11 ms·

Fedora on the PinePhone: Pipewire Calling

139 points by ashitlerferad 6y ago

drocer88 6y ago
Can these Linux phones prevent the mobile phone company ( i.e. Verizon, AT&T or the owner of the tower) from tracking you and selling ( or "renting" ) your location information?
- LinuxBender 6y ago
  No. Cell sites will always know your location. Additionally, in the U.S. all cellphone are required to support E911 which requires GPS location. Any phone out of compliance can have its IMEI blocked on that network. The benefit of open source phones in this regard could potentially be additional control over which apps can access GPS or additional visibility into which apps are requesting it. This already exists on closed source phones, but the devs could make permissions more obvious and potentially give more privacy tips if they so desired. Maybe even do something cool like have a red icon on your home screen that warns you may be giving apps too many permissions or if permissions changed without your interaction.
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    Cell sites have coarse location information only. E911 does not mean your phone is using GPS all the time, only while calling emergency services.
    - LinuxBender 6y ago
      Agreed, I just meant that the phones baseband is required to be connected to a GPS receiver. With an open hardware / open source phone, you might have more visibility into what is going on.
- marcodiego 6y ago
  I think it has nothing to do with privacy. Pipewire is like the 'new soundserver" for linux distros. Just that.
- gsich 6y ago
  Location from cell towers is not as accurate as GPS. I wonder for what purpose they sell the data. They need to track you, that's a technical requirement of a mobile network. (Ie someone calls you, the network needs to know where your mobile device is to forward the call)
- fsflover 6y ago
  Yes, if you use the kill switches (but then you will not have mobile connection).
3np 6y ago
UI responsiveness and polish is a lot better than what I would have expected. Pinephone and mobile Linux are coming a long way!
- twodave 6y ago
  Funny how perspectives can differ. I was just coming to comment how the UI was clearly not as polished as the competition. It's just the obvious stuff: Typing in a passcode: dots are too small, not spaced out enough Keyboard: it feels like the characters are about to run into the borders Camera: lots of just empty black space around the picture--I'd rather they just overscan it a bit to fill up the entire screen. Lack of a splash screen, icons in the app drawer are a bit too large, many of the prompts obviously expecting a mouse input, screens where responsiveness to the screen form factor is just broken. I am overall impressed with how far Linux on a phone has come--it's also still a long way to the top.
  - izacus 6y ago
    The most jarring thing is probably the lack of touch feedback when you tap on screen. There's no confirmation that phone actually registered the tap.
    - jraph 6y ago
      Interesting, I hadn't noticed this because haptic feedback using the vibrator is the first thing I disable on any phone (because of the noise).
      - choward 6y ago
        I do it because I find it annoying and distracting. It feels like I did something wrong. I'm already staring at the screen so visual feedback is all I need.
      - izacus 6y ago
        I didn't mean haptic, but visual feedback. On most OSes when you press your mouse or finger on an interactive element, that element highlights in some manner (e.g. text color changes, ripple appears, background color changes). That's critical for proper feedback and feel of a UI. It's almost entirely missing in that demo video.
asjkaehauisa 6y ago
Why will someone use it? It looks like first android phones. I mean usability and security.
- admax88q 6y ago
  And yet people used the first android phones.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    Tables stakes is now a lot higher than what was offered by the first Android phones. Unfortunately the barrier to entry into the mobile phone market has risen considerably since then.
    - admax88q 6y ago
      Yeah yeah that's fair. But every time a new product comes along that isn't _yet_ as good as Android or iPhone HN commentators reflexively dismiss it. I get that that when its some new proprietary product trying to enter the market, but when its something grass roots and community driven line the pinephone with classic linux distribution on it... I dunno, I guess I just expect HN to have more intellectual curiosity in technical projects, rather than surface level critique of packaged goods. That's the sort of thing I spend time on this site for, but those sorts of discussions are far and few between. Maybe its just time to move on, I can't relate to 90% of HN comments anymore.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    "Back when they were the pinnacle of technology", he thought but didn't say.
    - marcodiego 6y ago
      The computer in my pocket doesn't needs to be the "pinnacle of technology". It just needs to be "good enough". But, until we arrive there, some people will have to be willing to accept options which are still not "good enough" or else we'll never arrive there. It is sad that pioneers and early adopters often suffer more and are anonymous heroes that enable advanced user-respecting technology for the rest of the people. Think of this like the people who used KHTML based browsers. Their compromise allowed us to have the quick browsers we enjoy today but they had to endure broken websites for years.
mPReDiToR 6y ago
I've just got my KDE CE PinePhone. I love it because of what it represents, but as a phone it's not there yet. The more "eyes" on this device, the better. I have seen phones want to succeed and fail so many times. It isn't the distro that matters, it's the software running on that distro which can then be a universal package for all Linux devices. It's OK making ofono or Wayland run great on device A, but don't forget that wpa_supplicant and X11 run on every Thinkpad and Raspberry Pi we install on. The work we do today benefits the ecosystem, not just the community. Sorry for just saying thank you to everyone. I guess I should have had a point?
marcodiego 6y ago
Wouldn't it be possible for Pine64, Purism and Fairphone agree on a common chassis to reduce costs of their phones? Why can't it be like PC's where the user can buy a bunch of separate parts from different manufacturers and build his/her own computer?
