9 ms·

PinePhone Pro [GNU/Linux smartphone] has been discontinued

172 points by fsflover 1y ago

ge96 1y ago
Kind of sad, I had both PP and PPP When they were "new" the tech was old already and then the lack of drivers for the camera for example which I can't talk, I'm not a driver developer. I thought it would make me get into developing drivers but I never did. Or writing Qt/C++ apps vs. cross platform/web that I was used to. For some reason I was obsessed with the thought of Dex/your phone being a computer if connected to a big monitor, it was cool using VS Code on the PPP but there would be problems. The external monitor I think was capped to 1920x1080 (if connected to a 1440P display a huge chunk was just static) I had my fun with it I was interested in the Pine 64 eInk tablet but that seemed to not be in stock at the time. I had the Remarkable 2 at one point, I want to get it again. edit: looks like the PineNote is in stock right now my consumer brain is getting tickled, might get a PineNote, what I liked about the RM2 is I didn't have to charge it for like a month was crazy, unfortunately PineNote doesn't seem to have that, and no tilt support on pen but ehhh. I don't know if RM forces you to have a subscription now, I didn't have it on mine when I got it in like 2022.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  Yeah for these kinds of things to work the hardware has to be at least somewhat competitive and the overall device reasonably usable. It doesn’t need to be a flagship or anything, just relatively recent, and the experience doesn’t have to be perfect, just actually suitable as a daily driver. That’s what gets people interested, inspires devs to contribute and fill app gaps. This kicks off a virtuous cycle where less technical family of those devs see the device and want to try it, which in turn creates more demand for apps pulling more dev interest and so on and so forth. It’s critical to be good enough to clear that initial hurdle, though. Without that, the device is relegated to the most curious of tinkerers which just isn’t sustainable. As far as dev experience goes, from my limited dabbling I think GTK+Adwaita might actually be overall nicer for mobile development than Qt, due to furnishment of a full set of widgets without having to pull in anything else, as well as bindings to way more languages. It’s considerably more comparable to UIKit and Android Framework at the very least.
  - bruce511 1y ago
    >> That’s what gets people interested, inspires devs to contribute and fill app gaps. Alas, no, sorry. It's really not the number of apps that matters. Any phone OS could have less than 500 apps and be wildly successful. On the other hand you can have a million devs cranking out apps and the device would still be useless. Turns out the only apps that matters are the ones everyone actually use. Your banking app. Facebook. Whatsapp. Uber. Airbnb. Etc. All the product of big corporates. And my bank (to pick just 1) is simply not interested in developing their app for yet another platform. The effort in building it, supporting it etc simply makes no sense. Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, ESPN, and the next 40 "must haves" simply don't care. And independent devs simply cannot fill these holes. Without these the phone is simply useless as a daily driver for anything other than complete techno fanatics. Crumbs Microsoft couldn't convince this cohort to get on board. Some random Linux phone certainly won't. I don't say this with glee. They're nice toys. But Joe public doesn't reject them because of the hardware specs. He rejects them because they're functionally useless in the actual world.
    - ge96 1y ago
      That is true, you have to have two phones
    - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
      I think this is wildly more individual-dependent than you may think. Speaking personally, while I do have a number of big commercial apps installed, the number that couldn’t be filled either with a web app or the Android version via a compatibility layer is tiny. The native apps I find most difficult to replace are those by small to midsize devs, which are exactly the ones most likely to be the primary contributors to a new platform early on. I don’t think this is particularly unusual, either. Plenty of people have absoutely no need for video streaming on their phone outside of maybe YouTube for example, which works well enough on the web. Microsoft’s not the best example here, because they had momentum with both devs and users but shot themselves in the foot repeatedly on both sides of the fence: warring internal factions reset Windows Mobile development multiple times consecutively and burned through dev goodwill and poor strategy on the consumer side killed things there. Mozilla’s foray into phones failed because they insisted on sticking to entry level devices which were both not interesting to most of the market and not powerful enough to handle a new unoptimized OS.
