4 ms·

I get the point of low cost phone to keep the price low. I also know that there is a group that, rightfully, enjoys hacking on low-powered hardware to push it t

I get the point of low cost phone to keep the price low. I also know that there is a group that, rightfully, enjoys hacking on low-powered hardware to push it to limits. However, I wonder if there is also an opportunity to also sell high spec hardware, maybe in limited quantity. These phones are not for the masses anyway and I'm sure there is a Linux enthusiasts segment with pockets deep enough to afford the hardware - they know what they are getting into. Atleast what works will work fast and the software will only improve as we move along - which means improved overall experience. Plus it helps with the project funding too.

COGlory 6y ago
When this has been brought up about the PinePhone, the answer I've heard is that high spec hardware suitable for the project doesn't exist.
tpxl 6y ago
The problem with linux phones right now is not the price, but the usefulness/software. The UB Ports edition of the phone doesn't have a working camera, and the Mobian can only use one camera at a time, with a script to switch between them. In about a year when these issues are resolved I'm going to recommend them to everyone I know and probably buy them for my family. As far as high end goes, Librem 5 from Purism has better specs (still a lot worse than high end Androids/iPhones. That's open source firmware for you).
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  This. I am fine with Pine hardware. On the surface it should be sufficient. Oddly, my experience with Ubuntu OS is just plain awful. It made me miss Android almost instantly. I genuinely expected more. The physical switches are nice, but you still need to have some decent functionality to make it a daily driver. Sadly, it is not there yet. Since we are talking about it, if someone can recommend good alternative to Ubuntu for my UBports edition, that would be awesome. I am slowly preparing to try other OSs on Pinephone, but since it is not super easy process ( and since you have full access, you can easily brick your phone ), I have thus far spent more time learning about it than just trying to jump on one of the other OSs.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    You cannot easily brick your phone. You just use dd to write any image to the microSD and the phone just boots from it. Also see here concerning the internal memory: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9444 https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9444 Many people like Mobian. It has a very nice UI (Purism's Phosh) and the full GNU/Linux under the hood. I personally would recommend to try Sxmo: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9913 https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9913. It is unbelievably fast, capable and has a cool geeky UI.
    - qchris 6y ago
      Fwiw, I've tried UBports, pmOS, and Mobian on mine, and Mobian is definitely my favorite and the one I'm sticking with for now. And as you've said, installation is just like most other computers/SBCs, by flashing the uSD card.
    - lioeters 6y ago
      Sxmo ("Simple X Mobile") looks great. > Sxmo, or Simple X Mobile, is a collection of simple and suckless X programs and scripts used together to create a fully functional mobile UI adhering to the Unix philosophy for the Pinephone. https://sr.ht/~mil/Sxmo/ https://sr.ht/~mil/Sxmo/ It reminds me of working with text-based user interface in the terminal, with intuitive window manager. I love it!
  - ben-schaaf 6y ago
    I don't have my pinephone yet, but everyone I've heard of currently recommends Mobian.
    - tpxl 6y ago
      Mobian seems to be closest to upstream there is, so it should have the best support (assuming stuff gets backported).
