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The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

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Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#151

Post by boboche »

I still use lineageOS on my note 3. I always buy generational leaps, not incremental, Note 3 back in the days was a rare 3gb phone, 4k video and quad core, making it a little more future proof. it was a good call, subsequent updates were mostly about speed. Took several generations to gain significantly on image quality. I added a wireless recharge module, battery is easily swappable, I still plays clash royale on it, etc.

Now, I would like better night photos, and some zoom/wide angles, so going to go with the same approach, getting 12gb instead of 8. Only good candidate I see right now is a note 20 because I can expand it. Expansion is a must, I really hate where the phone market is heading right now with severely limiting repairs, gb premium with no expansion, Limited updates for an exhorbitant price and not controlling what I run and how I run it on top of it all.

Software like LineageOS are essential not only to reduce waste, but also to get a minimum control on our hackware back.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#152

Post by noirbot »

leephillips wrote: post #135
noirbot wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been daily-drivering on Linux for Desktop and Laptop for months and Linux across 4 different distros has made me feel more helpless than Windows ever did. Sure, the Windows "police" would come in and straighten my update settings (which is ultimately why I abandoned Windows), but Linux you get the helplessness of sometimes having something break and the only answer you can find after spending half of your weeken…

I don’t understand where these problems are coming from. I also needed a program to take screenshots, so I did `apt install flameshot` and it worked great.

Until you try to do that on Fedora. Where Flameshot just doesn't work for reasons. You can install it, but can't actually open it. For reasons I don't know enough about the windowing systems in whatever my flavor of Fedora is using to understand.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#153

Post by noirbot »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #140
noirbot wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been daily-drivering on Linux for Desktop and Laptop for months and Linux across 4 different distros has made me feel more helpless than Windows ever did. Sure, the Windows "police" would come in and straighten my update settings (which is ultimately why I abandoned Windows), but Linux you get the helplessness of sometimes having something break and the only answer you can find after spending half of your weeken…

> but Linux you get the helplessness of sometimes having something break and the only answer you can find after spending half of your weekend searching for solutions is just "idk, give up and reset your entire OS" ... On Linux ? That's the traditional Windows solution.

I mean, it can be both. The issue is sometime you do an "apt get" and it just doesn't work and the only solution you can find is "idk your apt cache is broken. Clean-slate your entire OS because at some point Apt crashed in a way that was unrecoverable."

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#154

Post by noirbot »

usrn wrote: post #134
noirbot wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been daily-drivering on Linux for Desktop and Laptop for months and Linux across 4 different distros has made me feel more helpless than Windows ever did. Sure, the Windows "police" would come in and straighten my update settings (which is ultimately why I abandoned Windows), but Linux you get the helplessness of sometimes having something break and the only answer you can find after spending half of your weeken…

The trick to not having crooked picture frames on Linux is to throw out components that refuse to be straightened (and you'll run into many of these, especially if you're on a distro pushing snap on you.) If you pull out everything complex and thoroughly understand what's left you won't run into the "idk just reset the whole OS" situation. Something Windows/OSX users coming to Linux might not realize is that almost n…

Oh trust me, I'm aware of that, but if I kicked out every component giving me trouble, I'd have no graphics drivers, or a windowing system, or a bootloader, or a package manager, and at that point I don't have a computer any more.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#155

Post by noirbot »

usrn wrote: post #147
scarface74 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Especially if you don't want graphics Who in 2022 doesn’t “want graphics”?

People who don't want to redo their Xorg config.

I don't WANT to redo my Xorg config, but I don't have much choice if I want Linux to behave like an OS from this century.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#156

Post by commoner »

azalemeth wrote: post #26
mikece wrote: post #2

Why LineageOS and not GrapheneOS? I have a Pixel 4a with GrapheneOS and really like it. The lack of Firebase Cloud Messaging (Google's push notifications service) isn't an issue for personal usage; for work I still use an iPhone because I don't want to put things like MS Teams on Graphene OS. As for PinePhone: it's interesting that this article puts LineageOS and PinePhone together since the latter cannot run the for…

The thing that annoys me about GrapheneOS is that it is not possible to install a sudo binary or to root the phone. I get that this is a Good Thing from a security perspective, but I don't like the fact that I can't install AdAway for resource-less adblocking with an edited hosts file, the ability to SSH into my phone with a certificate, or the ability to make good "nandroid" backups. I also philosophically like the…

There's also ProtonAOSP, which allows you to choose between no Google services, microG, sandboxed Google Play Services, and bundled Google Play Services:

https://protonaosp.org/gapps

ProtonAOSP works with root, and the documentation explains how to use it with Magisk:

https://protonaosp.org/root

ProtonAOSP also passes SafetyNet by default, as of right now.

The developer of ProtonAOSP (kdrag0n) is also the GrapheneOS contributor who implemented the Google Play Services sandbox for that OS.

