3 ms·

Anyone using this as a daily driver? What’s the experience like? (I’m hoping to move to a Linux phone when my old iPhone finally bites the dust.)

mech422 5y ago
Have you looked at Enlightenment(1)? I believe it used to power Tizen back in the day... 1: https://www.enlightenment.org/ https://www.enlightenment.org/
jcun4128 5y ago
I have a Pinephone, briefly tried KDE as I bought the KDE edition. It is a pretty design but what made me change from it is not detecting external display. Also I was not a fan of the "package manager" it was using. Arguable that's the OS (might have been Manjaro). I ended up going with Mobian and Phosh. I even installed ARM VS code on it but it was so slow like 5 second lag per click. Anyway problem right now is the modem doesn't detect my TMobile micro sim card. I don't know why, it worked before. The battery also dies too fast even in airplane mode sitting on my desk. And then of course the lack of apps and the Phosh UI is not that great imo, I don't know why they went with the design of the vertical split when finding apps. Maybe they can't match the gestures and what not that Android/iOS has. Still it's neat, motivation to learn C++/GTK when I have the time. As far as your actual question there are a couple of people on Reddit that are using it as a daily driver. [1] this is a little old though. As for why VS Code my fantasy is the Samsung Dex idea however I'm not going to drop $2K on a flagship cellphone. The Pinephone is not that strong but I was looking to get a Qemu VM running on it that would neat. https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/kxgtlu/pinephone_as_a_daily_driver_a_nonpredetermined/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/kxgtlu/pine...
- TheFreim 5y ago
  I don't have cell service and just basically use my phone as a glorified text editor (reminders, emails, low end browsing), would appear the pine phone would be perfect for me. I miss the ipod touch days, they did everything I needed.
  - jcun4128 5y ago
    The WiFi works fine I'm just miffed the modem doesn't. I don't know how to get it to work again. I was going to force myself to use it every other day so I would be more inclined to develop for it. I don't know up to you the hardware is bad compared to a modern phone for the same price. Granted for what it is and comparing to say Librem, it is cheap. In the end I want to believe in it, would suck to only have two OS options.
- kop316 5y ago
  > Anyway problem right now is the modem doesn't detect my TMobile micro sim card. Hm...that is odd, assuming you are still on Mobian/Phosh. Assuming you tried standard debugging, this page gives you some avenues for help: https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php The matrix channel for Mobian is very active, and there are plenty of folks there who can help debug that.
  - jcun4128 5y ago
    Thanks for the link I will look into that. I tried to join the purism Gitlab group or something ha don't know what happened there.
    - kop316 5y ago
      > I tried to join the purism Gitlab group or something ha don't know what happened there. Purism to my knowledge uses that for development, not tech support. They also tend to not give accounts to their gitlab unless they know who you are (i.e. a Pinephone dev, active on their Matrix Channel, etc.) I think your best bet, depending on the underlying issue, is to hop on the Matrix channel for help.
      - jcun4128 5y ago
        > not give accounts to their gitlab unless they know who you are Yeah I was trying to get in there to develop but I will admit I would be pretty useless. Thanks I will get this phone working again, good to know there is a community, I have posted on the Pine64 forums a few times, got some info there.
        kop316 5y ago
        > Yeah I was trying to get in there to develop I do a majority of my Pinephone related development on Gitlab. It hasn't stopped adoption for my work at all. Others use Github/Sourcehut. The nice thing is that developing for the Mobian is nearly identical as it is for Debian (I use the Modem quite extensively for my apps, so I have to use the Pinephone for testing). > but I will admit I would be pretty useless. Everyone starts somewhere! The Pinephone is really my first dabble into open source development, and now one of my apps are on quite a few distros. The community is incredibly welcoming and helpful. > Thanks I will get this phone working again, Good luck! If the Mobian channel is a dead end, you can also find me on Matrix too.
- gary17the 5y ago
  > Still it's neat, motivation to learn C++/GTK when I have the time. You might want to have a look at libhandy[1] for GTK/GNOME, to "build GNOME applications scaling from desktop workstations to mobile phones". [1] https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/libhandy/ https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/libhandy/
  - jcun4128 5y ago
    Thanks I'll put it on my list of resources. I was aiming for a low-resource UI and things like Sway came into mind. But yeah I'm a JavaScript kid at this time so this kind of development is not easy for me at this time.
swiley 5y ago
I'm not using plasma but I've found I'm happiest with the WM I use on my other computers and scaling turned off. My Pinephone is pretty much a laptop that gets phone calls and stuff generally "just works."
kop316 5y ago
I use it off and on, hoping to move to a daily driver soon. The main reason I do not use it full time yet is because MMS support is not fully integrated yet. (My experience is on Mobian/Phosh with a Pinephone, YMMV) As a basic phone (Calls/SMS/etc), it works pretty well. Voicemail works, but depending on your carrier, you may not get a notification for it. There is a Visual Voicemail client in the works, but that still has a bit to go before it could be considered for daily usage. The camera HW isn't very good, so if you want to take really nice pictures, you would need to have something else to take them. Email/Telegram works well. Signal requires a third party client (which I haven't really tried). There are a few games you can install, but most are basic (2048, Chess, etc.). Running Android specific apps is possible, but not very usable from my experience. Web browsing can be slow (Firefox can take a while to load). Convergence is really neat...but I don't really use it since I have a laptop. Mobian is nice in that any Debian package will happily install/run (but YMMV on how well it works on mobile).
chrismorgan 5y ago
I recently acquired a PinePhone, and Manjaro + KDE Plasma was installed out of the box. It was awful, utterly unusable. I brought it to its knees without even trying to, not even from poking and prodding with internals, just from trying to use the thing; I got it to crash outright once, and twice got its graphics stack basically bricked until manual restart, in two different ways, all in less than half an hour. I have found postmarketOS + Phosh, Arch Linux ARM (dreemurrs) + Phosh, and Ubuntu Touch (all via https://xnux.eu/p-boot-demo/ https://xnux.eu/p-boot-demo/) to each be considerably more not-simply-broken; they’re merely—ah—“minimal”, that’s what I’ll call it. I haven’t yet tried KDE Plasma under a different distribution, but will eventually, because fairness demands it. I know they said this stuff wasn’t ready to be a daily driver for any but serious enthusiasts, but I didn’t expect it to be quite as bad as I found it. I’m still going to persist. I am discouraged, but not dissuaded.
- 29083011397778 5y ago
  I actually use my Pinephone as a weekend phone. Matrix works, so I have messaging. Calls work, so I have a phone. Maps (not turn-by-turn) work, Firefox works, the camera is slow, but works. Respectfully, your experience sounds like what I had between when I got my Pinephone and last month (or so). It has since improved for me quite dramatically.
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    Yeah, I hadn’t run any updates when I tried it out, so it was running whatever it was shipped with in mid-May.
monroeclinton 5y ago
I tried it on the PinePhone, it's almost completely unusable. 1. The keyboard just won't open ~50% of the time. I had to do all sorts of hacky things to get it to open 2. The web browser Angelfish is no where near fully featured. The one good thing is that it has a built in adblocker. 3. For about a month whenever I restarted the phone it would be completely black. I had to bring it into a dark room and plug it in for me to be able to barely see anything. Then I could raise the brightness. An update fixed this 4. A lot of the apps just don't open 5. All sorts of random bugs/missing features, in the music player, the file explorer, etc. This isn't a bad thing. It is a work in progress and I hope that it will continue to improve. Ubuntu Touch has worked the best for me.

