7 ms·

One point that should be repeated ad infinitum for those reading about the Pinephone for the 1st time: it's all about the freedom, not performance. One doesn't

One point that should be repeated ad infinitum for those reading about the Pinephone for the 1st time: it's all about the freedom, not performance. One doesn't buy the Pinephone to brag about its technical achievements with friends, but rather to contribute building an ecosystem, even just by spreading the word, of people who put freedom and privacy above everything. I also should be repeated ad infinitum why its hardware is limited compared to other devices, and I don't mean the well known ones but also those built by the hundreds of thousands by Chinese factories then relabeled under a dozen different lesser known brands. The reason is that Pine64 had to make all of it from scratch since obtaining any meaningful technical information from those hardware makers is impossible, so they had literally to pick what hardware had the most open documentation available. Supporting them is our way to send a strong message: "we've had enough of your black boxes". Big players of course won't give a flying damn since the market of privacy conscious users wouldn't represent a fraction of a fraction of their user base, but hopefully that will help convincing other manufacturers to publish their specs. Phones aside, there are other ways to help them. I'm waiting for a beefier version of the Pinetab, am considering the PineBook pro (with EU keyboard which is out of stock) and in the meantime got their mini solder iron which works surprisingly well (and I have two Wellers).

Bancakes 5y ago
It's sad to see free hardware is so comically behind commercial one.
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  FOSS and OSH will always sit a few years behind companies which are investing billions of dollars in R&D. But we can try to lift what we can and catch up sooner or later.
  - api 5y ago
    FOSS UI/UX is at least two decades behind and the gap is growing. A major problem is that people almost always underestimate the difficulty of a good UI. Good UIs can be a lot harder than the rest of a system and a modern UI toolkit has a feature set and difficulty level approaching that of a good 3D game engine like Unity.
    - testific8 5y ago
      I think the new GNOME is pretty comparable to the Windows and MacOSX interfaces. Is there something I'm overlooking?
    - kazen44 5y ago
      i disagree, KDE has one, if not the best ui out there. it is consistent, customizable and not a resource hog. windows's UI has been a mess since the XP days, and osx is atleast consistent, but hides a lot of functionality in name of clean design.
      - mbreese 5y ago
        And I disagree with you. And it’s not because I think KDE is horrible… it’s not. I prefer the Gnome style but KDE is quite polished. But I disagree because it is really rare to have a completely unified UI with Linux. We have separate applications for Gnome and KDE for most tasks. Sometimes one is better than the other, or one has a feature you need, but you have many different competing applications. If you want to use the “best”, you end up with a mix of different styles. Or, if you want to use an office suite, Libre Office is a different style altogether! So, you say KDE has a unified style. That’s great. But KDE != Linux. And Linux is never going to have a unified style. That’s just the nature of the beast. There isn’t one group out there that can make UI/UX decisions for all of Linux. No group that can set priorities and make decisions about what features stay and what can be removed. But that’s okay. That’s the trade off we get when working with FOSS software. We get to make those decisions for ourselves. But it rarely results in a “unified” UX. Powerful, yes. unified? No. I am interested to see how the new KDE/pine64 relationship plays out though. Hopefully it will be great. And maybe I’m just a bit pessimistic after the last time with Nokia/Qt.
        2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
        > it is really rare to have a completely unified UI with Linux I mean neither does Windows 10, which basically does a split between at least 3 different styles. Tacked on top of everything sits the metro post Windows 8 style, but is a toy UI for many aspects, click on a random setting and it is likely you will then encounter settings in the windows XP/7 style. The third one is the older Windows XP style UIs, which you still encounter once you have to venture outside of regular user territory (registry editor and the like).
- blihp 5y ago
  That's a function of the state of the SoC options currently. There are very few options for an open source phone design to choose from that have sufficient public documentation. The ones that do tend to be several generations behind on process nodes and have more modest capabilities generally as they are often targeting the low end of the market.
- xhkkffbf 5y ago
  To be fair, it's also priced dramatically lower. It's not fair to compare a current iPhone, priced at more than $1200 on the open market, with the Pine Phone priced at $150. This is where they chose to bring a phone to market and I think it's a smart move. They'll attract a bigger audience and make it easier for people to sim-swap and experiment. When the distros get good enough, they can price out higher end hardware.
  - eric__cartman 5y ago
