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The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

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Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#241

Post by kewrkewm53 »

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 using Linux Mint Cinnamon for years, doing mostly programming, and honestly I've encountered way less issues than with Windows. Maybe it's because I'm using old hardware. I'm very satisfied with the experience as it is by default, not much need for customization or tinkering in my case.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#243

Post by chunk_waffle »

kop316 wrote: post #136
chunk_waffle wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its sad how utterly terrible the Pusrim phones are, can they even make a _phone calls_ reliably?

Yeah. I have been using it only for the past 3 months. Works pretty well with VoLTE, SMS/MMS, Visual Voicemail, Calls, internet. I second just reaching out to their support, they have been pretty good at helping to fix things, even obscure bugs.

Thanks for this! last time I went looking for video reviews none of the reviewers actually made a phone call with it which annoyed me to no end.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#244

Post by adrian_b »

adrian_b wrote: post #217
usrn wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A quarter of a century ago, the Xorg config was indeed the major problem of any Linux installation. Nevertheless, now that is extremely ancient history. During the last 20 years, I have been using Linux on all my desktops and laptops, without needing any Xorg config. The only exception is that now I have a couple of lines of Xorg config, which describe how my 3 monitors must be positioned. Without an Xorg config all…

I want to add that even if I have not seen for many years any problems with Xorg, on a wide variety of hardware, that does not mean that there are no problems with Linux.

In my opinion, the worst hardware problems in Linux are usually with Bluetooth or with audio.

I have not encountered yet hardware problems that could not be solved in Linux (unlike for Windows Enterprise, where I have met unsolvable problems).

Nevertheless, in the case of Bluetooth and of audio, I have encountered frequent cases when the default configurations would not work and when finding how to make the right configuration was highly convoluted and unintuitive, so many hours could be lost with that.

Even so, the difficulties of installing Linux versus Windows, Android or Mac OS are just a myth.

Most users see that Windows and the other commercial operating systems just work, because they have been preinstalled by professionals on their computers.

When you are the professional who must install Windows on a new computer and when that computer happens to be slightly non-standard, which is the case for most embedded computers, installing Windows is usually much more difficult than installing Linux.

I have encountered cases when I had to work a week to succeed in making Windows have an acceptable performance on a computer on which Linux just worked from a live USB stick, without any problems.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#245

Post by werbvyervwye »

usrn wrote: post #163
noirbot wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you don't even need a bootloader for an initramfs. you can easily set your initramfs in the cmdline stored in efivars.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#246

Post by noirbot »

werbvyervwye wrote: post #245
usrn wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you don't even need a bootloader for an initramfs. you can easily set your initramfs in the cmdline stored in efivars.

And you've both now used a lot of words that I'm not familiar with or particularly interested in learning deeply. I just want my computer to boot up, and maybe dual boot, and every time I try to do anything with GRUB or EFI I almost always nearly brick my computer again.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#247

Post by noirbot »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #240
noirbot wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

I don't get it. Since 2006 I have never had to clean-slate my GNU/Linux installation, on both PCs or phones. I only ever did it out of choice, usually with new hardware being a pretext to try a different distro or installation method - which happened total a handful of times during those 15 years. Debian (and apt) in particular has never made me even worry that I'll have to reinstall my OS, and I'm sort of a power us…

Honestly, you're probably just better at using it than I am. I'm sure most of my "I guess I'll just clean-slate" moments could be fixed if I put in the time and knew the system better, but I don't, and in the moment where my computer is half-broken and the windowing system has stopped displaying any text on anything, or just not rending half of the icons, I have the choice of either making it a learning opportunity, or deciding I want to use my computer today for sure.

Most folks who use Linux daily are just flat out better at Linux than me at this point. It makes sense - it's a self-selecting group. But that also means half of the instructions you'll find on a blog or forum or SO assume a lot more familiarity with the system than I have. I've been wanting to try a different visual theme on my computer - it seems easy to install a new one, and the repo I found just has a helper script that should install it, but all the docs also just say "and you can just uninstall it if you want", but there's no uninstall script, and I don't understand the install script well enough to know how I'd undo it if something broke. So I just haven't done it.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#248

Post by andrew_ »

gentleman11 wrote: post #109
andrew_ wrote: post #61

The (my) case against PinePhone is the case: it's not waterproof.

No phones were until recently and it was fine

I've had a waterproof phone since the Galaxy S5. That was released in 2014. I'd hardly call 8 years ago "recently."

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#249

Post by emteycz »

hef19898 wrote: post #196
emteycz wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want privacy, don't install anything Google or microG. Surprisingly many apps from Play store (via Aurora or sideloaded) still work (not all features though) - but if you want privacy, don't even use Play store via Aurora.

Not using Aurora and micro made banking impossible in my case... Well, I almost completely de-googled so I don't complain too much. Maybe keeping my old phone for banking only and using a pinephone for everything else would work, I have to investigate that!

I just use the web version of internet banking. One of my banks doesn't have responsive website, but for sending money and setting card limits it's still more than enough.

Re: The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone

#250

Post by jodrellblank »

hef19898 wrote: post #192
cehrlich wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental problem seems to be that there is one group of people who believe that smartphones should be 'real computers', and another group that wants it to be something different, more limited. For my personal usage I'm in the second group. I have several 'real computers', and I just want my phone to do phone stuff, and do it without getting in my way. I have no interest in switching from my iPhone to a PinePho…

I'm with you. And the device vs. computer thing is not just about hardware, it is much more about software. Not everything encountered in real life will be as easy to use as an app, nor should it be. I see this at work right now, people are getting third party, external UI interfaces just to avoid working in the ERP system that contains all necessary information. And it sucks. That being said, I just had a deep look…

> "Not everything encountered in real life will be as easy to use as an app, nor should it be"

Yes should it be. There's no value in "I suffered to learn this, so everyone should have to". There is a ton of value in "you can now pull data from five easy to use systems in the same time you used to spend on one hard to use system". That's not dumbing down, that's progress. It's raising the abstraction layer and hiding the minutiae. (This is not the same as apps forbidding you from getting to the lower levels. An easy to use UX and access to the lower levels are both desirable, and not in conflict. That apps have one and block the other is not a reason to reject easy UX.)

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