5 ms·

Unfortunately the hardware is incredibly subpar. I see no real future for Linux mobile unless the EU makes some law that forces Apple/Samsung to make flashing

by urthor 4y ago

Unfortunately the hardware is incredibly subpar. I see no real future for Linux mobile unless the EU makes some law that forces Apple/Samsung to make flashing easier.

megous 4y ago
HW is kinda fine, if you don't try to overstress it. Here it's running some optimized software via a convergence dock on an external monitor (1920x1080): https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec5.mp4 https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec5.mp4 https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec6.mp4 https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec6.mp4 Here it's driving an even higher resolution screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHOgVmxH_dA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHOgVmxH_dA And here it's driving Firefox on a 1440p screen (purely rendered via CPU with GPU disabled): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdKNugT-mTQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdKNugT-mTQ What's subpar is software optimization of some apps, or some combinations of compositors and apps.
- rebeccaskinner 4y ago
  The Firefox video there seems pretty misleading from my personal experience. I got a pinephone a couple of years ago with the intention of doing a little bit of development for it, and using it mostly as a handheld web browser and signal client. Even without plugging into an external monitor I found Firefox unusable for most my needs. With essentially any extensions it would grind to a halt. I don’t run a lot of extensions, but Firefox without ublock origin is essentially worthless to me, and with ublock origin enabled it would take Firefox tens of seconds to start, and several seconds to load a new tab. Scrolling on sites with a lot of images- especially infini-scrolling sites like Twitter was nearly impossible. I really want to like the pine phone, but whether the fault is hardware or software the result is that it’s just not there for performance in my experience. I’m hopeful that between the pine phone pro and a bit more time to optimize software it could be one day, but it seems a while off. Incidentally I have basically the same complaint about the pinebook pro. It’s not unusable, but a very small amount of extra power would take it from being a secondary laptop I only pick up for fun to a real viable daily driver when paired with a powerful desktop.
  - megous 4y ago
    Firefox performance is better with GPU disabled (on Xorg with noaccel), to reduce RAM bandwidth requirements. Which leaves out most of the fancy wayland compositors. Yes, opening a badly optimized website, like youtube or twitter is slow. Thankfully there are alternatives like twitter -> nitter, etc.
- linmob 4y ago
  Hi Megi! Thank you for your great work to make the PinePhone so much better than it was when I got it! (I was going to add a people "I want to thank for their hard work"-section to the post, but lacked the time to do it thoroughly and make sure I would not forget a major contributor, and therefore dropped that.)
  - megous 4y ago
    ;-)
- urthor 4y ago
  Software optimization is never going to be solved. Ultimately, software developers will ALWAYS stress the hardware to the limit. With labor saving software tools or else with performance hogging GUIs. Simply put, devices need to keep up with the latest and greatest.
BjoernKW 4y ago
I find that kind of argument for EU regulation quite depressing. So, just because other vendors aren't capable of producing decent hardware to run Linux on, the EU should force competitors to open up their hardware to those vendors? Unfortunately, this seems to be a common line of thinking, not least within the EU corridors of power themselves: Instead of nurturing competition and their own tech industry or create an environment where such an industry can thrive, they somehow try to regulate it into being. This way, Linux on smartphones would still remain a very niche proposition for hobbyists and enthusiasts. Regular consumers probably wouldn't flash their expensive Apple or Samsung phones just to run Linux on them. Without a vendor selling a complete product, alternative smartphone operating systems will largely remain a pipe dream.
- piaste 4y ago
  > Unfortunately, this seems to be a common line of thinking, not least within the EU corridors of power themselves: Instead of nurturing competition and their own tech industry or create an environment where such an industry can thrive, they somehow try to regulate it into being. Then why haven't "vendors [..] capable of producing decent hardware to run Linux on" sprung up in the unfettered entrepreneurial utopias of Shenzhen or SV? This has nothing to do with Europe's (very real) difficulties in establishing a local tech industry. The OP wished for the EU to enforce the opening of phone hardware because he does not see any path for this to happen organically anywhere, and the EU happens to be the only entity that might be both capable and willing to knock down technological moats.
  - jokethrowaway 4y ago
    Because it's a hell of a task, regardless if the outcome will be open or closed. The closest thing I can think of is Apple taking BSD and making Darwin. Which company would be happy to risk so much, in such a busy market as mobile OS?
    - southerntofu 4y ago
      > Because it's a hell of a task, regardless if the outcome will be open or closed. Disclaimer: i'm no hardware engineer I believe this is utterly false. There is a strong distinction between selling open hardware (the real stuff, not just open board design) and selling closed hardware. If all you care about is board schematics, it's not hard to buy various chips and assemble them into functioning hardware. It's then often (though not always) possible to use the various binary firmware and drivers provided by the vendors for a certain platform (say Android device tree, or Windows driver) and make the hardware usable under a specific system. Now, if you're trying to do real open hardware and have 100% schematics available, good luck: it's technically possible to acquire an open hardware micro-controller/CPU (though you have to look for it), but then you need open hardware GPU and network card and i don't think that even exists (at least not fulfilling our 2022 feature expectations). These problems are detailed in various sources. My two favorites are an article about Lenovo hardware support in HaikuOS and a recent talk about operating systems design for interfacing with hardware: https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmu_man/2021-10-04_ok_lenovo_we_need_to_talk/ https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmu_man/2021-10-04_ok_lenovo_w... https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-keynote https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-ke...
pjmlp 4y ago
Even on desktops and servers, Linux has a lot to thank the likes of IBM and co to graduate from an hobby project. There they had a business case, reduce UNIX development costs, on mobile there is no benefit as such over what Android already offers.