    I'm all for having tuxphones but even a $100 Android phone creams the Pine Phone in every aspect regarding performance. The sad truth is until the soc vendors don't start properly supporting a mainline Linux kernel and offer open source drivers we will be stuck with devices that haven't left the "wow this is cool but I wouldn't use is as my only phone" territory.
    - axiolite 5y ago
      > even a $100 Android phone creams the Pine Phone That $100 Android phone is going to be carrier locked (subsidized by the carrier) and probably an older model where the R&D has already been paid-off, not an all new device. Once the Pine64 has been out for a few years, it's possible its price will drop to similarly competitive levels.
    - fragileone 5y ago
      Unfortunately this is even less likely in future once Fuschia matures and Google are able to replace the kernel with it on Pixel phones.
  - Bancakes 5y ago
    I can buy a Prestigio phone from aliexpress that far outperforms the pinephone, and is feature-complete.
zozbot234 5y ago
To me the PinePhone and other Linux phones are also about performance. Yes the MVP prototypes will always suck and you would only buy these for freedom's sake, but a truly unified software platform encompassing both mobile and mainstream computing all running on openly documented reference hardware, will be far superior technically to what we have today.
- squarefoot 5y ago
  My hopes are that 5 years from now free hardware will be much faster than today. By then, even the bottom of the list should be able to support a working mobile environment.
- m463 5y ago
  As a purism owner, and a long-time linux user... I think that is a fantasy statement. Theoretically, there could be an open platform like the PC (with usb + pcie + ATX case/power supply + etc..) with open interfaces. However the reason this came into existence was by microsoft's design to commoditize the hardware to drive software sales of its (closed) operating system. With cellphones all of those interfaces are being subsumed so the trend is one chip + a display + a battery. The chip is IP of many vendors. Additionally, the linux distributions have not had the highest performance. For example, frequently there is poor or no graphics acceleration. I think Linux will always be behind commercial/proprietary platforms. One could arguably say that the iphone is a multi-billion dollar platform, with more careful engineering, development and tuning than any other device on the planet. That said - I do believe linux based phones are nearing that "good enough" stage where dedicated users can make it work for them and people may at least have a choice.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > I think Linux will always be behind commercial/proprietary platforms. One could arguably say that the iphone is a multi-billion dollar platform One could have expected the same wrt. proprietary *NIX workstation and server hardware in the 1980s and 1990s, and where are those today? Linux is dominating that market. Embedded brings more trouble because the hardware, far from being a "multi billion dollar" endeavor, is all-too-often entirely undocumented and sloppily hacked together, where a barely workable state is considered "good enough" for shipping. But even there, Linux is easily gaining ground over proprietary OS's. The underlying dynamic is clear enough.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
amelius 5y ago
> in the meantime got their mini solder iron which works surprisingly well (and I have two Wellers). Looks interesting, what temperature can it reach?
- squarefoot 5y ago
  Didn't test its maximum temp, however connected to a laptop power supply (from memory: about 20V, 4A) it reaches enough temperatures to do clean shiny solder joints on fairly big contacts compared to its size. I think it's mainly conceived for portability and soldering small parts, however it seems powerful enough to be used as a general purpose solder iron as well. edit for more information: all tests done with leaded solder.
noduerme 5y ago
So currently, it's a couple days after police and intelligence agencies worldwide raided the owners of ANOM-using phones that were allegedly private and built to exclude common hardware/software that's used for tracking. I'm not saying the governments of the world were wrong to bring those people down. But do you really expect anyone to buy a phone - with any combination of hardware and software - and retain any expectation of privacy whatsoever? Am I paranoid to think that this sounds like a continuation of the ANOM project... selling a supposedly secure, home brew and private device to the gullible who desperately want a secure channel? Here's a secure channel: Dump your phone. There's no personal security with a device like that if you live in a state that might use your affiliations against you.
- Darvokis 5y ago
  > Am I paranoid to think that this sounds like a continuation of the ANOM project... selling a supposedly secure, home brew and private device to the gullible who desperately want a secure channel? The difference being that the point of the PinePhone is that the whole stack, from the hardware up to everything software, is open source or runs on open source firmware. The Anom was a completely closed-source solution which required a large amount of trust in a single entity. The Pinephone (and by extension every other Linux phone, whether it exists yet or not) leverages the strengths of the Linux community and is in no way comparable.
jascii 5y ago
In all fairness, My personal PinePhone running SXMO is a lot snappier and performant then my Android work phone with all its bloatware...

