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I tried out a PinePhone recently. While I applaud the progress being made by the devs, PinePhone is still a ways out from being a daily driver. For those looki

I tried out a PinePhone recently. While I applaud the progress being made by the devs, PinePhone is still a ways out from being a daily driver. For those looking for a Linux phone, is Purism the only (close to) usable option?

bogwog 5y ago
What do you mean by a "Linux phone"? If you just mean a phone that can run a more traditional Linux distribution, you could look into Postmarket OS. There's a list of supported devices here: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
- megous 5y ago
  One definition may be a phone that you can run current mainline Linux on (5.16-rc2) without much trouble or loss in functionality. Maybe with some patches on top to enable more functionality, but easily rebaseable, unlike some abandoned 3-6 years old kernel with milions of lines of changes that you have no way of rebasing on top of the latest Linux release, to be able to enjoy all the latest Linux kernel advancements. More strict definition would be that you can just boot Arch Linux ARM on it or other ARM distro out of the box, and all HW will be accessible and usable. Otherwise Linux phone is any old Android, because all of them run some hacked up version of Linux. :)
Arnavion 5y ago
The PinePhone is fine as a daily driver. If it's not good enough for you, that's fine, but don't generalize it as if it's something obvious and applies to everyone. Edit: People responding to me as if I said it's suitable as a daily driver for "most people" or "casual users" need to learn how to read. Not only did I not use either of those phrases, the context of the conversation was "those looking for a Linux phone", which neither of those demographics are.
- abstract_put 5y ago
  While I love the PinePhone, I think "still a ways from being a daily driver" is a more accurate representation than "fine as a daily driver" for most people's experiences. Some people are definitely able to daily drive the PinePhone, but e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/qm1aut/pinephone_as_a_daily_driver_update/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/qm1aut/pine... > Firefox: 8 seconds to open; ... and loads my start page in 21 seconds. It's constantly improving, and the PinePhone Pro seems similarly promising, but I'd be downright shocked if there triple digits of people daily driving it and enjoying the experience (outside the satisfaction of living on the bleeding edge).
- kaba0 5y ago
  I mean, please be honest and say that the exception is those who find it usable as a daily driver. Compared to the “average” phone of a typical person (which depends on country), the pinephone is slower and less capable than that with worse battery life. I do own one, but this is the unfortunate reality. I could probably use one as a daily driver, but at that point I could probably just as well be without a phone, as taking photos is 2000s category and desktop firefox is not the most usable on a touch interface, let alone on such a weak CPU.
  - wink 5y ago
    Someone just mentioned browserbench.org to me and I tested my work iphone 12 mini (score 212) versus my personal moto x4 with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 (11.x score). So this benchmark tells me the single-core JS performance of the iphone is 20x that of my just 2 year old phone. And you know what? I didn't notice it was supposed to be "slow". I don't have a comparison to the Pinephone and I'm too lazy to look now but if I, a casual (normal?) phone user don't notice this weak cpu, what else might I not notice?
- reginold 5y ago
  Agree with the other respondents here. I love the PinePhone project and want them to succeed long term. That said, recommending it to causal users as a daily driver before it's ready causes more harm than good.
m4rtink 5y ago
If you want a Linux distro running on a mobile phone with good build quality and decent specs there is Sailfish OS: https://shop.jolla.com/ https://shop.jolla.com/ It unfortunately not fully open source, but other than that its a normal Linux distro (Qt, DBus, systemd, rpm, Python, etc.). I have been running it on my primary device for years so I would say it is useable. ;-)
kaba0 5y ago
The actually usable category would probably start at a bootloader unlocked android, and arguably the best “distro” on them is graphene os, which pays a ton of attention to security and privacy (while “gnu/linux” derivatives mostly couldn’t care less about security unfortunately, but privacy without that is meaningless)
ddtaylor 5y ago
I've tried all the major Linux phone distributions and they are almost all completely unusable for day-to-day things for me. Ubuntu Touch, PinePhone, Plasma Mobile - they all have nice parts and bad parts but the overall thing is that none of them offer most of the things people need from their phone like third party messaging applications (Discord, WhatsApp, etc.) without janky workarounds and hacks.
- opan 5y ago
  You say third party, but I think you mean proprietary. Essentially everything running on these devices is third party. Pine themselves aren't making PineChat and similar programs. Lack of support for proprietary apps is something to blame those proprietary app developers for, generally. They haven't given the people freedoms to port them. Matrix and XMPP are third party, free, and already usable on a PinePhone.