- jolmg 1y ago
  > The external monitor I think was capped to 1920x1080 (if connected to a 1440P display a huge chunk was just static) That happened to me with the PP, but I can reliably use a 1440P monitor with the PPP. Not sure if it's the phone, or the fact that I added a power cord to the phone while it was connected. I can't remember if I did that with the PP. EDIT: Scratch that. It's because I used the official dock with the PP, and for the PPP I used one I got on Amazon. The official dock is docked (:P) to 1080P.[1] I wonder how it happened that the de-facto standard here is for the protocol going over USB-C to be DisplayPort, but for the hardware connection to be HDMI, and so leading to docks needed to be spec'ed to the resolution you want instead of being passive. [1] https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-pro-usb-c-docking-bar/ https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-pro-usb-c-docking-bar/
  - zorgmonkey 1y ago
    The answer is boring and annoying, they almost certainly want it to work with TVs and cheap monitors both of which commonly only have HDMI inputs. It has been my experience that you typically have to pay more for a USB-C dock with displayport outputs, even though they don't have the chip just cause of economies of scale.
  - ge96 1y ago
    To be clear when I say 1440p I mean 3840x1440 which might be obvious I was using random USB-C to HDMI/usb that I bought on Amazon, I primarily used Mobian
    - jolmg 1y ago
      I meant 2560×1440. Checking online, I didn't realize there were so many different 1440p resolutions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1440p https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1440p Random adapters on Amazon specify 4K though, so I would've thought they'd work for you too.
- gunalx 1y ago
  you might habe an old enough rm account to have free base subscription.
- ge96 1y ago
  I bought a Pine Note, probably a mistake with how poor I am But maybe motivates me I'm already concerned since it runs a full OS, its battery will be shit compared to an RM2
ethagnawl 1y ago
This is a bummer. If there was ever a time this sort of device was needed, it's now / in the near future when Google (probably) starts requiring all Android apps to be signed by approved developers and further locks down the Android platform. I kind of regret not buying one of these instead of a Pixel 7 but, unfortunately, I'm pretty tethered to the Android ecosystem at the moment.
- fellowniusmonk 1y ago
  The situation with RCS means Google and Apple have a complete douopoly on the texting market.
  - CharlesW 1y ago
    SMS will outlive us all.
    - const_cast 1y ago
      The problem is SMS sucks major ass and it's, by far, the least secure channel for... well just about anything, but especially for private, personal conversations.
      - 1718627440 1y ago
        Nothing stops you from encrypting the message you send over SMS.
        const_cast 1y ago
        Nothing stops me from running 150 miles too. That's just hard and I don't want to do it.
        port11 1y ago
        This is somewhat of a silly take. With SMS size restriction and their limited amount in many people's mobile plan, it's somewhat of a nonstarter. We already have better infrastructure. Nothing stops you from being more considerate of other people's reality.
mixmastamyk 1y ago
Not surprising. These phones were out of date when they debuted and not updated, in like five years? I played with one for a bit but then mobian trixie updates bricked it twice and I gave up. Only wanted it to be on par with my old iPhone 6s, but it never achieved that. Star labs makes a great Linux tablet, the starlite, so it is near possible to make a decent floss phone these days.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  Oh wow, that Star lab tablet looks great. For quite a while I used an iPad+NUC, which was perfect and I loved it, except it could only really run terminal programs (via ssh) or iOS programs nicely. VNC kinda works but not well. Eventually I switched to a folding convertible laptop, but it is a significant downgrade in terms of form-factor. Nice to know that exists, hopefully they’ll stick around until I’m ready to turn this thing into e-waste…
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
    Yes, though haven't used it as a convertible yet. I usually use tablets as my home movie machine since we don't have a proper TV. At this, the Starlite with Phosh and recent Fedora/firmware updates is fantastic. Freetube, Netflix and Kanopy on Firefox via widevine, PBS, and homegrown .mkv's are more than I have time to watch. On the go a Framework 13 is fantastic, tall screen, light and powerful. Only waiting on coreboot and ECC RAM.
storus 1y ago
PinePhone Pro's main drawback was the low-res display for a price of a midrange Android with far superior specs. I was thinking about buying one but it was barely better than the regular PinePhone.
- fsflover 1y ago
  https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/ https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/
BariumBlue 1y ago
I really like the phone/desktop convergence concept. Mostly I think because I want the freedom / open experience of my desktop on my phone though, I think. But I think most folks interested enough in the concept are also rich enough to afford a phone and a laptop, and if you want a keyboard for your phone you might as well just use a laptop. I still think conceptually it's the right direction for tech that our devices should be so flexible, but it's hard enough in practice that it's not generally done.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- solardev 1y ago
  Don't most Samsung phones and tablets already do this? Dex or something?
  - semi-extrinsic 1y ago
    Huawei as well. Used to have a P30 Pro. It felt like a true downgrade when I bought a Pixel 8 Pro two years ago and it had no desktop mode and a worse camera to boot.