mech422 5y ago

Have you looked at Enlightenment(1)? I believe it used to power Tizen back in the day... 1: https://www.enlightenment.org/ https://www.enlightenment.org/

jcun4128 5y ago

I have a Pinephone, briefly tried KDE as I bought the KDE edition. It is a pretty design but what made me change from it is not detecting external display. Also I was not a fan of the "package manager" it was using. Arguable that's the OS (might have been Manjaro). I ended up going with Mobian and Phosh. I even installed ARM VS code on it but it was so slow like 5 second lag per click. Anyway problem right now is the modem doesn't detect my TMobile micro sim card. I don't know why, it worked before. The battery also dies too fast even in airplane mode sitting on my desk. And then of course the lack of apps and the Phosh UI is not that great imo, I don't know why they went with the design of the vertical split when finding apps. Maybe they can't match the gestures and what not that Android/iOS has. Still it's neat, motivation to learn C++/GTK when I have the time. As far as your actual question there are a couple of people on Reddit that are using it as a daily driver. [1] this is a little old though. As for why VS Code my fantasy is the Samsung Dex idea however I'm not going to drop $2K on a flagship cellphone. The Pinephone is not that strong but I was looking to get a Qemu VM running on it that would neat. https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/kxgtlu/pinephone_as_a_daily_driver_a_nonpredetermined/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/kxgtlu/pine...