bogwog 5y ago

What do you mean by a "Linux phone"? If you just mean a phone that can run a more traditional Linux distribution, you could look into Postmarket OS. There's a list of supported devices here: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

megous 5y ago
One definition may be a phone that you can run current mainline Linux on (5.16-rc2) without much trouble or loss in functionality. Maybe with some patches on top to enable more functionality, but easily rebaseable, unlike some abandoned 3-6 years old kernel with milions of lines of changes that you have no way of rebasing on top of the latest Linux release, to be able to enjoy all the latest Linux kernel advancements. More strict definition would be that you can just boot Arch Linux ARM on it or other ARM distro out of the box, and all HW will be accessible and usable. Otherwise Linux phone is any old Android, because all of them run some hacked up version of Linux. :)

Arnavion 5y ago

The PinePhone is fine as a daily driver. If it's not good enough for you, that's fine, but don't generalize it as if it's something obvious and applies to everyone. Edit: People responding to me as if I said it's suitable as a daily driver for "most people" or "casual users" need to learn how to read. Not only did I not use either of those phrases, the context of the conversation was "those looking for a Linux phone", which neither of those demographics are.

abstract_put 5y ago
While I love the PinePhone, I think "still a ways from being a daily driver" is a more accurate representation than "fine as a daily driver" for most people's experiences. Some people are definitely able to daily drive the PinePhone, but e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/qm1aut/pinephone_as_a_daily_driver_update/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/qm1aut/pine... > Firefox: 8 seconds to open; ... and loads my start page in 21 seconds. It's constantly improving, and the PinePhone Pro seems similarly promising, but I'd be downright shocked if there triple digits of people daily driving it and enjoying the experience (outside the satisfaction of living on the bleeding edge).
kaba0 5y ago
I mean, please be honest and say that the exception is those who find it usable as a daily driver. Compared to the “average” phone of a typical person (which depends on country), the pinephone is slower and less capable than that with worse battery life. I do own one, but this is the unfortunate reality. I could probably use one as a daily driver, but at that point I could probably just as well be without a phone, as taking photos is 2000s category and desktop firefox is not the most usable on a touch interface, let alone on such a weak CPU.
- wink 5y ago
  Someone just mentioned browserbench.org to me and I tested my work iphone 12 mini (score 212) versus my personal moto x4 with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 (11.x score). So this benchmark tells me the single-core JS performance of the iphone is 20x that of my just 2 year old phone. And you know what? I didn't notice it was supposed to be "slow". I don't have a comparison to the Pinephone and I'm too lazy to look now but if I, a casual (normal?) phone user don't notice this weak cpu, what else might I not notice?
reginold 5y ago
Agree with the other respondents here. I love the PinePhone project and want them to succeed long term. That said, recommending it to causal users as a daily driver before it's ready causes more harm than good.

m4rtink 5y ago

If you want a Linux distro running on a mobile phone with good build quality and decent specs there is Sailfish OS: https://shop.jolla.com/ https://shop.jolla.com/ It unfortunately not fully open source, but other than that its a normal Linux distro (Qt, DBus, systemd, rpm, Python, etc.). I have been running it on my primary device for years so I would say it is useable. ;-)

kaba0 5y ago

The actually usable category would probably start at a bootloader unlocked android, and arguably the best “distro” on them is graphene os, which pays a ton of attention to security and privacy (while “gnu/linux” derivatives mostly couldn’t care less about security unfortunately, but privacy without that is meaningless)

ddtaylor 5y ago

I've tried all the major Linux phone distributions and they are almost all completely unusable for day-to-day things for me. Ubuntu Touch, PinePhone, Plasma Mobile - they all have nice parts and bad parts but the overall thing is that none of them offer most of the things people need from their phone like third party messaging applications (Discord, WhatsApp, etc.) without janky workarounds and hacks.

opan 5y ago
You say third party, but I think you mean proprietary. Essentially everything running on these devices is third party. Pine themselves aren't making PineChat and similar programs. Lack of support for proprietary apps is something to blame those proprietary app developers for, generally. They haven't given the people freedoms to port them. Matrix and XMPP are third party, free, and already usable on a PinePhone.