    - peaseagee 1y ago
      Android 16 (coming to Pixel 8 series if it's not there already) supports this.
    - Xss3 1y ago
      Tbf huawei got heavy subsidies and just wanted marker share, google actually tried to make a profit.
      - codedokode 1y ago
        I always read here that China gives subsidies to everyone, they must be rich to afford it.
  - 1y ago
rpnx 1y ago
Pinephone pro... The phone was not specced well enough and had issue. Hoping the FLX1 isn't vaporware.
andrewmcwatters 1y ago
I looked into buying one a while back, and the spec sheet said it was using a 9 year old processor, and PinePhone uses a 13 year old processor. It wasn't "discontinued," no one was working on it for years, and it was pointless to purchase. The PinePhone is an outdated ripoff.
- linmob 1y ago
  "No one was working on it for year" is both untrue and unfair. There have been continued improvements (both PinePhone and PinePhone Pro), and I know that there are people who have put in the midnight oil to make them happen. What that work was not is 'paid for by PINE64'. It's also not been enough to raise the bar enough to make the phone work well enough; but if you consider what's involved there, it makes sense. You don't just need to write/fix a driver, you need upstream (or at least a distribution) to accept it and include it for that work to make a meaningful difference for anyone else.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  > It wasn't "discontinued," no one was working on it for years, and it was pointless to purchase. If it was being made and sold and now it's not, then it was discontinued. You may point out reasons why it was discontinued, but that is in fact what happened.
mrbuttons454 1y ago
I bought one as soon as they were released, as well as the keyboard case. It never really worked correctly, but I loved the concept and wish they would have succeeded. I know it's a niche product, but I'd love a pocket sized Debian device with cellular, decent standby time, and a physical keyboard. Anything out there I should look in to? I've tried to make various GPD devices work, but they are too big, and the standby time isn't great.
- sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
  > I know it's a niche product, but I'd love a pocket sized Debian device with cellular, decent standby time, and a physical keyboard yes they're called netbooks and x86 tablets but you may need a time machine back to 2015 to get one.
  - MrGilbert 1y ago
    GPD makes decent small devices, that can be equipped with cellular, and work fine with Debian. So no need for a time-travel here. :)
  - tempest_ 1y ago
    You don't have to go to 2015 GPD has a bunch, they are not exactly cheap though https://gpd.hk/product https://gpd.hk/product
    - hnlmorg 1y ago
      Those aren’t netbooks. They’re another class of device which I’ve forgotten the name of. Something like umpc or something. But the idea was netbooks were the bottom end of the market and this other class were the same form factor but at the top end of the market.
      - mananaysiempre 1y ago
        GPDs used to be much cheaper[1], and IMO made much more sense that way. Unfortunately, GPD indeed seems to have caught the expensive bug. [1] https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2022/08/18/i-love-my-gpd-micro-pc/ https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2022/08/18/i-love-my-gpd-micro-p...
fsflover 1y ago
Fortunately, Pinephone and Librem 5 still exist and work quite well, despite being relatively slow. Sent from my daily driver Librem 5.
- alchemist1e9 1y ago
  Anyone have thoughts on Purism’s Liberty Phone? Looks like it’s an upgraded Librem 5 of sorts.
  - woodrowbarlow 1y ago
    what you're really paying for is a difference in manufacturing; the spec bump is just to make the very high price hurt less. $2k instead of $800. they designed an elaborate process which theoretically guarantees that your phone was not tampered with at the factory or in transport. it was sort of a reaction to Bloomberg's "The Big Hack" article, which claimed Apple devices were compromised en masse at the factory in China by state actors (and the story was later retracted due to lack of evidence). i do think it's a cool effort, even if the threat is only hypothetical. but it's a lot to pay unless you're operating under an extreme threat model.
- canadiantim 1y ago
  Do you use WhatsApp, signal or Uber from your Librem 5? Is that possible?
  - jolmg 1y ago
    I haven't tried Whatsapp or Signal. The problem I've had with Uber is feeding it GPS coordinates. Talking about Waydroid, for some reason, while I can get Google Maps to see my coordinates, Uber seems to try to get the coordinates some different way. IIRC, you can still use it, you just need to be more explicit about where you want it to pick you up.