Bancakes 5y ago

It's sad to see free hardware is so comically behind commercial one.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago
FOSS and OSH will always sit a few years behind companies which are investing billions of dollars in R&D. But we can try to lift what we can and catch up sooner or later.
- api 5y ago
  FOSS UI/UX is at least two decades behind and the gap is growing. A major problem is that people almost always underestimate the difficulty of a good UI. Good UIs can be a lot harder than the rest of a system and a modern UI toolkit has a feature set and difficulty level approaching that of a good 3D game engine like Unity.
  - testific8 5y ago
    I think the new GNOME is pretty comparable to the Windows and MacOSX interfaces. Is there something I'm overlooking?
  - kazen44 5y ago
    i disagree, KDE has one, if not the best ui out there. it is consistent, customizable and not a resource hog. windows's UI has been a mess since the XP days, and osx is atleast consistent, but hides a lot of functionality in name of clean design.
    - mbreese 5y ago
      And I disagree with you. And it’s not because I think KDE is horrible… it’s not. I prefer the Gnome style but KDE is quite polished. But I disagree because it is really rare to have a completely unified UI with Linux. We have separate applications for Gnome and KDE for most tasks. Sometimes one is better than the other, or one has a feature you need, but you have many different competing applications. If you want to use the “best”, you end up with a mix of different styles. Or, if you want to use an office suite, Libre Office is a different style altogether! So, you say KDE has a unified style. That’s great. But KDE != Linux. And Linux is never going to have a unified style. That’s just the nature of the beast. There isn’t one group out there that can make UI/UX decisions for all of Linux. No group that can set priorities and make decisions about what features stay and what can be removed. But that’s okay. That’s the trade off we get when working with FOSS software. We get to make those decisions for ourselves. But it rarely results in a “unified” UX. Powerful, yes. unified? No. I am interested to see how the new KDE/pine64 relationship plays out though. Hopefully it will be great. And maybe I’m just a bit pessimistic after the last time with Nokia/Qt.
      - 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
        > it is really rare to have a completely unified UI with Linux I mean neither does Windows 10, which basically does a split between at least 3 different styles. Tacked on top of everything sits the metro post Windows 8 style, but is a toy UI for many aspects, click on a random setting and it is likely you will then encounter settings in the windows XP/7 style. The third one is the older Windows XP style UIs, which you still encounter once you have to venture outside of regular user territory (registry editor and the like).
blihp 5y ago
That's a function of the state of the SoC options currently. There are very few options for an open source phone design to choose from that have sufficient public documentation. The ones that do tend to be several generations behind on process nodes and have more modest capabilities generally as they are often targeting the low end of the market.
xhkkffbf 5y ago
To be fair, it's also priced dramatically lower. It's not fair to compare a current iPhone, priced at more than $1200 on the open market, with the Pine Phone priced at $150. This is where they chose to bring a phone to market and I think it's a smart move. They'll attract a bigger audience and make it easier for people to sim-swap and experiment. When the distros get good enough, they can price out higher end hardware.
- eric__cartman 5y ago
  I'm all for having tuxphones but even a $100 Android phone creams the Pine Phone in every aspect regarding performance. The sad truth is until the soc vendors don't start properly supporting a mainline Linux kernel and offer open source drivers we will be stuck with devices that haven't left the "wow this is cool but I wouldn't use is as my only phone" territory.
  - axiolite 5y ago
    > even a $100 Android phone creams the Pine Phone That $100 Android phone is going to be carrier locked (subsidized by the carrier) and probably an older model where the R&D has already been paid-off, not an all new device. Once the Pine64 has been out for a few years, it's possible its price will drop to similarly competitive levels.
  - fragileone 5y ago
    Unfortunately this is even less likely in future once Fuschia matures and Google are able to replace the kernel with it on Pixel phones.
- Bancakes 5y ago
  I can buy a Prestigio phone from aliexpress that far outperforms the pinephone, and is feature-complete.