- notRobot 6y ago
  You're not the first one to think of this. See: Phonebloks [1]. It failed mostly because there wasn't enough demand, but I wonder if they could make a comeback. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonebloks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonebloks
  - marcodiego 6y ago
    The librem 5 is somewhat modular. IIRC, you can disconnect and replace the modem and wifi card. So, I think a common chassis could have a screen, IMU, PMIC, battery, cameras, speakers, mics, leds, buttons, headphone jack, usb port and sensors (barometer, thermometers, light sensor, proximity...). The mainboard could connect to the chassis using some standardized common connectors for the devices provided by the chassis. Other devices could be connected to the mainboard: modem, wifi card, bluetooth and sd-card. That is not a giant leap from what librem 5 is.
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    Phonebloks has a questionable design: Each component had its own shell - making it bulky and very expensive.
- thepete2 6y ago
  Once you separate the phone into its parts you can only improve the parts, not the whole phone. I would think that's the problem from the manufacturer's side.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Why would they agree on a common chassis when they have already been focusing on different market segments? Purism's offering is rather higher-end, so the feel of its products will be superior to PinePhone, which is aiming at pretty rock-bottom prices. Purism and Mobian-Pine64 are already collaborating on software development, so the projects aren't intentionally ignoring one another.
ninjha 6y ago
Oh hey, this is a project I started a while ago. It's a little buggier than the other PinePhone distributions because most of our apps are straight from the "Real" Fedora repository and aren't patched. [1] General sentiment in the thread is that this is not a replacement for Android or iOS: you are correct. I can answer questions if people have any. [1]: https://github.com/nikhiljha/pp-fedora-sdsetup https://github.com/nikhiljha/pp-fedora-sdsetup
- nousermane 6y ago
  Given proximity to "real" fedora, is this any good with USB-C dock (and external keyboard, mouse, and monitor)? Stretch question - any apps that work well between both "desktop" i.e. dock and "phone", i.e. dock-less modes?
  - kop316 6y ago
    I can't answer for Fedora, but for Mobian (Mobile Debian). It works reasonably well with a USB-C dock and external keyboard/mouse/monitor. A lot of apps works well between both of you use phosh. Purism (the software dev behind phosh) developed libraries to enable apps to switch between desktop and phone mode (it's called libhandy).
  - ninjha 6y ago
    Yup, others have done the docked thing after installing gnome-shell. Haven’t tested it myself since I have an older PinePhone where this wasn’t functional. I wouldn’t say any apps work “well” on mobile - but everything that works on mobile is usable on desktop.
worik 6y ago
I have a pine phone. Have had it a week. Still excited, thrilled! But it is not a useable phone in day to day life. I have successfully made one call so far. I recommend going out and buying one today.
- jcun4128 6y ago
  Yeah I have one too, using Mobian right now. I got VS Code ARM to run on it haha it's so slow 3-5 second lag... still. Also going to try running a small VM through QEMU on it.
bArray 6y ago
I own a PineTab (based on similar hardware - A64 and 2GB RAM). These devices are very cool, if not a little under-powered [1]. For the price point, there is no competition in this space in terms of what is offered in value and quality. I really hope Pine continue to fight the good fight! [1] https://coffeespace.org.uk/projects/review-pinetab.html https://coffeespace.org.uk/projects/review-pinetab.html
- synchronise 6y ago
  How do these go with OS support? Not much in the way of reviews on Youtube but I've seen a few where the driver support leaves a bit to be desired.
  - bArray 6y ago
    Mostly okay, the OSes are really getting there. Most of them are shared with that of the PinePhones. The driver support is also mostly there. I believe for the PinePhones pretty much the entire hardware is working and usable. They are still not daily drivers, but it gets closer each day.
butz 6y ago
Is there any way to squeeze a bit more performance from current applications on PinePhone, or do we have to wait for better hardware?
- caseyavila 6y ago
  Well I don't think waiting for better hardware take any less time than improving the software that these phones run. In the video, you can see that these phones are still running desktop versions of these applications, so there is a lot of room for improvement and optimizations for these mobile Linux platforms (things like Firefox running at the right size, better GTK and touchscreen support, etc.). One of the cool things about these phones is that the battery is removable, so I would imagine these phones will last a while and only get better over time, as their operating systems mature.
- opencl 6y ago
  Supposedly a lot of the performance issues are down to GTK3 not really making much use of GPU acceleration and apps getting ported to GTK4 should improve things. Plasma mobile does seem to run a bit better than GNOME/Phosh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz_hRfkBnic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz_hRfkBnic
  - linmob 6y ago
    GTK4 may eventually improve things - while I am happily adding more and more GTK4 apps to https://linmobapps.frama.io https://linmobapps.frama.io, they don't profit from GPU acceleration due to the Mali 400 graphics in the PinePhone only supporting OpenGL(ES) 2.
linmob 6y ago
Hi, linmob here, I created this video and many others about Linux Smartphones, you can find them at https://linmob.net/videos https://linmob.net/videos I have also been writing weekly updates (well, link lists) that try to capture what’s happening in this space, you can find the latest one here: https://linmob.net/2021/02/07/linbits31-weekly-linux-phone-news-week5.html https://linmob.net/2021/02/07/linbits31-weekly-linux-phone-n... The most important thing I do in this space IMO is the app list at https://LINMOBapps.frama.io https://LINMOBapps.frama.io I look forward to your questions, ideas, feedback and contributions – the best way to reach me is via email currently (which you can find on my blog)!

