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Two Years of Life with PinePhone

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131–139 of 139 posts

Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone

#131
post #78
post #6

I 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.

Is the Pro worth it? I like the idea and I own the og, but it is painfully slow. At this point I just check on the progress each month and put it back in the drawer :/

It is way faster. Has 6 cores, can run VS Code for example. But officially the cameras don't work yet. Although megous has it recording video.

I do the same thing, put the batteries in, update them (run both Mobian/Phosh and Manjaro/KDE Plasma Mobile). Then turn them back off. I have a TMobile number for it but the pro also has this sleep/wake issue. Where it will not wake up after a while. It's more apparent with the plasma Mobile than Phosh.

I think it's worth it with regard to saving money, supposedly the price will bump up. But as far a s a daily driver/main phone I still use an Android.

The external display detect/reliability is buggy still too as in, plug it in, nope, plug it in, nope... There it's working. That kind of thing.

Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone

#132

There is something inherently wrong with that that you can not install a linux on basically any phone on the market that could work with linux with a bit of good will. I think we need truly open hardware and someone with money willing to stand against "status quo" of industry, like Elon Musk did with cars.

"I think we need truly open hardware and someone with money willing to stand against "status quo" of industry, like Elon Musk did with cars." I- huh? Open hardware? Elon Musk? I can only find a vague legalese pledge that doesn't seem to be very attractive for real world use according to many, and I know that Tesla is starting to really enjoy being an Apple-like company with such hits like proprietary chargers. I'm al…

Well, the only thing i meant is that Elon stood against industry with elecrtic car idea. If not him I think not a single major car manufacturer would go for electric by now. And to be clear - agree with everything you've said, or almost everything - not dreaming of cpt. save anyone :)

Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone

#133
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They mean how long a battery lasts until depletion, not how long it lasts until it's no longer functional.

Then, that's a function of device's power consumption, which is a function of many factors, which includes user behavior, too. It only makes to sense to talk about it with a particular usage in mind and not in general. You can have Pinephone suspended for 7 days if you like, under certain circumstances. Or you can drain it 2.5h if you mean to compile Gentoo on it. And completely different SW optimizations would come…

People mean battery life for typical use, not putting your phone in a deep freezer or running a file server for your dorm.

Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone

#134
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm tempted to get it as a second phone and run NixOS Mobile on it. It'll be awful for years. But if many people with my skills & elbow grease levels marinates with it for a few years, it could become special. It takes guts to be amazing, after all!

Having my daily driver run NixOS is my ultimate goal.

I've been using it for a few years now (across 2 laptops and a tower). For basic usage, it works pretty great. So terminal + internet + basic programs. KDE is wonderful by default and easy to customize (not a NixOS thing). For more specific stuff it can take some elbow grease (packaging software, playing games, more exotic system config). Between the nixpkgs issue tracker and the official docs/wiki, it's pretty easy to figure things out.

And my computer is infinitely hackable and idiotproof at the same time. That's helped me learn a lot of Linux stuff by doing fearlessly.

And this isn't to mention how nice it is that all 3 of my machines' full config is in a monorepo, with shared config abstracted into Nix modules.

Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone

#135
post #16
post #15

Unfortunately the hardware is incredibly subpar. I see no real future for Linux mobile unless the EU makes some law that forces Apple/Samsung to make flashing easier.

HW is kinda fine, if you don't try to overstress it. Here it's running some optimized software via a convergence dock on an external monitor (1920x1080): https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec5.mp4 https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec6.mp4 Here it's driving an even higher resolution screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHOgVmxH_dA And here it's driving Firefox on a 1440p screen (purely rendered via CPU with GPU disa…

Software optimization is never going to be solved.

Ultimately, software developers will ALWAYS stress the hardware to the limit. With labor saving software tools or else with performance hogging GUIs.

Simply put, devices need to keep up with the latest and greatest.

Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone

#136
post #15

Unfortunately the hardware is incredibly subpar. I see no real future for Linux mobile unless the EU makes some law that forces Apple/Samsung to make flashing easier.

I find that kind of argument for EU regulation quite depressing. So, just because other vendors aren't capable of producing decent hardware to run Linux on, the EU should force competitors to open up their hardware to those vendors? Unfortunately, this seems to be a common line of thinking, not least within the EU corridors of power themselves: Instead of nurturing competition and their own tech industry or create an…

> Instead of nurturing competition and their own tech industry or create an environment where such an industry can thrive, they somehow try to regulate it into being

Fair and efficient markets don't exist in a vacuum.

In a free-for-all, everyone would be insider trading, stealing, and defrauding.

Integrated, non-modular technology platforms are not competitive marketplaces. You cannot introduce a competitor to the Apple App store or iOS because it's a monopolistic integrated platform.

Society has to continually keep creating laws that turn non-marketplaces into marketplaces. Just as it has always done.

Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone

#137
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then, that's a function of device's power consumption, which is a function of many factors, which includes user behavior, too. It only makes to sense to talk about it with a particular usage in mind and not in general. You can have Pinephone suspended for 7 days if you like, under certain circumstances. Or you can drain it 2.5h if you mean to compile Gentoo on it. And completely different SW optimizations would come…

People mean battery life for typical use, not putting your phone in a deep freezer or running a file server for your dorm.

Typical use for me is to touch my phone (not pp) once every 20 days to put it on the charger and don't toy with it or call at all, just receive an odd SMS or two for 2fa bank access.

If you'll play a game, it will matter whether the game consumes 30% or 290% of CPU time. It will matter if you use the phone mostly indoor, or outdoor, because backlight is a major power sink. It will matter if you need wifi or mobile internet, or whether your usecase is mostly uploading or downloading data, how much screen on time you'll want,...

It's nonsensical to ask for how long will phone run on a single charge without specifying what you'll be doing with it, because it can be anywhere between 7 days and 2-3 hours.

There's no such thing as a typical use.

Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone

#138
post #130

My wife recently bought me a Pinephone Pro as a present. I liked the idea, but in practice I still haven't managed to use it because I'm stuck with basic problems. E.g., the battery wouldn't charge in the phone. I bought an external charger, and this seems fine, but ideally I'd like a backup battery so that I can charge one while I use the other. But pine64 batteries have been out of stock for ages. Their wiki says "…

I just grind off the bottom plastic tabs from the samsung batteries. Otherwise they really don't fit.

Thanks, that's a good tip. I might try that.

Re: Two Years of Life with PinePhone

#139
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. The blog post is not meant as a discouragement, but as a report. It does not help anyone if people get a PinePhone (or other Linux Phone) with the expectation that it's just going to work like their big-platform-high-volume smartphone, and then cry a river because mobile Linux is not as refined. Maybe I should have highlighted the personal success stories I have had more (contributing to mobile-config-fi…

Maybe you should make this clearer to your readers?

Sort of an implicit assumption when publishing a literary work is that the readers can actually read.
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