zozbot234 5y ago

To me the PinePhone and other Linux phones are also about performance. Yes the MVP prototypes will always suck and you would only buy these for freedom's sake, but a truly unified software platform encompassing both mobile and mainstream computing all running on openly documented reference hardware, will be far superior technically to what we have today.

squarefoot 5y ago
My hopes are that 5 years from now free hardware will be much faster than today. By then, even the bottom of the list should be able to support a working mobile environment.
m463 5y ago
As a purism owner, and a long-time linux user... I think that is a fantasy statement. Theoretically, there could be an open platform like the PC (with usb + pcie + ATX case/power supply + etc..) with open interfaces. However the reason this came into existence was by microsoft's design to commoditize the hardware to drive software sales of its (closed) operating system. With cellphones all of those interfaces are being subsumed so the trend is one chip + a display + a battery. The chip is IP of many vendors. Additionally, the linux distributions have not had the highest performance. For example, frequently there is poor or no graphics acceleration. I think Linux will always be behind commercial/proprietary platforms. One could arguably say that the iphone is a multi-billion dollar platform, with more careful engineering, development and tuning than any other device on the planet. That said - I do believe linux based phones are nearing that "good enough" stage where dedicated users can make it work for them and people may at least have a choice.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > I think Linux will always be behind commercial/proprietary platforms. One could arguably say that the iphone is a multi-billion dollar platform One could have expected the same wrt. proprietary *NIX workstation and server hardware in the 1980s and 1990s, and where are those today? Linux is dominating that market. Embedded brings more trouble because the hardware, far from being a "multi billion dollar" endeavor, is all-too-often entirely undocumented and sloppily hacked together, where a barely workable state is considered "good enough" for shipping. But even there, Linux is easily gaining ground over proprietary OS's. The underlying dynamic is clear enough.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

amelius 5y ago

> in the meantime got their mini solder iron which works surprisingly well (and I have two Wellers). Looks interesting, what temperature can it reach?

squarefoot 5y ago
Didn't test its maximum temp, however connected to a laptop power supply (from memory: about 20V, 4A) it reaches enough temperatures to do clean shiny solder joints on fairly big contacts compared to its size. I think it's mainly conceived for portability and soldering small parts, however it seems powerful enough to be used as a general purpose solder iron as well. edit for more information: all tests done with leaded solder.

noduerme 5y ago

So currently, it's a couple days after police and intelligence agencies worldwide raided the owners of ANOM-using phones that were allegedly private and built to exclude common hardware/software that's used for tracking. I'm not saying the governments of the world were wrong to bring those people down. But do you really expect anyone to buy a phone - with any combination of hardware and software - and retain any expectation of privacy whatsoever? Am I paranoid to think that this sounds like a continuation of the ANOM project... selling a supposedly secure, home brew and private device to the gullible who desperately want a secure channel? Here's a secure channel: Dump your phone. There's no personal security with a device like that if you live in a state that might use your affiliations against you.

Darvokis 5y ago
> Am I paranoid to think that this sounds like a continuation of the ANOM project... selling a supposedly secure, home brew and private device to the gullible who desperately want a secure channel? The difference being that the point of the PinePhone is that the whole stack, from the hardware up to everything software, is open source or runs on open source firmware. The Anom was a completely closed-source solution which required a large amount of trust in a single entity. The Pinephone (and by extension every other Linux phone, whether it exists yet or not) leverages the strengths of the Linux community and is in no way comparable.

jascii 5y ago

In all fairness, My personal PinePhone running SXMO is a lot snappier and performant then my Android work phone with all its bloatware...