Comment by tyami94
14 hours ago
I own one of these devices (pinephone) and it is legitimately not good enough for day-to-day use (despite the incredible efforts of the people who are working on it's software). I only use my phone for locally-stored music, text-only web browsing and calls/SMS. The Pinephone cannot perform any of these tasks competently. The thing it does best is playing music, but this drains the battery. It will not reliably place/recieve calls/texts (and 911 doesn't work IIRC). It can barely handle basic web browsing. KDE on this device literally pegs both CPU cores to 100% all of the time. Phosh is better but still dog-slow. This is the case even with the many years of improvements the community has been making to these devices. It used to be significantly worse, and the software is monumentally better than it ever has been. I love this device, and it deeply saddens me that it has such major flaws.
All of the current Linux phones have major showstopper issues, and saying we're complaining about them being "unable to run modern PC games" is a strawman. The simple fact of the matter is there are no decent mobile Linux options available.
The most endemic problem right now is "Linux" phones that use crummy forked vendor kernels and Halium. For all intents and purposes, these devices are trapped in time and can't meaningfully get software updates for major system components. The 2 decent Halium-free options, the Pinephone and the Librem 5, both still use downstream kernels, and the Pinephone's kernel is maintained by 1 person in their spare time. I think it's apparent that this is not sustainable, and one can't reasonably expect megi to maintain this device forever.
As sad as it makes me feel to say this, I don't foresee these problems improving for a long time. As of now, I remain stuck with a Moto E6 from 2019 (Android 9.0) as it seems to be the final device ever produced with a replaceable battery, headphone jack, SD card slot, and screws instead of glue.
> Pinephone's kernel is maintained by 1 person in their spare time
Most open source projects, except few popular ones, are maintained by 1 person in their spare time.
But most open source projects are not the kernel beneath your bank app.
Man, I just want to get a rapsberry pi and screw together a touch display screen with some sim attachment as my phone.
Or a device which can just take a X server running on the same port of sorts but I have found that sure you can do something like it, but its gonna be of inferior / subpar than a phone but definitely possible.
Halium is fine.
If you wait around to be purist on this issue all day, nothing will ever change. Something like e.g FuriLabs is good for growing the ecosystem and getting people actually exposed to something other than iOS/Android.
Halium is a hack around crummy vendors doing sub-par work. It is technically impressive but it doesn't resolve the underlying issue that the crummy vendor kernel will never be updated. Saying that Halium is not a good enough solution in the long-term does not make one a purist, it's a simple fact. Devices that rely on Halium are dead-on-arrival.
And yet I've been using these devices for 17 years now (first Neo Freerunner, then Nokia N900, now Librem 5) and they've been good enough for day-to-day use. With some compromises, sometimes effort, maybe not for everyone, but they sure were usable by a determined person who cares.
I do have a replaceable battery, headphone jack, SD card slot and screws. I do some Web browsing, reliable calls/SMS, playing music for hours. It's starting to get a bit slow and old over the years, but I still see no reason to switch to any less user-respectful device.
What I worry about is whether there will be an upgrade path within the next decade. So far there was the Liberux campaign, and it failed. I already had to use an Android device as a secondary phone for 2-3 years before I got my Librem 5 because the N900 eventually aged too much to be usable for the Web and there was nothing on the market that could properly replace it. I don't want to need to do that again.
PinePhone is a low-end device with no support other than what you get from the community. It was a good option for those who couldn't afford anything else and wanted to invest their time and skills instead of money, but there are no miracles. The community of people who did actually care turned out to be small enough that you can still find some low-hanging fruits to work on today - and that's the thing I wanted to point out. I see lots of people who talk about how much they want Linux phones, but it's a tiny subset that actually acts like it. They won't fall from the sky - not when the sales of existing devices can't finance developing their successors.
Which software stack were you using on the Neo Freerunner that was usable as a phone and had working power management?
I tried to use a Freerunner as a phone for well over 2 years before I gave up and just bought another nokia. As far as I'm aware, it was never really usable as a phone, partly due to the power management never really working properly (there was a point where we finally got power management and a battery life of >4hrs, but the phone often wouldn't wake to ring when somebody called). When using several of the available distros I was frequently mocked by my friends for using the "echophone", due to their own voice being echoed back at them, making it extremely disconcerting to talk to.
I tried a bunch of different distros. And I spent hours and hours and hours trying to tweak settings and test to eliminate the echo. qtmoko was the best distro IIRC, but it had its own issues.
To say that "they sure were usable by a determined person" severely overstates the usability of the freerunner IMO - I'll be extremely curious to hear about the software stack that you characterise as "usable", particularly with regard to the ability to make and receive calls and the ability to have the phone on standby for more than about 4 hours away from a charger.
I used SHR (initially Om2007.2, but switched after a few months as it wasn't maintained anymore). Echo could be eliminated by configuring Calypso modem's DSP and IIRC FSO distros did it by default at some point. Buzz and not waking up to ring (the infamous bug #1024) were hardware issues on early units and could be fixed pretty easily by anyone who knows how to use a soldering iron (I didn't back then, so a friend did it for me). There was a software workaround as well, though at a cost of elevated power usage in suspend. I don't remember exactly how long it lasted on battery, but it sure did last a day at school. A quick search through my e-mail archives shows people on mailing lists talking about 100 hours in suspend with modem deep sleep fixed and about 70 hours with it disabled (though I can see someone complaining in one mail that they couldn't reach more than 50 hours), but of course it could quickly burn through the battery when under active use - especially with Wi-Fi on, as I remember its power saving mode to be quite flaky.
Freerunner was the roughest of these devices, but that was more than 15 years ago. Things have changed meanwhile ;)
2 replies →
> It can barely handle basic web browsing
I don't understand what you're talking about. SXMo (https://sxmo.org/) is fast on Pinephone. Even Phosh is pretty usable. Firefox with NoScript is more than good enough to browse web sites with pictures.
Also, Librem 5 is much faster than Pinephone, and I've been using it as a daily driver for quite some time already.
You do not expect any 'normal' person to ever use this SXMo shell, right? Hell, most nerds I know wouldn't want to touch this with a 10ft pole.
SXMo simply proves that slow hardware isn't a problem. I also said that Phosh worked well enough for me, even on a Pinephone.
I have to second this. I've bought two of these devices over the years: first the Neo Freerunner and then a Pinephone Pro.
I spent over two years persisting, trying to get the Freerunner to a state where it was usable as a phone. Openmoko were more interested in rewriting from scratch and making sure it had pretty animations than things that some might consider more important, like working power management and phone calls.
For a long time I called the Freerunner "the worst phone ever made"...
...but then I bought a Pinephone. Which couldn't even play mp3s without stuttering - something even the freerunner could manage over a decade earlier. Don't get me started on the "quirkiness" of trying to use it to make and receive calls. Also the keyboard attachment I bought with it never worked. I tried multiple distros and whatnot, but I didn't get to spend a huge amount of time experimenting, because less than a month after I started to try actually using it, I dropped it, and it was so fragile that the screen was destroyed, despite me having bought a screen protector for it.
I've looked at a lot of these devices over the years and been tempted many times. I was very put off by the freerunner experience. The pinephone experience was actually almost impressive that it managed to be somehow worse.
I've just been scanning the postmarketos wiki looking at how that works with a few different devices. The number of devices that have some feature like calls / gps / camera / etc "partially working" is dismaying, particularly for open devices like the pinephone and librem.
Personally I switched to using lineageos on phones a long time ago. It's not ideal but at least it's usable as a phone.