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My Pinephone Setup

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Re: My Pinephone Setup

#71
post #59

Why does Google hate the regular Linux Kernel and the regular Linux userland so much that Android doesn't have much Linux resemblance? I remember that wen Nokia did N900, it was pretty compatible with mainline Linux.

Because Linux userspace arguably sucks. While the kernel is excellent, there is no sane sandboxing (and I can’t communicate enough how truly terrible linux desktop’s “security” is. A single bash script could break absolute havoc), the IPC mechanism used to communicate between programs is fragmented and in my opinion the insistence that C should be used everywhere really holds back the platform. Compared to that, andr…

Most Linux distros have standardized on AppArmor which provides the same basic featureset as SELinux while being a lot easier to manage (e.g. no file system hacks required, everything is set up via standard configuration mechanisms!).

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#72

Any news about running Android apps inside Pinephone? It was more than an year since I've last followed the progress on this topic. If someone here has some pratical experience on the topic, would love to hear your thoughts.

Not pratical: I'm using Waydroid on Fedora. Compared to Anbox, the only requirement that changed is the need for a Wayland compositor.

Google Apps: installed but not approved by Google. I am supposed to request access to Google but 30s after I made the request the error was still there. Will try again next weekend, hoping it was just a cache issue.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#73
post #62

> Lately, I've been learning C programming solely on my Pinephone. Ha I like this guy already. That’s my kind of crazy :) It is an interesting experiment to be sure. I’m a big geek and love Linux but not sure I would go so far as to run i3 on my phone like this but more power to him and I’m glad there are people trying different things out and seeing how it goes. I know I’m getting old because every year I appreciate…

The biggest problem with the iPhone to me is forced obsolescence. A device from 2014 (iPhone 6) is no longer able to run many apps, because it doesn't support iOS versions past 12. Many of these apps are essentially just web pages, so in principle the hardware should be more than capable of running them. But instead you are pushed to ditch perfectly functional and capable hardware in favour of a new model.

Compare that with the PC world. A laptop from 2011 can still both run Windows 10 and pretty much anything you want, assuming your hardware is able to process it fast enough - which for many use cases it is.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#74
post #62

> Lately, I've been learning C programming solely on my Pinephone. Ha I like this guy already. That’s my kind of crazy :) It is an interesting experiment to be sure. I’m a big geek and love Linux but not sure I would go so far as to run i3 on my phone like this but more power to him and I’m glad there are people trying different things out and seeing how it goes. I know I’m getting old because every year I appreciate…

The biggest problem with the iPhone to me is forced obsolescence. A device from 2014 (iPhone 6) is no longer able to run many apps, because it doesn't support iOS versions past 12. Many of these apps are essentially just web pages, so in principle the hardware should be more than capable of running them. But instead you are pushed to ditch perfectly functional and capable hardware in favour of a new model. Compare th…

Ahem. You should be comparing iPhone upgradability with Android upgradability, most of which get stuck after a year or so. If they receive any upgrades at all.

Unless you carry you 2011 laptop around in your pocket, that is.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an example of the flakiness: if I use my PinePhone heavily, the screen tends to stop working spontaneously, so that if on at the time of failure, it ceases to update, and when turned off and on again it will be black. Touch input still works. Restarting the graphical session (e.g. ssh in and run `systemctl restart phosh` for phosh or `systemctl restart tinydm` for sxmo) fixes it. “Heavily” tends to mean at least t…

Maybe tie those systemctl commands to the power button and state, so it restarts the screen every time you blank the screen, or when coming back on use a restart for the service? I have a feeling mainstream phones use all sorts of these ux hacks in the background - it only looks good, under the hood is just as messy and chaotic as any other software/hardware collision.

LCD controller is restarted/reinitialized every time you "blank" it. So this would be useless.

Likely GPU driver/mesa/compositor crashing. I never have any issues with the screen when using i3wm (with GPU acceleration disabled).

These bug reports would be more useful, if the OP did some debugging/log hunting.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#76
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's hardening against the user being able to do things, not against corporate or government threat models. Software can only do a little bit on megacorp smartphone hardware even if it tries to help the user instead of locking them out.

> Software can only do a little bit on megacorp smartphone hardware That isn't true at all. Do you have a source for your implication that the Pixel's trusted boot chain is compromised, or that remote attestation of software+hardware is backdoored?

So who controls the keys?

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#79

OP's setup looks actually pretty similar to my one, though where the pinephone really - really - shines is pentesting. The compatibility with external Wifi USB adapters and BT hardware like the ones from scott's gadgets make it an amazing pentesting device. For serious mobile-friendly usage I don't think that we can build UIs the way they're built on Linux systems anymore. I challenge every defender of that GTK/QT cr…

> I challenge every defender of that GTK/QT crap to build a swipeable sidebar into their native and responsive UI. If it takes more than 10 minutes, you lost, cause that's what it takes to use CSS, even without any IDE or toolkit. You get this for free with Qt's QML Drawer type, and it's also a declarative UI, so you don't have to implement anything yourself[1]. It's swipeable by default. You also get it for free wit…

Not to be pedantic, but I'm fairly sure it's also "for free" with GTK2/3's "stack" dialogue. Don't think it's still the case with GTK4 though, I'm pretty sure all that gesture functionality was broken out into a separate library...

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem with the iPhone to me is forced obsolescence. A device from 2014 (iPhone 6) is no longer able to run many apps, because it doesn't support iOS versions past 12. Many of these apps are essentially just web pages, so in principle the hardware should be more than capable of running them. But instead you are pushed to ditch perfectly functional and capable hardware in favour of a new model. Compare th…

Ahem. You should be comparing iPhone upgradability with Android upgradability, most of which get stuck after a year or so. If they receive any upgrades at all. Unless you carry you 2011 laptop around in your pocket, that is.

At least you have the option to install LineageOS f.x.
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