TheFreim 5y ago
I don't have cell service and just basically use my phone as a glorified text editor (reminders, emails, low end browsing), would appear the pine phone would be perfect for me. I miss the ipod touch days, they did everything I needed.
- jcun4128 5y ago
  The WiFi works fine I'm just miffed the modem doesn't. I don't know how to get it to work again. I was going to force myself to use it every other day so I would be more inclined to develop for it. I don't know up to you the hardware is bad compared to a modern phone for the same price. Granted for what it is and comparing to say Librem, it is cheap. In the end I want to believe in it, would suck to only have two OS options.
kop316 5y ago
> Anyway problem right now is the modem doesn't detect my TMobile micro sim card. Hm...that is odd, assuming you are still on Mobian/Phosh. Assuming you tried standard debugging, this page gives you some avenues for help: https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php The matrix channel for Mobian is very active, and there are plenty of folks there who can help debug that.
- jcun4128 5y ago
  Thanks for the link I will look into that. I tried to join the purism Gitlab group or something ha don't know what happened there.
  - kop316 5y ago
    > I tried to join the purism Gitlab group or something ha don't know what happened there. Purism to my knowledge uses that for development, not tech support. They also tend to not give accounts to their gitlab unless they know who you are (i.e. a Pinephone dev, active on their Matrix Channel, etc.) I think your best bet, depending on the underlying issue, is to hop on the Matrix channel for help.
    - jcun4128 5y ago
      > not give accounts to their gitlab unless they know who you are Yeah I was trying to get in there to develop but I will admit I would be pretty useless. Thanks I will get this phone working again, good to know there is a community, I have posted on the Pine64 forums a few times, got some info there.
      - kop316 5y ago
        > Yeah I was trying to get in there to develop I do a majority of my Pinephone related development on Gitlab. It hasn't stopped adoption for my work at all. Others use Github/Sourcehut. The nice thing is that developing for the Mobian is nearly identical as it is for Debian (I use the Modem quite extensively for my apps, so I have to use the Pinephone for testing). > but I will admit I would be pretty useless. Everyone starts somewhere! The Pinephone is really my first dabble into open source development, and now one of my apps are on quite a few distros. The community is incredibly welcoming and helpful. > Thanks I will get this phone working again, Good luck! If the Mobian channel is a dead end, you can also find me on Matrix too.
gary17the 5y ago
> Still it's neat, motivation to learn C++/GTK when I have the time. You might want to have a look at libhandy[1] for GTK/GNOME, to "build GNOME applications scaling from desktop workstations to mobile phones". [1] https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/libhandy/ https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/libhandy/
- jcun4128 5y ago
  Thanks I'll put it on my list of resources. I was aiming for a low-resource UI and things like Sway came into mind. But yeah I'm a JavaScript kid at this time so this kind of development is not easy for me at this time.

swiley 5y ago

I'm not using plasma but I've found I'm happiest with the WM I use on my other computers and scaling turned off. My Pinephone is pretty much a laptop that gets phone calls and stuff generally "just works."

kop316 5y ago

I use it off and on, hoping to move to a daily driver soon. The main reason I do not use it full time yet is because MMS support is not fully integrated yet. (My experience is on Mobian/Phosh with a Pinephone, YMMV) As a basic phone (Calls/SMS/etc), it works pretty well. Voicemail works, but depending on your carrier, you may not get a notification for it. There is a Visual Voicemail client in the works, but that still has a bit to go before it could be considered for daily usage. The camera HW isn't very good, so if you want to take really nice pictures, you would need to have something else to take them. Email/Telegram works well. Signal requires a third party client (which I haven't really tried). There are a few games you can install, but most are basic (2048, Chess, etc.). Running Android specific apps is possible, but not very usable from my experience. Web browsing can be slow (Firefox can take a while to load). Convergence is really neat...but I don't really use it since I have a laptop. Mobian is nice in that any Debian package will happily install/run (but YMMV on how well it works on mobile).

chrismorgan 5y ago

I recently acquired a PinePhone, and Manjaro + KDE Plasma was installed out of the box. It was awful, utterly unusable. I brought it to its knees without even trying to, not even from poking and prodding with internals, just from trying to use the thing; I got it to crash outright once, and twice got its graphics stack basically bricked until manual restart, in two different ways, all in less than half an hour. I have found postmarketOS + Phosh, Arch Linux ARM (dreemurrs) + Phosh, and Ubuntu Touch (all via https://xnux.eu/p-boot-demo/ https://xnux.eu/p-boot-demo/) to each be considerably more not-simply-broken; they’re merely—ah—“minimal”, that’s what I’ll call it. I haven’t yet tried KDE Plasma under a different distribution, but will eventually, because fairness demands it. I know they said this stuff wasn’t ready to be a daily driver for any but serious enthusiasts, but I didn’t expect it to be quite as bad as I found it. I’m still going to persist. I am discouraged, but not dissuaded.

29083011397778 5y ago
I actually use my Pinephone as a weekend phone. Matrix works, so I have messaging. Calls work, so I have a phone. Maps (not turn-by-turn) work, Firefox works, the camera is slow, but works. Respectfully, your experience sounds like what I had between when I got my Pinephone and last month (or so). It has since improved for me quite dramatically.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  Yeah, I hadn’t run any updates when I tried it out, so it was running whatever it was shipped with in mid-May.

monroeclinton 5y ago

I tried it on the PinePhone, it's almost completely unusable. 1. The keyboard just won't open ~50% of the time. I had to do all sorts of hacky things to get it to open 2. The web browser Angelfish is no where near fully featured. The one good thing is that it has a built in adblocker. 3. For about a month whenever I restarted the phone it would be completely black. I had to bring it into a dark room and plug it in for me to be able to barely see anything. Then I could raise the brightness. An update fixed this 4. A lot of the apps just don't open 5. All sorts of random bugs/missing features, in the music player, the file explorer, etc. This isn't a bad thing. It is a work in progress and I hope that it will continue to improve. Ubuntu Touch has worked the best for me.