  - RealStickman_ 6y ago
    I like Mobian. It's based on Debian and allows you to do the same stuff as on a normal desktop (technically). That's also the reason why I almost immediately threw UBPorts off my PP UBPorts CE. You can't do anything like you would it in Linux. For example, mounting the SD card automatically on boot with fstab wasn't possible as it always reset itself to default values. The root partition is also read only. No thanks. For trying other OSs. Just flash them to an SD card and put them in the phone. It'll boot from the SD card before booting from the eMMC.
- m463 6y ago
  > Librem 5 from Purism has better specs (still a lot worse than high end Androids/iPhones... What I would say from booting linux on apple hardware is: apple has a LOT of fat to cut away. macos/ios run an enormous number of unnecessary processes, and apps themselves use tremendous resources as well. So a lot of resource use is for business reasons and not technical ones.
davidhyde 6y ago
The iPhone 1.0 came out in 2007 and it ran on a single core arm cpu under clocked at 412mhz and with 120MB of ram and the scrolling was butter smooth. I remember being shocked at how responsive the touch screen was compared to other smartphones at the time. The PinePhone contains an AllWinner A64 Quad Core CPU with 2GB of Ram. Sure, its a crappy 5 year old Soc but it is MUCH faster than the original iphone. I know, modern smartphones have a much higher screen resolution, but still. I mention iPhones instead of android phones because it took quite a few years for Android phones to achieve that same butter smooth experience. The perceived slowness of the PinePhone is due to layers upon layers of software used to draw simple 2D stuff to the screen. I think a really simple bare metal GUI would be better than running a full blown linux desktop environment like GNOME. Even if you "skin" and strip it down for mobile, it is still laggy as hell. Linux on a smartphone => yes Linux desktop environment on a smartphone (even with Wayland support) => no I am less interested in the "daily driver" part of the PinePhone and more interested in the power consumption and responsiveness of the device itself. Stuff like this is exciting (extending the standby time of a PinePhone to 100 hours): https://github.com/crust-firmware/crust https://github.com/crust-firmware/crust
- zatop 6y ago
  During Librem 5 development, they considered using GNOME but, after talking with the upstream devs, they abandoned the idea. Gnome is slow even on laptops, it was made for X and later ported to Wayland, it uses Clutter/Mutter, JavaScript, etc. So here yes definitively it's layers upon layers. On the other hand, Posh is based on Wlroots and there is no layers. It's pure C code talking directly to EGL/DRM/KMS (And in the future Vulkan) stack. Even more interesting, Wlroots allows the use of hardware layers and with that you directly write to the screen and compositing is done in hardware. You can't go more optimised than that. With this kind of approach you can totally write a convergent, both phone & desktop, environment which is butter smooth on low spec mobile. But of course then the whole question is which apps you run on that environment, the typical Electron app won't run smoothly (but it wouldn't either on a IPhone 1). On the other hand, GTK 4 should be GPU accelerated and Qt too so those could run pretty smoothly
  - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
m463 6y ago
They could sell them for $399 and nobody would care because open phones are a special thing. Unless that's not what motivates them. Maybe they want to get them into as many hands as possible to bootstrap a working phone. They can always raise the price when the software becomes more usable.