ProtonAOSP supports the Pixel 4/XL, 4a/5G, 5, and 6/Pro. It does not currently support the Pixel 5a.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#157

Post by easrng »

usrn wrote: post #97
zwieback wrote: post #30

I like the idea of a more open phone a lot but dispute the "Smartphones are shit" premise. I think modern smart phones are an unbelievably awesome value. Battery, display, wireless and processing power have advanced at such an unbelievable rate that we have something in our pockets that far exceeds predictions of 20, 30, 100 years ago. The problem is that we don't want to pay what it really costs to have such a great…

As someone who had a few pre-smartphone PDAs: Smartphones absolutely are high powered shit. On paper they're amazing but the ecosystem limits you to scrolling instagram and only a handfull of accepted IMs (iOS struggles with XMPP and IRC for example, something even my hacked DS could do fine with 4MB of ram and a 60Mhz ARM9.) Just editing fucking textfiles and copying it back to a normal PC (that isn't a mac) is a re…

You can have compilers on iOS with iSH which emulates an x86 processor and has a Linux syscall translation layer. https://iSH.app

On Android the situation is much better, you can use Termux and it runs things natively.

For Android file transfer is easy, except on a Mac where IIRC you need to install a separate transfer tool. On Windows and Linux the file explorers come with support for the protocol used. (It's MTP I think?)

For iOS with a non-Mac it's more complicated, IIRC for Windows you need iTunes and I never used my iOS device with Linux. You could mount the folder you want in iSH, start an SSH server, and tunnel it over USB to your computer with one of the usbmuxd tools (I don't remember what the specific command is) then copy the files with SFTP/SCP, but that's kinda overkill and would probably be slow.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#158

Post by usrn »

easrng wrote: post #157
usrn wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who had a few pre-smartphone PDAs: Smartphones absolutely are high powered shit. On paper they're amazing but the ecosystem limits you to scrolling instagram and only a handfull of accepted IMs (iOS struggles with XMPP and IRC for example, something even my hacked DS could do fine with 4MB of ram and a 60Mhz ARM9.) Just editing fucking textfiles and copying it back to a normal PC (that isn't a mac) is a re…

You can have compilers on iOS with iSH which emulates an x86 processor and has a Linux syscall translation layer. https://iSH.app On Android the situation is much better, you can use Termux and it runs things natively. For Android file transfer is easy, except on a Mac where IIRC you need to install a separate transfer tool. On Windows and Linux the file explorers come with support for the protocol used. (It's MTP I…

iSH is mindnumbingly slow and will chew through your battery in hours. My slow Pinephone with an Ancient Allwinner SoC that wasn't great when it was released runs circles around anything on iSH.

Also if the screen turns off it kills your sockets so you get to start things like git clone over (which can take tens of minutes on a normal sized repo and will make the phone hot enough its uncomfortable to hold.)

Also you can't multitask at all.

And most importantly: The interesting thing about compilers is that you can generate native executable for the platform. gcc on iSH is generating executables for an interpreter which is no better than just messing around with javascript.

>complicated File transfer stuff

I can literally just scp things back and forth between my phone and computer, the UI is exaclty the same, no extra wires, no extra software and it doesn't matter what device I'm sitting in front of. On my Girlfriend's machine running Gnome I can even type the IP into the graphical shell and everything shows up like a local disk. If I had an MDNS responder set up it would be 100% point and click. If I had a Windows or OSX machine in the house it would just work with those too, no extra software needed (now that Windows ships with OpenSSH.) The UX for this is unbeatable by Apple and Google.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#159

Post by leephillips »

noirbot wrote: post #152
leephillips wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand where these problems are coming from. I also needed a program to take screenshots, so I did `apt install flameshot` and it worked great.

Until you try to do that on Fedora. Where Flameshot just doesn't work for reasons. You can install it, but can't actually open it. For reasons I don't know enough about the windowing systems in whatever my flavor of Fedora is using to understand.

I wouldn’t try to use apt on Fedora. But a more serious reply would be to ask what you mean by “windowing systems” (I don’t know much about Fedora). I’ve found that Linux works best if you keep things simple. I use Debian with no “desktop”; just X11 and dwm as a window manager. This gets me a fast and responsive system on modest hardware, with almost all my RAM available to actually use. But aren’t there at least a half-dozen screenshot programs to choose from?

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#160

Post by noirbot »

leephillips wrote: post #159
noirbot wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you try to do that on Fedora. Where Flameshot just doesn't work for reasons. You can install it, but can't actually open it. For reasons I don't know enough about the windowing systems in whatever my flavor of Fedora is using to understand.

I wouldn’t try to use apt on Fedora. But a more serious reply would be to ask what you mean by “windowing systems” (I don’t know much about Fedora). I’ve found that Linux works best if you keep things simple. I use Debian with no “desktop”; just X11 and dwm as a window manager. This gets me a fast and responsive system on modest hardware, with almost all my RAM available to actually use. But aren’t there at least a h…

I don't know much about Fedora either, but it's the only distro that seemed to have out of the box support for the laptop components in the laptop I needed to install linux on. My basic understanding of the Flameshot issue is that it assumes you're in Gnome and tries to put the Flameshot button in the top bar, but whatever Fedora uses doesn't have that bar, so it just silently crashes.

The issue is "keeping things simple" requires you to have some pretty serious knowledge of Linux, to the point where it's far from simple to know what the "simple" set of things you need to install in order for your system to work, or to know what components you can't buy if you want to use Linux. As-is, my trackpad on my laptop just sometimes doesn't register clicks, even on the best supported drivers (which I had to install by hand because no distro upstreams them). Also the audio system just doesn't work half of the time either, but I'm used to that on Linux, and literally the official explanation I've seen is "idk it's like that. Just reboot if it can't find any audio devices." No other OS makes me have to check the manufacturer of specific sub-components of my motherboard to know whether they'll work at all.

Helplessness.

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