by urthor 4y ago

Unfortunately the hardware is incredibly subpar. I see no real future for Linux mobile unless the EU makes some law that forces Apple/Samsung to make flashing easier.

megous 4y ago

HW is kinda fine, if you don't try to overstress it. Here it's running some optimized software via a convergence dock on an external monitor (1920x1080): https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec5.mp4 https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec5.mp4 https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec6.mp4 https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec6.mp4 Here it's driving an even higher resolution screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHOgVmxH_dA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHOgVmxH_dA And here it's driving Firefox on a 1440p screen (purely rendered via CPU with GPU disabled): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdKNugT-mTQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdKNugT-mTQ What's subpar is software optimization of some apps, or some combinations of compositors and apps.

rebeccaskinner 4y ago
The Firefox video there seems pretty misleading from my personal experience. I got a pinephone a couple of years ago with the intention of doing a little bit of development for it, and using it mostly as a handheld web browser and signal client. Even without plugging into an external monitor I found Firefox unusable for most my needs. With essentially any extensions it would grind to a halt. I don’t run a lot of extensions, but Firefox without ublock origin is essentially worthless to me, and with ublock origin enabled it would take Firefox tens of seconds to start, and several seconds to load a new tab. Scrolling on sites with a lot of images- especially infini-scrolling sites like Twitter was nearly impossible. I really want to like the pine phone, but whether the fault is hardware or software the result is that it’s just not there for performance in my experience. I’m hopeful that between the pine phone pro and a bit more time to optimize software it could be one day, but it seems a while off. Incidentally I have basically the same complaint about the pinebook pro. It’s not unusable, but a very small amount of extra power would take it from being a secondary laptop I only pick up for fun to a real viable daily driver when paired with a powerful desktop.
- megous 4y ago
  Firefox performance is better with GPU disabled (on Xorg with noaccel), to reduce RAM bandwidth requirements. Which leaves out most of the fancy wayland compositors. Yes, opening a badly optimized website, like youtube or twitter is slow. Thankfully there are alternatives like twitter -> nitter, etc.
linmob 4y ago
Hi Megi! Thank you for your great work to make the PinePhone so much better than it was when I got it! (I was going to add a people "I want to thank for their hard work"-section to the post, but lacked the time to do it thoroughly and make sure I would not forget a major contributor, and therefore dropped that.)
- megous 4y ago
  ;-)
urthor 4y ago
Software optimization is never going to be solved. Ultimately, software developers will ALWAYS stress the hardware to the limit. With labor saving software tools or else with performance hogging GUIs. Simply put, devices need to keep up with the latest and greatest.

BjoernKW 4y ago

I find that kind of argument for EU regulation quite depressing. So, just because other vendors aren't capable of producing decent hardware to run Linux on, the EU should force competitors to open up their hardware to those vendors? Unfortunately, this seems to be a common line of thinking, not least within the EU corridors of power themselves: Instead of nurturing competition and their own tech industry or create an environment where such an industry can thrive, they somehow try to regulate it into being. This way, Linux on smartphones would still remain a very niche proposition for hobbyists and enthusiasts. Regular consumers probably wouldn't flash their expensive Apple or Samsung phones just to run Linux on them. Without a vendor selling a complete product, alternative smartphone operating systems will largely remain a pipe dream.

piaste 4y ago
> Unfortunately, this seems to be a common line of thinking, not least within the EU corridors of power themselves: Instead of nurturing competition and their own tech industry or create an environment where such an industry can thrive, they somehow try to regulate it into being. Then why haven't "vendors [..] capable of producing decent hardware to run Linux on" sprung up in the unfettered entrepreneurial utopias of Shenzhen or SV? This has nothing to do with Europe's (very real) difficulties in establishing a local tech industry. The OP wished for the EU to enforce the opening of phone hardware because he does not see any path for this to happen organically anywhere, and the EU happens to be the only entity that might be both capable and willing to knock down technological moats.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  Because it's a hell of a task, regardless if the outcome will be open or closed. The closest thing I can think of is Apple taking BSD and making Darwin. Which company would be happy to risk so much, in such a busy market as mobile OS?
  - southerntofu 4y ago
    > Because it's a hell of a task, regardless if the outcome will be open or closed. Disclaimer: i'm no hardware engineer I believe this is utterly false. There is a strong distinction between selling open hardware (the real stuff, not just open board design) and selling closed hardware. If all you care about is board schematics, it's not hard to buy various chips and assemble them into functioning hardware. It's then often (though not always) possible to use the various binary firmware and drivers provided by the vendors for a certain platform (say Android device tree, or Windows driver) and make the hardware usable under a specific system. Now, if you're trying to do real open hardware and have 100% schematics available, good luck: it's technically possible to acquire an open hardware micro-controller/CPU (though you have to look for it), but then you need open hardware GPU and network card and i don't think that even exists (at least not fulfilling our 2022 feature expectations). These problems are detailed in various sources. My two favorites are an article about Lenovo hardware support in HaikuOS and a recent talk about operating systems design for interfacing with hardware: https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmu_man/2021-10-04_ok_lenovo_we_need_to_talk/ https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmu_man/2021-10-04_ok_lenovo_w... https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-keynote https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-ke...

pjmlp 4y ago

Even on desktops and servers, Linux has a lot to thank the likes of IBM and co to graduate from an hobby project. There they had a business case, reduce UNIX development costs, on mobile there is no benefit as such over what Android already offers.