11 ms·

For the record, I received yesterday the new mainboard that will be in those phones to replace the one of my pinephone UBport edition. The boost in RAM (3gb ins

For the record, I received yesterday the new mainboard that will be in those phones to replace the one of my pinephone UBport edition. The boost in RAM (3gb instead of 2gb) does the trick for me, allowing to use firefox. Not to the point that the experience is even close to android, but at least usable (before that, I used elinks on the phone). The system I use (mobian/phosh) still feels sluggish, but I suspect it's more a matter of software than hardware, now. I tried yesterday KDE neon/plasma with that new board, but had problems that the screen would black out after a few minutes of use (had to do hard reboot to recover). I see in this release announcement that their build of plasma is on top on Manjaro, I'll have to try that one. It's especially interesting because someone from Plasma mobile team told on HN the other day that they support MMS.

kop316 6y ago
> It's especially interesting because someone from Plasma mobile team told on HN the other day that they support MMS. I'm curious about this too, as I explicitly tried plasma mobile on several distros (PostmarketOS, Manjaro, KDE Neon), and MMS did not work for me at all. It seems to work on the ofono stack, which seems to be closer to supporting MMS versus ModemManger + Chatty, but I'd love to hear from that same person again to hear their set up.
- oriesdan 6y ago
  For reference, this was the post, in case you come around the author : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25101199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25101199
- linmob 6y ago
  IIRC (not a MMS user, it never took off in Germany) MMS requires provider/carrier specific settings (e.g. a special MMS APN) to be set, meaning that it may not work for you even though it’s properly implemented.
swiley 6y ago
Supposedly improvements in hardware acceleration have changed this but IME a window manager with no compositing is way faster than phosh. I use fluxbox and on that firefox scrolls in real time for example.
- oriesdan 6y ago
  Thanks for mentioning it. How does fluxbox works on mobile? Is it basically the same than the desktop on a small resolution, or it can receive phone calls and have a notification bar?
  - p4bl0 6y ago
    If it's the compositor that causes the problem, can't it be disabled? I don't know phosh but in Plasma you can disable the compositing from the system settings.
    - oriesdan 6y ago
      Nope, there's no option for that in phosh settings. Actually, it's the compositor (phoc) that starts gnome-session in /usr/bin/phosh. I've just tried to edit the startup script to launch gnome-session directly, but it would refuse to start. It's also a pure wayland system, so it's quite unlike what we're used on desktop.
      - p4bl0 6y ago
        I see, thanks for your explanations :).
      - jhardy54 6y ago
        > It's also a pure wayland system, so it's quite unlike what we're used on desktop. When you say "pure", do you mean "no XWayland"?
        linmob 6y ago
        All Phosh distributions I’ve come across have Xwayland.
kleiba 6y ago
I grew up in the C64 days - I still can't get my head around the fact that you need 3gb of RAM because 2gb is not enough to run a webbrowser these days. I know that what's going on on a typical website these days requires an enormous amount of computational power, but I mean, come on. That shouldn't be the explanation, it's part of the problem.
- zitterbewegung 6y ago
  Any content you see on the screen hasn't changed at all. On a typical website all of the analytics are causing page bloat. Sometimes there are frameworks like bootstrap but hypothetically those should be cached. If you are looking at a web application then it has a framework that is a magnitude higher and the rest of it you see a significant increase.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    Website bloat isn't the explanation. Firefox on the original 2GB Pinephone board is painfully slow even if you have uBlock Origin and Noscript installed. It is slow even to open and browse to a minimalist text-only website with. I'm not sure how much of this is Firefox, and how much is the whole Mobian UI that depends on GNOME components that have not been optimized to save RAM. It also has a lot to do with the fact that the Pinephone CPU is underpowered compared to anything from 2020 (or almost anything from 2015, really).
    - jcun4128 6y ago
      It is too bad (in the case of parsing) most websites have dynamic HTML structures... I wonder how hard it would be if you had some browser/wrapper that made most websites into wire-frame boxes, text to be simpler to render
    - zitterbewegung 6y ago
      You do realize if you use ublock Origin and Noscript that actually degrades your performance because it has to verify to not load that information.
KingMachiavelli 6y ago
Have you tried Sxmo? It's a very lightweight UI based on suckless programs but seems like it would make the phone functions calls, sms, very intuitive & easy to access. It's based on postmarketOS anything supporting that should also work. https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone_Software_Releases#Sxmo https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone_Software_Release...
enos_feedler 6y ago
I’ve been using Mobian on the UBport edition for the last month. Sluggish doesn’t even describe the usability. I bought a few data only sims in hopes of leaving the house for short errands with different devices. There is no way I could leave the house with the pinephone. It isn’t usable yet. Could an extra gig of RAM solve this? It seems like it needs years of work.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- blihp 6y ago
  As you noticed, it's not just a RAM issue. The problem is that Linux GUI and apps generally expect laptop/desktop-ish levels of hardware capabilities because that's what they were developed on/for. You're literally running the same code base that the x86 versions run, just recompiled for ARM. Most mobile SoCs, especially the ones that are Linux-friendly in terms of being open enough to be viable, are not even remotely that. On iOS and Android, widely used apps such as browsers are extensively optimized for mobile. On the Pinephone, and all other ARM-based Linux devices, we're still running applications like web browsers that were written expecting to run on multi-core I/O monsters with lots of RAM, beefier GPUs etc. (the main exception being the main GUI shell... it would be so much worse if you had to boot the phone into a full Gnome/KDE environment) We're still in the late stages of getting the pile of software that is a typical Linux distro running at all on a mobile device. Then assuming these devices get enough traction, you'll start to see more effort put into mobile-optimized software.
  - stazz1 6y ago
    Hmmm great points. Is this a "call for mobile versions" of classic Linux programs in a way?
    - blihp 6y ago
      Definitely... that's part of the reason I chime in when this topic comes up. Having done both Linux and mobile development, I don't believe that the entirety of the answer is going to be 'just throw a more powerful SoC in the device'. Sure, that will help to a degree in some areas but there is a lot of work that has been put into iOS and Android to achieve a balance between battery life and performance that most developers who have only worked in/on Linux haven't appreciated. Which is understandable since it wasn't 'their' problem... now with the Pinephone/Librem 5, it is. Something I have found worthwhile has been listening to the UBports podcast over the last 6 months or so. They really do seem to be 'getting it' faster than most re: what's left to be done. That's partly because they're in the rather unique position of coming from a place of having the Android kernel (which isn't just a vanilla Linux kernel) do a lot of things for them (i.e. UBports on Android phones) and now that they're running on bare metal (i.e. UBports on Pinephone) with (mostly) the same code base they are able to see 'oh, yeah... the kernel and/or apps need to be able to do Y' in order to replicate the functionality they get on Android phones.
abawany 6y ago
I tried Mobian but eventually switched to https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch - the phone is much more usable for me including Firefox. I am waiting to receive my updated board and look forward to further improvements.
tomc1985 6y ago
The screen blacking out thing might be due to DRAM speeds or timings being too aggressive. I received a manjaro CE phone the other day that does the same thing. https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9832 https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9832 has more info
Fnoord 6y ago
Elinks has known vulnerabilities in JavaScript (Spidermonkey) and possibly other parts. It is abandonware, and should not be used. You could use a terminal, mosh, and Browsh, allowing you to use Firefox remotely.

