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Honestly there are so many "pinephone is great" reviews out there, and they just cannot be truthful. They are always along the lines of "yeah it is great but ac

Honestly there are so many "pinephone is great" reviews out there, and they just cannot be truthful. They are always along the lines of "yeah it is great but actually it was not my daily driver because nothing works". The pinephone would be great in comparison to a Nokia 3310. Everything that came after, even the i models with Bluetooth, would be better daily drivers than anything running on the pinephone. The bluetooth disconnects alone make me throw this thing into the trashbox, because my 5$ usb mp3 flash stick can handle that better these days. This includes SXMO, phosh, and all the rust weekend projects that nobody cares about. We don't need type safety, we don't need GTK or QT, we don't need X on mobile. These are all outdated ways of thinking about what a mobile computer can do, it's ridiculous that you have to even mention it. There was a reason Android 2.3 moved away from anything related to X at the time. And the reason was: OpenGLES. Nothing in the tech stack that GNOME and KDE provides is made for a quick and efficient shader pipeline, let alone a compositor that can be programmed/influenced from userspace. Just use ANGLE and get over your damned opinions about how you can do it better. If the pinephone had boot2chromium or sth like boot2electron, it probably would be a million times less sluggish. Nobody needs an SSH toy terminal that they cannot exit if it cannot render a special character and crashes, because the process management has a single UI thread. If I cannot make a phone call and cannot use WhatsApp on a phone in 2024, it's utterly useless and can only be described as an expensive brick. I get that it's not the hardware, but the software folks seem to be busy reinventing their own opinions about how to do things without even looking for the reasons why thousands of devs before them with decades more experience might have a point. Linux on the phone will fail as long as this cultural problem of "not invented here so I can do it better" isn't fixed.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
> If I cannot make a phone call, and cannot use WhatsApp on a phone in 2024, it's utterly useless and can only be described as an expensive brick. Different people care about different things. I've never used WhatsApp in my life. > Nobody needs an SSH toy terminal that they cannot exit if it cannot render a special character and crashes, because the process management has a single UI thread. Er, is that a thing that can happen? I can't see any reason the software would be any less robust just because it's on a phone. In general, it sounds like you're arguing the view that if everyone just reinvented the wheel your way it'd work, but most of those decisions were made for a reason; generally, either for software compatibility, or because just reimplementing Android seems like a questionable value proposition. (And also the usual thing that it's almost all volunteers, so the choice isn't diversity or uniformity, it's diversity or nothing.)
saidinesh5 3y ago
I don't think any famous Linux mobile these days use X? Most of them are just wayland compositors. iirc GTKv4 is fully hardware accelerated. Everything/Most of the apps on KDE mobile side uses QtQuick/QML/Kirigami etc.. which is 100% GPU accelerated. Even my Ubuntu touch experience was lot more fluid than anything Android had to offer at the time on the same handset. > If the pinephone had boot2chromium or sth like boot2electron, it probably would be a million times less sluggish. The sluggishness of pinephone, i think, is probably due to slower sdcards (most of them tend to dual boot using an sdcard) and dated hardware for the kind of animated UI people expect these days. There is still boot2gecko/firefox os/whatever they call it these days.
mixmastamyk 3y ago
Sounds like you haven’t used it in a long time, so many details wrong in your post.
yaky 3y ago
> Honestly there are so many "pinephone is great" reviews out there The only one I recall is "I love my PinePhone" (published last year I think). Most of reviews I've seen is variations on "interesting, but not there yet", usually with high expectations, if not outright complaints. > The bluetooth disconnects alone make me throw this thing into the trashbox Haven't used bluetooth on PinePhone much, but for comparison, my previous iPhone 12 Pro (a "flagship" at the time) had tons of bluetooth issues and disconnects and worked terribly with in-car speaker. YMMV. > If I cannot make a phone call and cannot use WhatsApp on a phone in 2024, it's utterly useless and can only be described as an expensive brick. While I agree about phone calls, WhatsApps's availability has nothing to do with PinePhone or Linux. I heard it runs through Waydroid fairly well. I bridge WhatsApp to my Matrix server and chat through Fractal. > Linux on the phone will fail as long as this cultural problem of "not invented here so I can do it better" isn't fixed. From what you wrote above it, that is also exactly why Android succeeded, going their own way instead of using what existed before.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

> If I cannot make a phone call, and cannot use WhatsApp on a phone in 2024, it's utterly useless and can only be described as an expensive brick. Different people care about different things. I've never used WhatsApp in my life. > Nobody needs an SSH toy terminal that they cannot exit if it cannot render a special character and crashes, because the process management has a single UI thread. Er, is that a thing that can happen? I can't see any reason the software would be any less robust just because it's on a phone. In general, it sounds like you're arguing the view that if everyone just reinvented the wheel your way it'd work, but most of those decisions were made for a reason; generally, either for software compatibility, or because just reimplementing Android seems like a questionable value proposition. (And also the usual thing that it's almost all volunteers, so the choice isn't diversity or uniformity, it's diversity or nothing.)

saidinesh5 3y ago

I don't think any famous Linux mobile these days use X? Most of them are just wayland compositors. iirc GTKv4 is fully hardware accelerated. Everything/Most of the apps on KDE mobile side uses QtQuick/QML/Kirigami etc.. which is 100% GPU accelerated. Even my Ubuntu touch experience was lot more fluid than anything Android had to offer at the time on the same handset. > If the pinephone had boot2chromium or sth like boot2electron, it probably would be a million times less sluggish. The sluggishness of pinephone, i think, is probably due to slower sdcards (most of them tend to dual boot using an sdcard) and dated hardware for the kind of animated UI people expect these days. There is still boot2gecko/firefox os/whatever they call it these days.

mixmastamyk 3y ago

Sounds like you haven’t used it in a long time, so many details wrong in your post.

yaky 3y ago

> Honestly there are so many "pinephone is great" reviews out there The only one I recall is "I love my PinePhone" (published last year I think). Most of reviews I've seen is variations on "interesting, but not there yet", usually with high expectations, if not outright complaints. > The bluetooth disconnects alone make me throw this thing into the trashbox Haven't used bluetooth on PinePhone much, but for comparison, my previous iPhone 12 Pro (a "flagship" at the time) had tons of bluetooth issues and disconnects and worked terribly with in-car speaker. YMMV. > If I cannot make a phone call and cannot use WhatsApp on a phone in 2024, it's utterly useless and can only be described as an expensive brick. While I agree about phone calls, WhatsApps's availability has nothing to do with PinePhone or Linux. I heard it runs through Waydroid fairly well. I bridge WhatsApp to my Matrix server and chat through Fractal. > Linux on the phone will fail as long as this cultural problem of "not invented here so I can do it better" isn't fixed. From what you wrote above it, that is also exactly why Android succeeded, going their own way instead of using what existed before.