139 points by ashitlerferad 6y ago

Can these Linux phones prevent the mobile phone company ( i.e. Verizon, AT&T or the owner of the tower) from tracking you and selling ( or "renting" ) your location information?

LinuxBender 6y ago
No. Cell sites will always know your location. Additionally, in the U.S. all cellphone are required to support E911 which requires GPS location. Any phone out of compliance can have its IMEI blocked on that network. The benefit of open source phones in this regard could potentially be additional control over which apps can access GPS or additional visibility into which apps are requesting it. This already exists on closed source phones, but the devs could make permissions more obvious and potentially give more privacy tips if they so desired. Maybe even do something cool like have a red icon on your home screen that warns you may be giving apps too many permissions or if permissions changed without your interaction.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  Cell sites have coarse location information only. E911 does not mean your phone is using GPS all the time, only while calling emergency services.
  - LinuxBender 6y ago
    Agreed, I just meant that the phones baseband is required to be connected to a GPS receiver. With an open hardware / open source phone, you might have more visibility into what is going on.
marcodiego 6y ago
I think it has nothing to do with privacy. Pipewire is like the 'new soundserver" for linux distros. Just that.
gsich 6y ago
Location from cell towers is not as accurate as GPS. I wonder for what purpose they sell the data. They need to track you, that's a technical requirement of a mobile network. (Ie someone calls you, the network needs to know where your mobile device is to forward the call)
fsflover 6y ago
Yes, if you use the kill switches (but then you will not have mobile connection).

