAM. It also has a lot to do with the fact…

You do realize if you use ublock Origin and Noscript that actually degrades your performance because it has to verify to not load that information.

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#123

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #121
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Website bloat isn't the explanation. Firefox on the original 2GB Pinephone board is painfully slow even if you have uBlock Origin and Noscript installed. It is slow even to open and browse to a minimalist text-only website with. I'm not sure how much of this is Firefox, and how much is the whole Mobian UI that depends on GNOME components that have not been optimized to save RAM. It also has a lot to do with the fact…

You do realize if you use ublock Origin and Noscript that actually degrades your performance because it has to verify to not load that information.

My apologies for not making myself entirely clear: even if you have no addons whatsoever, and you open Firefox and try to navigate to some bare-bones text-only website, even that is extremely slow on the 2GB Pinephone.

However, I would question whether uBlock Origin degrades performance – my own experience running Firefox on low-memory platforms like netbooks and the Raspberry Pi suggests that is not the case. Yes, addons use some amount of RAM, but if they prevent the device from loading a modern advertising-based webpage where the ads and analytics run into the many megabytes and the useless Javascript is CPU-intensive, it seems to work out as a net benefit.

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#124

Post by heavyset_go »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #49
kleiba wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in the C64 days - I still can't get my head around the fact that you need 3gb of RAM because 2gb is not enough to run a webbrowser these days. I know that what's going on on a typical website these days requires an enormous amount of computational power, but I mean, come on. That shouldn't be the explanation, it's part of the problem.

Any content you see on the screen hasn't changed at all. On a typical website all of the analytics are causing page bloat. Sometimes there are frameworks like bootstrap but hypothetically those should be cached. If you are looking at a web application then it has a framework that is a magnitude higher and the rest of it you see a significant increase.

It isn't the Bootstrap-like frameworks that are causing bloat. It's that websites are written as apps these days by people with relatively beefy machines compared to consumers who don't usually buy top of the line hardware every year.

For example, compare Twitter or Facebook to their recent SPA rewrites in React. I can't use either without sacrificing GBs of residential memory. Loading anything on those sites now requires many more CPU cycles than they did before.

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#125

Post by heavyset_go »

blihp wrote: post #76
enos_feedler wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using Mobian on the UBport edition for the last month. Sluggish doesn’t even describe the usability. I bought a few data only sims in hopes of leaving the house for short errands with different devices. There is no way I could leave the house with the pinephone. It isn’t usable yet. Could an extra gig of RAM solve this? It seems like it needs years of work.

As you noticed, it's not just a RAM issue. The problem is that Linux GUI and apps generally expect laptop/desktop-ish levels of hardware capabilities because that's what they were developed on/for. You're literally running the same code base that the x86 versions run, just recompiled for ARM. Most mobile SoCs, especially the ones that are Linux-friendly in terms of being open enough to be viable, are not even remotel…

I have an old 32-bit machine from like 2005 with 2GB of memory running MATE Desktop that Firefox sails on, and that you can open several tabs on without it being a problem.

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#126

Post by remexre »

blihp wrote: post #76
enos_feedler wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using Mobian on the UBport edition for the last month. Sluggish doesn’t even describe the usability. I bought a few data only sims in hopes of leaving the house for short errands with different devices. There is no way I could leave the house with the pinephone. It isn’t usable yet. Could an extra gig of RAM solve this? It seems like it needs years of work.

As you noticed, it's not just a RAM issue. The problem is that Linux GUI and apps generally expect laptop/desktop-ish levels of hardware capabilities because that's what they were developed on/for. You're literally running the same code base that the x86 versions run, just recompiled for ARM. Most mobile SoCs, especially the ones that are Linux-friendly in terms of being open enough to be viable, are not even remotel…

Relatedly, I've had a much better experience with Chromium than Firefox on my Pinebook -- I'm willing to bet this is because of Google's investment in Chromebooks.

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#127

Post by alfiedotwtf »

e12e wrote: post #119
blihp wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you noticed, it's not just a RAM issue. The problem is that Linux GUI and apps generally expect laptop/desktop-ish levels of hardware capabilities because that's what they were developed on/for. You're literally running the same code base that the x86 versions run, just recompiled for ARM. Most mobile SoCs, especially the ones that are Linux-friendly in terms of being open enough to be viable, are not even remotel…

> The problem is that Linux GUI and apps generally expect laptop/desktop-ish levels of hardware capabilities because that's what they were developed on/for. I remember running x11 and Java w/swing on 8MB 486 laptop... So something is off if multiple cores at 30-100 times the frequency can't run a gui?

Yep. But on mobile, Linux seem to run fine on the n900 and Ubuntu Phones.

The FreeRunner and Zaurus were sluggish, but they’re also on hardware that’s about 15 years old

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#128

Post by jcun4128 »

blendergeek wrote: post #73
LeonM wrote: post #58

Does anyone here have experience with actually using the pinephone as a daily driver? I know plenty of people that ordered one, but they are all laying on a drawer somewhere with the intention to play with it a bit. Basically how most RPi's end up. Just curious if this phone is actually competitive with android devices in the same price class.

> Does anyone here have experience with actually using the pinephone as a daily driver? I do. I have been using my pmOS edition as my daily driver since the day i gott it. > Just curious if this phone is actually competitive with android devices in the same price class. That depends on your needs. It is not going to have any of the proprietary app that are on Android. So, what works? - Camera: stills only - Phone cal…

> Camera: stills only

Are you saying it can't record video? Curious what kind of stuff you've installed. I'm assuming I can do `$dpkg -i package.deb` and it will work?

Re: PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available

#130

Post by anderspitman »

I've been playing with my pinephone a bit (2GB postmarketOS). Overall I think it's awesome and I love having a real linux machine in such a nice package. The build quality is much better than expected.

That said, Firefox is extremely slow and crashes a lot. Getting a fast stable browser seems like priority #1 to me. If these things are ever going to take off they need apps, and I think web apps (for better or for worse) are the quickest way to get a decent number of apps.

I'm not sure if it's simply a hardware issue (can't expect too much for 150USD), or a software optimization problem. I don't have a cheap Android phone to compare to.

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