kop316 6y ago

> It's especially interesting because someone from Plasma mobile team told on HN the other day that they support MMS. I'm curious about this too, as I explicitly tried plasma mobile on several distros (PostmarketOS, Manjaro, KDE Neon), and MMS did not work for me at all. It seems to work on the ofono stack, which seems to be closer to supporting MMS versus ModemManger + Chatty, but I'd love to hear from that same person again to hear their set up.

oriesdan 6y ago
For reference, this was the post, in case you come around the author : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25101199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25101199
linmob 6y ago
IIRC (not a MMS user, it never took off in Germany) MMS requires provider/carrier specific settings (e.g. a special MMS APN) to be set, meaning that it may not work for you even though it’s properly implemented.

swiley 6y ago

Supposedly improvements in hardware acceleration have changed this but IME a window manager with no compositing is way faster than phosh. I use fluxbox and on that firefox scrolls in real time for example.

oriesdan 6y ago
Thanks for mentioning it. How does fluxbox works on mobile? Is it basically the same than the desktop on a small resolution, or it can receive phone calls and have a notification bar?
- p4bl0 6y ago
  If it's the compositor that causes the problem, can't it be disabled? I don't know phosh but in Plasma you can disable the compositing from the system settings.
  - oriesdan 6y ago
    Nope, there's no option for that in phosh settings. Actually, it's the compositor (phoc) that starts gnome-session in /usr/bin/phosh. I've just tried to edit the startup script to launch gnome-session directly, but it would refuse to start. It's also a pure wayland system, so it's quite unlike what we're used on desktop.
    - p4bl0 6y ago
      I see, thanks for your explanations :).
    - jhardy54 6y ago
      > It's also a pure wayland system, so it's quite unlike what we're used on desktop. When you say "pure", do you mean "no XWayland"?
      - linmob 6y ago
        All Phosh distributions I’ve come across have Xwayland.

