Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

jleightcap.srht.site

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 277 posts

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#161

Post by pavo-etc »

boboche wrote: post #151

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…

Ahhh I adored Lineage on my Note 3. Revived that device for years for me. That device and that software really was a winning combination. Too bad the charging port broke.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#162

Post by usrn »

noirbot wrote: post #160
leephillips wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

>out of the box support for the laptop components

Drivers are going to be part of the kernel. The only thing I would expect to vary by distro is probably the way firmware blobs are packaged (which is just a matter of installing the appropriate firmware blob package or worst case grabbing the blobs from kernel.org.) In general your hardware shouldn't constrain your distro choice outside of very weird hardware or very weird distros (or maybe Nvidia graphics cards but you just shouldn't use those.)

If you're talking about your WiFi, Bluetooth, or possibly your GPU not working OOTB this is almost certainly what you ran into. Not that Fedora is a bad distro although personally I don't like it.

Also switching out the UI is just a package away if you don't like the default. If you want to run, say, FVWM instead literally just `yum install fvwm` and then log out. It should show up in you display manager (and then since it's an X11 WM instead of a Wayland compositor you can just use scrot etc for screenshots.)

>Just reboot to fix audio

Sometimes Pulesaudio can get funky. Do you atleast run `pulseaudio -k` first?

>Trackpad

Yeah the trackpad situation is not great. I don't buy laptops without trackpoint mice partly for that reason and also because the only machine I've ever used where I didn't hate the trackpad was a mac.

>Shopping for motherboards etc.

An easy shortcut for this is to just check the Arch/Gentoo/Debian wiki for the composite hardware you're looking at and see if people have issues with it. Windows and OSX have similar issues if you want to buy hardware separate from the OS.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#163

Post by usrn »

noirbot wrote: post #154
usrn wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't need a bootloader. If your distro builds Linux with the EFI stub and you don't need an initramfs the EFI firmware can load it directly.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#164

Post by leephillips »

noirbot wrote: post #160
leephillips wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

I’m not in Gnome, as I mentioned, and Flameshot works perfectly here. I don’t have a top bar.

“No other OS makes me have to check the manufacturer”

Other OSes are sold on hardware that’s designed to work with them. If you want to buy a laptop to run Linux on, first research whether Linux works well on it. There are plenty of machines of all types that Linux works great on.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#165

Post by noirbot »

usrn wrote: post #162
noirbot wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

>out of the box support for the laptop components Drivers are going to be part of the kernel. The only thing I would expect to vary by distro is probably the way firmware blobs are packaged (which is just a matter of installing the appropriate firmware blob package or worst case grabbing the blobs from kernel.org.) In general your hardware shouldn't constrain your distro choice outside of very weird hardware or very…

This was trying to get a Framework laptop running, and there were literally 3 Fedora team devs working on compatibility for it as a priority and stuff still didn't work. I only went to Fedora after I couldn't even get through the setup tools for Manjaro, Ubuntu, Debian, or Pop.

I'd look into swapping out my UI if I had any confidence I knew what was going on and how to revert it. I mostly bricked an Ubuntu install earlier last year trying to get Wayland working on it.

I'm pretty sure it's not pulseaudio, it's Pipewire by default, but I think neither of them works. It's something about the device just not registering correctly on boot for some reason.

I knew what I was in for on trackpads, but it's still not a good system/sign either way.

I'm really unsure I agree with you on Windows having "similar issues" with hardware. As someone who's been building and upgrading the same desktop computer for 20 years with a combination of Windows and various Linux distros running on it, I have literally never had a compatibility issue on Windows that took more than going to the company's website and running an EXE for drivers, and I never once went to check if Windows was compatible with any part I purchased. Meanwhile, I found out that the specific sub-SKU of my Intel CPU just doesn't work with the Linux kernel for some features, so I guess I'm either out hundreds of dollars on a new CPU or I just don't use Linux again on that computer.

I'm to the point where I mostly like Linux for day to day stuff, and I really do understand a lot of the reasons why all of this isn't trivial, but it really gets my ire when people try to contend that Windows has worse usability for most normal use cases. I don't know nearly as much about Linux as you or many others, but I appreciate that I can fix things in ways I couldn't before. That said, the complete "there are no guard rails, the only instructions are a forum post you just have to copy-paste from, and sometimes the answer is just NO" of Linux is really its own universe of pain for anyone who doesn't want to have their computer eating up 1-10 hours a week just to keep it running acceptably.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#166

Post by noirbot »

leephillips wrote: post #164
noirbot wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

I’m not in Gnome, as I mentioned, and Flameshot works perfectly here. I don’t have a top bar. “No other OS makes me have to check the manufacturer” Other OSes are sold on hardware that’s designed to work with them. If you want to buy a laptop to run Linux on, first research whether Linux works well on it. There are plenty of machines of all types that Linux works great on.

I bought a Framework, which was specifically intended to work with Linux, and has devs from multiple distros working to stabilize, and I'm still having plenty of issues.

As I said elsewhere, I've been building desktops for most of 20 years with just entirely random parts and had Windows always work completely fine on it, and only get better at it over the years. Linux has gotten better as well, but I still have to be paranoid about every single part and sub-component in the system. My current motherboard's USB-C controller just doesn't work with Linux, it seems, but I'm not about to replace the entire motherboard just for that, and I'm not even sure where I'd go to research such a thing.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#167

Post by toastercat »

nabaraz wrote: post #18
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 choice is between GrapheneOS + Sandboxed Google play vs LineageOS + MicroG. If you care too much about privacy, GrapheneOS is the way to go. If you want a balance between privacy and usability, LineageOS is the way to go. Also, GrapheneOS only supports Pixel phones. I have tried CalyxOS but there are too many issues.

What issues have you experienced with CalyxOS? Asking as a daily user of CalyxOS. I have not had any real issues, but I also don't install many apps on my phone.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#169

Post by apatheticonion »

Also, you can run Android on PinePhone through Waydroid (Android in a Linux container).

My dream would be a phone that has Android on the handset but I can plug it into a USBC dock with connected displays, keyboard, mouse and a Linux desktop environment would be displayed on the external displays.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#170

Post by thaumasiotes »

noirbot wrote: post #132
usrn wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually don't share your experience. My Linux machines are all more reliable than the best smartphones I've had. Flagship Android phones have been the worst in my experience, most can't make it a week without crashing, not to mention the awful battery life. Maybe it's because I know to be picky about PC hardware and don't run things like Chrome. >I don't want a browser that's described as just "usable". I have to…

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'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 weekend searching for solutions is just "idk, give up and reset your entire OS"

So a long time ago, I installed Gentoo running GNOME 2.

There was a menu in the topbar labeled with some kind of icon in addition to the text. Probably the GNOME foot.

Anyway, since Gentoo was all about letting you make the customizations you wanted, I thought it would be nice to replace that icon. I had found an icon of the Gentoo fish wearing a wizard hat and I thought that would be appropriate.

So I looked through the documentation for the menu. I found the file where the icon associated with the menu was defined. And I replaced that with a definition pointing to my preferred icon. This did not work. The icon displayed in the name of the menu didn't change.

It's not that there was no effect. If I viewed the menu properties (you know - right click, "properties"...), my fish-wizard icon showed up (in the properties view) as the icon for the menu where I'd tried to put it. It just wasn't displaying in the topbar the way I'd hoped.

I was unable to figure out how to change the icon the menu actually displayed, and had to give up. The documentation was no help. :(

Post reply on HN