COGlory 6y ago

When this has been brought up about the PinePhone, the answer I've heard is that high spec hardware suitable for the project doesn't exist.

tpxl 6y ago

The problem with linux phones right now is not the price, but the usefulness/software. The UB Ports edition of the phone doesn't have a working camera, and the Mobian can only use one camera at a time, with a script to switch between them. In about a year when these issues are resolved I'm going to recommend them to everyone I know and probably buy them for my family. As far as high end goes, Librem 5 from Purism has better specs (still a lot worse than high end Androids/iPhones. That's open source firmware for you).

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
This. I am fine with Pine hardware. On the surface it should be sufficient. Oddly, my experience with Ubuntu OS is just plain awful. It made me miss Android almost instantly. I genuinely expected more. The physical switches are nice, but you still need to have some decent functionality to make it a daily driver. Sadly, it is not there yet. Since we are talking about it, if someone can recommend good alternative to Ubuntu for my UBports edition, that would be awesome. I am slowly preparing to try other OSs on Pinephone, but since it is not super easy process ( and since you have full access, you can easily brick your phone ), I have thus far spent more time learning about it than just trying to jump on one of the other OSs.
- fsflover 6y ago
  You cannot easily brick your phone. You just use dd to write any image to the microSD and the phone just boots from it. Also see here concerning the internal memory: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9444 https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9444 Many people like Mobian. It has a very nice UI (Purism's Phosh) and the full GNU/Linux under the hood. I personally would recommend to try Sxmo: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9913 https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9913. It is unbelievably fast, capable and has a cool geeky UI.
  - qchris 6y ago
    Fwiw, I've tried UBports, pmOS, and Mobian on mine, and Mobian is definitely my favorite and the one I'm sticking with for now. And as you've said, installation is just like most other computers/SBCs, by flashing the uSD card.
  - lioeters 6y ago
    Sxmo ("Simple X Mobile") looks great. > Sxmo, or Simple X Mobile, is a collection of simple and suckless X programs and scripts used together to create a fully functional mobile UI adhering to the Unix philosophy for the Pinephone. https://sr.ht/~mil/Sxmo/ https://sr.ht/~mil/Sxmo/ It reminds me of working with text-based user interface in the terminal, with intuitive window manager. I love it!
- ben-schaaf 6y ago
  I don't have my pinephone yet, but everyone I've heard of currently recommends Mobian.
  - tpxl 6y ago
    Mobian seems to be closest to upstream there is, so it should have the best support (assuming stuff gets backported).
- RealStickman_ 6y ago
  I like Mobian. It's based on Debian and allows you to do the same stuff as on a normal desktop (technically). That's also the reason why I almost immediately threw UBPorts off my PP UBPorts CE. You can't do anything like you would it in Linux. For example, mounting the SD card automatically on boot with fstab wasn't possible as it always reset itself to default values. The root partition is also read only. No thanks. For trying other OSs. Just flash them to an SD card and put them in the phone. It'll boot from the SD card before booting from the eMMC.
m463 6y ago
> Librem 5 from Purism has better specs (still a lot worse than high end Androids/iPhones... What I would say from booting linux on apple hardware is: apple has a LOT of fat to cut away. macos/ios run an enormous number of unnecessary processes, and apps themselves use tremendous resources as well. So a lot of resource use is for business reasons and not technical ones.

davidhyde 6y ago

The iPhone 1.0 came out in 2007 and it ran on a single core arm cpu under clocked at 412mhz and with 120MB of ram and the scrolling was butter smooth. I remember being shocked at how responsive the touch screen was compared to other smartphones at the time. The PinePhone contains an AllWinner A64 Quad Core CPU with 2GB of Ram. Sure, its a crappy 5 year old Soc but it is MUCH faster than the original iphone. I know, modern smartphones have a much higher screen resolution, but still. I mention iPhones instead of android phones because it took quite a few years for Android phones to achieve that same butter smooth experience. The perceived slowness of the PinePhone is due to layers upon layers of software used to draw simple 2D stuff to the screen. I think a really simple bare metal GUI would be better than running a full blown linux desktop environment like GNOME. Even if you "skin" and strip it down for mobile, it is still laggy as hell. Linux on a smartphone => yes Linux desktop environment on a smartphone (even with Wayland support) => no I am less interested in the "daily driver" part of the PinePhone and more interested in the power consumption and responsiveness of the device itself. Stuff like this is exciting (extending the standby time of a PinePhone to 100 hours): https://github.com/crust-firmware/crust https://github.com/crust-firmware/crust

zatop 6y ago
During Librem 5 development, they considered using GNOME but, after talking with the upstream devs, they abandoned the idea. Gnome is slow even on laptops, it was made for X and later ported to Wayland, it uses Clutter/Mutter, JavaScript, etc. So here yes definitively it's layers upon layers. On the other hand, Posh is based on Wlroots and there is no layers. It's pure C code talking directly to EGL/DRM/KMS (And in the future Vulkan) stack. Even more interesting, Wlroots allows the use of hardware layers and with that you directly write to the screen and compositing is done in hardware. You can't go more optimised than that. With this kind of approach you can totally write a convergent, both phone & desktop, environment which is butter smooth on low spec mobile. But of course then the whole question is which apps you run on that environment, the typical Electron app won't run smoothly (but it wouldn't either on a IPhone 1). On the other hand, GTK 4 should be GPU accelerated and Qt too so those could run pretty smoothly
- 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

m463 6y ago

They could sell them for $399 and nobody would care because open phones are a special thing. Unless that's not what motivates them. Maybe they want to get them into as many hands as possible to bootstrap a working phone. They can always raise the price when the software becomes more usable.