  - fsflover 1y ago
    I don't use them, but some people do. You can use Waydroid to run Android apps. Also, concerning Signal: https://forums.puri.sm/t/building-and-running-signal-desktop-on-the-librem-5/14999 https://forums.puri.sm/t/building-and-running-signal-desktop... https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/3410 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/3410 Concerning Whatsapp: https://forums.puri.sm/t/how-to-install-whatsapp-and-discord-on-librem-5/28433 https://forums.puri.sm/t/how-to-install-whatsapp-and-discord...
jchw 1y ago
The PinePhone Pro just wasn't a very good product. There was frankly unnecessary drama regarding the bootloader of all things, which was a bad start. The specs were obviously a bad value compared to any mass-produced phone, though it did bring the Linux phone down to a price point where an enthusiast could reasonably buy it, so I can't say it was priced that poorly. But, the big problem was software. Getting the damn device to work reliably was a true pain in the ass. If you could get "deep" sleep to work, then it would last longer than a couple hours on battery, which was nice... But sleep/resume on the device was buggy and slow. Getting a phone call can wake the device, but by the time it actually wakes up you might've already missed the call. And audio routing for calls was shockingly ugly... Most of the time it was routed directly by the hardware, bypassing the Linux audio stack entirely, but it was quite flexible and you could route it into Pipewire/etc. The microphone quality is "it works" tier, though the person on the other end may be occasionally alarmed by a flash bang of noise for unknown reasons. There are two piss-quality cameras that sometimes work for a little bit until they stop working. I waited a long time and occasionally checked to see if anything had changed, but it was clear that Pine64 had again taken the approach of "build it and they will come" hoping for other people to clean up the mess and make the phone usable. And to be fair, they were up front about this, to some degree, but they built it and nobody really came. The truth is it's just too damn hard for random people to fix all of the software issues on a device like this, especially when it's basically not usable as a daily driver yet. Working on a device like this is a full-time job, and you can't really replace that full-time job with 20 hobbyist weekends stacked in a trenchcoat. I did realize this when I bought one, with full intent to be one of those hobbyists spending weekends on it, but at least to me, it was simply too broken. So I think the PinePhone experiment is a failure. Then there's the Librem 5, which I presume is at least more stable and usable, but it's at a price that is less easy to stomach. I think until the software is ready and a market is proven, the best route for Linux phones is going to be by taking Android phone parts and trying to make it run regular Linux, a la libhybris. It may not really work out either, but it does seem like it is a path of significantly less resistance, where the software can be worked on with solid hardware and hopefully solid enough drivers to build on. There are some folks working on this angle, too. The latest I've seen is the Liberux NEXX, no idea how it's going, not affiliated in any way. https://liberux.net/ https://liberux.net/
- deleted 1y ago
Ezhik 1y ago
I'm so sad I couldn't get my hands on that Psion-like keyboard for it.
- mlok 1y ago
  Oh they look really cool : https://pine64.org/documentation/Phone_Accessories/Keyboard/ https://pine64.org/documentation/Phone_Accessories/Keyboard/
  - ge96 1y ago
    This is one of those things seems cool but is it (usability)? My own opinion, I bought a Toshiba Libretto CT50 and the keyboard is really cool but also so small/hard to use.
    - jolmg 1y ago
      It's just big enough that it might be barely usable to touch type with sufficient practice, not comfortably though. Definitely seems smaller than the Libretto from glancing at pictures. If the idea is to have a portable keyboard to then sit down somewhere and work, there are pocket BT ones that fold in half and are comfortably big. The only use-case I can think for the Pinephone keyboard is if for some reason you want a physical keyboard to use while walking.
    - spankibalt 1y ago
      When your fingers are too fat and/or your hands are too big for a Libretto, or you have pathological issues troubling the relevant appendages, then do yourself a favor and don't bother. It's obvious: These keyboards are, or should be, primarily made for mobile people, so high quality and tray or coffee table compatibility are a must. The Psion 5-series keyboards are ideal for this as long as you don't fuck with the formula.
    - ikkun 1y ago
      they discontinued it because of quality control reasons, which tracks with my experience. the key mechanism is weird, a circular membrane around plastic posts, and it makes some of the keys (especially the top row) constantly miss inputs. there's a 3D printed shim 'fix' but that barely helped me. off-center keypresses also bind really badly. the pogo pins that connect to the phone are flaky, which can make it lose connection and require a reboot. like the keys, there's a shim you can use (putting some paper behind the contacts) which only sort of helps. a benefit of the keyboard case is the battery it has that extends the phone's battery, which is nice, but it's an odd setup too. the charge controller on it was originally designed for a power bank and seems like a bit of a crude solution that's lead to multiple issues, like how you could damage the phone having it plugged into USB while the keyboard case is connected. it's slow to charge too, often it can't even keep up with the phone during use.
whitehexagon 1y ago
I think the PP still makes for a great educational device. I was following the Lupyuen tutorials for PinePhone nuttx for a while, and then got inspired to have a go at following his revese engineering journey using Zig. It has been slow going but great fun! Just started on volume keys. They say they continue production on the PP for 2 more years, so hopefully I'll have a bit more than 'Hello, world' by then. But buy a serial debug cable and SD card extension if you decide to have a play with one, huge time savers! I only just got mine and it has speeded up things no end.
canadiantim 1y ago
Are Linux phones viable? Eg even the librem 5 seems like not workable as a daily driver.