3np 6y ago

UI responsiveness and polish is a lot better than what I would have expected. Pinephone and mobile Linux are coming a long way!

twodave 6y ago
Funny how perspectives can differ. I was just coming to comment how the UI was clearly not as polished as the competition. It's just the obvious stuff: Typing in a passcode: dots are too small, not spaced out enough Keyboard: it feels like the characters are about to run into the borders Camera: lots of just empty black space around the picture--I'd rather they just overscan it a bit to fill up the entire screen. Lack of a splash screen, icons in the app drawer are a bit too large, many of the prompts obviously expecting a mouse input, screens where responsiveness to the screen form factor is just broken. I am overall impressed with how far Linux on a phone has come--it's also still a long way to the top.
- izacus 6y ago
  The most jarring thing is probably the lack of touch feedback when you tap on screen. There's no confirmation that phone actually registered the tap.
  - jraph 6y ago
    Interesting, I hadn't noticed this because haptic feedback using the vibrator is the first thing I disable on any phone (because of the noise).
    - choward 6y ago
      I do it because I find it annoying and distracting. It feels like I did something wrong. I'm already staring at the screen so visual feedback is all I need.
    - izacus 6y ago
      I didn't mean haptic, but visual feedback. On most OSes when you press your mouse or finger on an interactive element, that element highlights in some manner (e.g. text color changes, ripple appears, background color changes). That's critical for proper feedback and feel of a UI. It's almost entirely missing in that demo video.

asjkaehauisa 6y ago

Why will someone use it? It looks like first android phones. I mean usability and security.

admax88q 6y ago
And yet people used the first android phones.
- kelnos 6y ago
  Tables stakes is now a lot higher than what was offered by the first Android phones. Unfortunately the barrier to entry into the mobile phone market has risen considerably since then.
  - admax88q 6y ago
    Yeah yeah that's fair. But every time a new product comes along that isn't _yet_ as good as Android or iPhone HN commentators reflexively dismiss it. I get that that when its some new proprietary product trying to enter the market, but when its something grass roots and community driven line the pinephone with classic linux distribution on it... I dunno, I guess I just expect HN to have more intellectual curiosity in technical projects, rather than surface level critique of packaged goods. That's the sort of thing I spend time on this site for, but those sorts of discussions are far and few between. Maybe its just time to move on, I can't relate to 90% of HN comments anymore.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  "Back when they were the pinnacle of technology", he thought but didn't say.
  - marcodiego 6y ago
    The computer in my pocket doesn't needs to be the "pinnacle of technology". It just needs to be "good enough". But, until we arrive there, some people will have to be willing to accept options which are still not "good enough" or else we'll never arrive there. It is sad that pioneers and early adopters often suffer more and are anonymous heroes that enable advanced user-respecting technology for the rest of the people. Think of this like the people who used KHTML based browsers. Their compromise allowed us to have the quick browsers we enjoy today but they had to endure broken websites for years.

mPReDiToR 6y ago

I've just got my KDE CE PinePhone. I love it because of what it represents, but as a phone it's not there yet. The more "eyes" on this device, the better. I have seen phones want to succeed and fail so many times. It isn't the distro that matters, it's the software running on that distro which can then be a universal package for all Linux devices. It's OK making ofono or Wayland run great on device A, but don't forget that wpa_supplicant and X11 run on every Thinkpad and Raspberry Pi we install on. The work we do today benefits the ecosystem, not just the community. Sorry for just saying thank you to everyone. I guess I should have had a point?

marcodiego 6y ago

Wouldn't it be possible for Pine64, Purism and Fairphone agree on a common chassis to reduce costs of their phones? Why can't it be like PC's where the user can buy a bunch of separate parts from different manufacturers and build his/her own computer?

notRobot 6y ago
You're not the first one to think of this. See: Phonebloks [1]. It failed mostly because there wasn't enough demand, but I wonder if they could make a comeback. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonebloks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonebloks
- marcodiego 6y ago
  The librem 5 is somewhat modular. IIRC, you can disconnect and replace the modem and wifi card. So, I think a common chassis could have a screen, IMU, PMIC, battery, cameras, speakers, mics, leds, buttons, headphone jack, usb port and sensors (barometer, thermometers, light sensor, proximity...). The mainboard could connect to the chassis using some standardized common connectors for the devices provided by the chassis. Other devices could be connected to the mainboard: modem, wifi card, bluetooth and sd-card. That is not a giant leap from what librem 5 is.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  Phonebloks has a questionable design: Each component had its own shell - making it bulky and very expensive.
thepete2 6y ago
Once you separate the phone into its parts you can only improve the parts, not the whole phone. I would think that's the problem from the manufacturer's side.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Why would they agree on a common chassis when they have already been focusing on different market segments? Purism's offering is rather higher-end, so the feel of its products will be superior to PinePhone, which is aiming at pretty rock-bottom prices. Purism and Mobian-Pine64 are already collaborating on software development, so the projects aren't intentionally ignoring one another.