kleiba 6y ago

I grew up in the C64 days - I still can't get my head around the fact that you need 3gb of RAM because 2gb is not enough to run a webbrowser these days. I know that what's going on on a typical website these days requires an enormous amount of computational power, but I mean, come on. That shouldn't be the explanation, it's part of the problem.

zitterbewegung 6y ago
Any content you see on the screen hasn't changed at all. On a typical website all of the analytics are causing page bloat. Sometimes there are frameworks like bootstrap but hypothetically those should be cached. If you are looking at a web application then it has a framework that is a magnitude higher and the rest of it you see a significant increase.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Website bloat isn't the explanation. Firefox on the original 2GB Pinephone board is painfully slow even if you have uBlock Origin and Noscript installed. It is slow even to open and browse to a minimalist text-only website with. I'm not sure how much of this is Firefox, and how much is the whole Mobian UI that depends on GNOME components that have not been optimized to save RAM. It also has a lot to do with the fact that the Pinephone CPU is underpowered compared to anything from 2020 (or almost anything from 2015, really).
  - jcun4128 6y ago
    It is too bad (in the case of parsing) most websites have dynamic HTML structures... I wonder how hard it would be if you had some browser/wrapper that made most websites into wire-frame boxes, text to be simpler to render
  - zitterbewegung 6y ago
    You do realize if you use ublock Origin and Noscript that actually degrades your performance because it has to verify to not load that information.

KingMachiavelli 6y ago

Have you tried Sxmo? It's a very lightweight UI based on suckless programs but seems like it would make the phone functions calls, sms, very intuitive & easy to access. It's based on postmarketOS anything supporting that should also work. https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone_Software_Releases#Sxmo https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone_Software_Release...

enos_feedler 6y ago

I’ve been using Mobian on the UBport edition for the last month. Sluggish doesn’t even describe the usability. I bought a few data only sims in hopes of leaving the house for short errands with different devices. There is no way I could leave the house with the pinephone. It isn’t usable yet. Could an extra gig of RAM solve this? It seems like it needs years of work.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
blihp 6y ago
As you noticed, it's not just a RAM issue. The problem is that Linux GUI and apps generally expect laptop/desktop-ish levels of hardware capabilities because that's what they were developed on/for. You're literally running the same code base that the x86 versions run, just recompiled for ARM. Most mobile SoCs, especially the ones that are Linux-friendly in terms of being open enough to be viable, are not even remotely that. On iOS and Android, widely used apps such as browsers are extensively optimized for mobile. On the Pinephone, and all other ARM-based Linux devices, we're still running applications like web browsers that were written expecting to run on multi-core I/O monsters with lots of RAM, beefier GPUs etc. (the main exception being the main GUI shell... it would be so much worse if you had to boot the phone into a full Gnome/KDE environment) We're still in the late stages of getting the pile of software that is a typical Linux distro running at all on a mobile device. Then assuming these devices get enough traction, you'll start to see more effort put into mobile-optimized software.
- stazz1 6y ago
  Hmmm great points. Is this a "call for mobile versions" of classic Linux programs in a way?
  - blihp 6y ago
    Definitely... that's part of the reason I chime in when this topic comes up. Having done both Linux and mobile development, I don't believe that the entirety of the answer is going to be 'just throw a more powerful SoC in the device'. Sure, that will help to a degree in some areas but there is a lot of work that has been put into iOS and Android to achieve a balance between battery life and performance that most developers who have only worked in/on Linux haven't appreciated. Which is understandable since it wasn't 'their' problem... now with the Pinephone/Librem 5, it is. Something I have found worthwhile has been listening to the UBports podcast over the last 6 months or so. They really do seem to be 'getting it' faster than most re: what's left to be done. That's partly because they're in the rather unique position of coming from a place of having the Android kernel (which isn't just a vanilla Linux kernel) do a lot of things for them (i.e. UBports on Android phones) and now that they're running on bare metal (i.e. UBports on Pinephone) with (mostly) the same code base they are able to see 'oh, yeah... the kernel and/or apps need to be able to do Y' in order to replicate the functionality they get on Android phones.

abawany 6y ago

I tried Mobian but eventually switched to https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch - the phone is much more usable for me including Firefox. I am waiting to receive my updated board and look forward to further improvements.

tomc1985 6y ago

The screen blacking out thing might be due to DRAM speeds or timings being too aggressive. I received a manjaro CE phone the other day that does the same thing. https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9832 https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9832 has more info

Fnoord 6y ago

Elinks has known vulnerabilities in JavaScript (Spidermonkey) and possibly other parts. It is abandonware, and should not be used. You could use a terminal, mosh, and Browsh, allowing you to use Firefox remotely.