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  Librem 5 was good enough for a few years. Too old to buy now at the price they're still charging however.
  - fsflover 1y ago
    Why is it too old? See also: https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/ https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/
    - mixmastamyk 1y ago
      It’s a decade out of date, and can’t keep up with my EOL iPhone 6s. Charging $700 for that is unacceptable. I have hope for the furiphone.
      - fsflover 1y ago
        This is a quite misleading statement, since Librem 5 is still supported, will forever be supported and always had features that no other phone has, like true convergence and user ownership. You should clarify what you mean by "can't keep up with" if you want to argue that.
        mixmastamyk 1y ago
        Not really, my 6s is snappy when running apps, even heavy ones like (unfortunately) a browser with a webgl page. Also been revised 5-10 times. My pinephone had user ownership but didn’t work well.
        fsflover 1y ago
mhitza 1y ago
It costs 600 euros in europe (plus shipping?) I don't know why they expected that it would have sold more. Even the "200 dollars" PinePhone is 350 in euros. It was on my list of devices that would have been fun to hack on, but not at that price.
- marci 1y ago
  Those price are from the (non-official?) european reseller. You can still get the pinephone at the original price from the original store https://pine64.com/product-category/smartphones/ https://pine64.com/product-category/smartphones/
adamredwoods 1y ago
>> On the other hand, the PinePhone (A64) will continue to be sold for around two years. It is currently still selling well. Interesting! Well, there's a hint at your market.
- dotancohen 1y ago
  Enough stock on the shelves for an expected 2 years of slow sales.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago
Really sad about this. I recently bought another Android and was checking out the PinePhone Pro, but only wanted something with a little better specs..
mystraline 1y ago
Good riddance. That pile of garbage had crazy critical hardware faults they never fixed. 1. If the battery is discharged, then in order to recharge it, you have to take out the microsd and sim cards, press an SMT button, and plug in with battery. 2. If you bought the keyboard/battery, and you plug in USB on the phone, you fry the keyboard/battery. Shit burns up, haha screw you. And if you say anything, you the user are at fault. You didn't read, or follow their discord, or whatever, because it is 'Your Fault' ™. Pine's primary game here has been to paracitize off of FLOSS folks, pump out incompetent and/or broken hardware, and summarily blame FLOSS for their not-working. At minimum, they should be funding the projects they want to build on/paracitize. But they do none of the sort. We would be better if Pine died as a company. Then they wouldn't be sucking the oxygen out of the FLOSS arena, and might get more respectable orgs here.
- jbm 1y ago
  I do not understand why so many companies have that charging issue with Linux devices. Anbernic has the same issue with the RG35XX series. If the battery reaches 0, you may need to pull it out just to get the charging to work. And if you accidentally connect the wrong kind of usb-c charger, it won't charge, so you may have it plugged into the wall for days and come back to it being dead and needing battery surgery. Great devices for hacking because they are cheap though — cannot understand why an expensive phone would have that problem too.
  - numpad0 1y ago
    Some of pre-HSDPA Nokia phones had the same issue. You needed a clip-on raw cell charger to revive them. It's manufacturer skill as well as a bit of cost issue.
  - fakedang 1y ago
    > Great devices for hacking because they are cheap though — cannot understand why an expensive phone would have that problem too. Because the more I read about Pinephone, the more it seems like a grift.
    - 1y ago
mcflubbins 1y ago
Pine has an attention problem, they produce a lot of different things but the ones that people really wanted like the PinePhone Pro just were never there, with they'd have just doubled down on something and made that REALLY good first. I preordered the Pinebook, it was never really awesome but it was neat, I accidentally broke the screen and was never able to get a replacement (at least from the store - they were always sold out.) Turned into ewaste. PinePhone Pro wasn't too good either, I really tried but had lots of flaky issues with basic phone functionality, eventually gave it away to a friend. It's collecting dust for sure and will eventually be more ewaste.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  Pine’s approach has always felt like they wanted to make the hardware and then hope that the community would sort out of the software for it. There isn’t a lot of motivation for the community to sort out the software for them when the products aren’t attractive enough to build a community around. I wish they would narrow their focus, shift some resources into software development, and produce at least one very good product. As it stands, the Pine brand has become associated with buyer beware.