ninjha 6y ago

Oh hey, this is a project I started a while ago. It's a little buggier than the other PinePhone distributions because most of our apps are straight from the "Real" Fedora repository and aren't patched. [1] General sentiment in the thread is that this is not a replacement for Android or iOS: you are correct. I can answer questions if people have any. [1]: https://github.com/nikhiljha/pp-fedora-sdsetup https://github.com/nikhiljha/pp-fedora-sdsetup

nousermane 6y ago
Given proximity to "real" fedora, is this any good with USB-C dock (and external keyboard, mouse, and monitor)? Stretch question - any apps that work well between both "desktop" i.e. dock and "phone", i.e. dock-less modes?
- kop316 6y ago
  I can't answer for Fedora, but for Mobian (Mobile Debian). It works reasonably well with a USB-C dock and external keyboard/mouse/monitor. A lot of apps works well between both of you use phosh. Purism (the software dev behind phosh) developed libraries to enable apps to switch between desktop and phone mode (it's called libhandy).
- ninjha 6y ago
  Yup, others have done the docked thing after installing gnome-shell. Haven’t tested it myself since I have an older PinePhone where this wasn’t functional. I wouldn’t say any apps work “well” on mobile - but everything that works on mobile is usable on desktop.

worik 6y ago

I have a pine phone. Have had it a week. Still excited, thrilled! But it is not a useable phone in day to day life. I have successfully made one call so far. I recommend going out and buying one today.

jcun4128 6y ago
Yeah I have one too, using Mobian right now. I got VS Code ARM to run on it haha it's so slow 3-5 second lag... still. Also going to try running a small VM through QEMU on it.

bArray 6y ago

I own a PineTab (based on similar hardware - A64 and 2GB RAM). These devices are very cool, if not a little under-powered [1]. For the price point, there is no competition in this space in terms of what is offered in value and quality. I really hope Pine continue to fight the good fight! [1] https://coffeespace.org.uk/projects/review-pinetab.html https://coffeespace.org.uk/projects/review-pinetab.html

synchronise 6y ago
How do these go with OS support? Not much in the way of reviews on Youtube but I've seen a few where the driver support leaves a bit to be desired.
- bArray 6y ago
  Mostly okay, the OSes are really getting there. Most of them are shared with that of the PinePhones. The driver support is also mostly there. I believe for the PinePhones pretty much the entire hardware is working and usable. They are still not daily drivers, but it gets closer each day.

butz 6y ago

Is there any way to squeeze a bit more performance from current applications on PinePhone, or do we have to wait for better hardware?

caseyavila 6y ago
Well I don't think waiting for better hardware take any less time than improving the software that these phones run. In the video, you can see that these phones are still running desktop versions of these applications, so there is a lot of room for improvement and optimizations for these mobile Linux platforms (things like Firefox running at the right size, better GTK and touchscreen support, etc.). One of the cool things about these phones is that the battery is removable, so I would imagine these phones will last a while and only get better over time, as their operating systems mature.
opencl 6y ago
Supposedly a lot of the performance issues are down to GTK3 not really making much use of GPU acceleration and apps getting ported to GTK4 should improve things. Plasma mobile does seem to run a bit better than GNOME/Phosh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz_hRfkBnic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz_hRfkBnic
- linmob 6y ago
  GTK4 may eventually improve things - while I am happily adding more and more GTK4 apps to https://linmobapps.frama.io https://linmobapps.frama.io, they don't profit from GPU acceleration due to the Mali 400 graphics in the PinePhone only supporting OpenGL(ES) 2.

linmob 6y ago

Hi, linmob here, I created this video and many others about Linux Smartphones, you can find them at https://linmob.net/videos https://linmob.net/videos I have also been writing weekly updates (well, link lists) that try to capture what’s happening in this space, you can find the latest one here: https://linmob.net/2021/02/07/linbits31-weekly-linux-phone-news-week5.html https://linmob.net/2021/02/07/linbits31-weekly-linux-phone-n... The most important thing I do in this space IMO is the app list at https://LINMOBapps.frama.io https://LINMOBapps.frama.io I look forward to your questions, ideas, feedback and contributions – the best way to reach me is via email currently (which you can find on my blog)!