  - rjsw 1y ago
    As someone who doesn't run Linux on any of my Pine64 systems, that suits me fine.
    - fsflover 1y ago
      What do you run?
  - RealStickman_ 1y ago
    To be fair to them, they at least tell you that software support is largely community provided. However, you probably won't know how that is in practice until you experience it once or twice.
    - 1y ago
guywithahat 1y ago
Honestly the company is kind of a nightmare. When I ordered mine, they shipped it with no packaging from Hong Kong. Obviously it arrived broken, and when I told them they said I could pay to have someone fix it in CA. It ended up taking 2 months for my chargeback to go through, and they were threatening me the whole time. It was only after they lost (which of course they would, it's like they've never worked with a credit card processor before) they got really sweet and sent me a return label. Just a terribly run company. I'm sure it's better if you're buying bulk boards from them but after my experience I wouldn't work with them again.
- jolmg 1y ago
  > When I ordered mine, they shipped it with no packaging from Hong Kong. As I understand, customs (in your country) will typically check what's being imported, to verify the invoice is true for correct taxation, and also to check that it's something allowed. It might be that your customs authority didn't put it back in its package after inspecting it.
  - guywithahat 1y ago
    Could be, but this seems to be a common problem with them other people have complained about.
storus 1y ago
With the Android becoming a privacy nightmare, Pine was like the only hope for some FOSS phones. Their main drawback was the software. Now given the coding LLMs available these days, would generating a set of useful apps for Pine be a major problem? They can be pretty minimalistic but must be 100% reliable for the platform to take off. Right now they are super buggy and basic features work randomly.
- xethos 1y ago
  I used a Pinephone Pro as a daily carry. It wasn't actually the lack of apps that killed it for me. Fractal, the Gnome Matrix client, was great. Phone calls were functional, Mobile Thunderbird (thanks to PmOS packagers), Mobile Firefox, and Gapless (my preferred music player for mobile) all worked well, and I could actually use native apps for most of my use-cases, like Gnome Password Safe (the Keepass client), Gnome Calendar, etc. The battery life and performance absolutely murdered it though, and it was worse for the Librem 5. The PPP at least had external chargers for sale, and was made to be compatible with Samsung batteries, so I could, and did, carry 3 on me. The (larger) dev community for the PPP also put out things like Sleepwalk (to periodically wake the modem for notifications), and had more stable, cooler- and longer-running modem software for the PPP. Somehow, the software for Linux Mobile isn't impossibly far off. Modems are a bitch though. Like, buy Qualcomm stock levels of "This shit is insane, how does any of it work as well as it does".
  - fsflover 1y ago
    > and it was worse for the Librem 5 I guess it should be better now: https://forums.puri.sm/t/status-of-suspend-for-librem-5/13918/558 https://forums.puri.sm/t/status-of-suspend-for-librem-5/1391...
    - xethos 1y ago
      Note that this improves reliability for suspending the modem, not power draw while the modem is awake. The Pinephone (and Pro's) modem stil runs circles around the L5's modem for power draw and data reliability, and I say that having used the L5 with the improvements you pointed to.
codedokode 1y ago
The situation with phones is pretty bad now. The phones that have or support open-source ROM (Pinephones, Pixels etc), are usually expensive and cost like 2-3 normal phones. So it might be cheaper just to buy a non-free phone and keep it in airplane mode (and connect it only to a airgapped home WiFi network to transfer data), and a second dumb phone for calling. Or have one phone with your data, connecting to Internet via second $50 phone, which has connectivity, but no data, and DPIs all requests from first phone, basically serving as a portable router. And proprietary phones are really bad, today I read the news that Samsung promised to comply with law and auto-install Russian software (like Vk, Kaspersky, Rustore) when the phone is connected to the Internet. And that's a Korean company. Consumers are treated like garbage today. It's understandable that you earn more on expensive phones, and freedom is not free, but I don't want to buy a phone that costs like 2 cheaper phones + a guitar. I would prefer simply having something like GrapheneOS with root access.
rgreekguy 1y ago
Last time I bothered with news from Pine was with that Manjaro and bootloader drama. I am not even sure what came out of that... But the other issue is I just found out from this post that PineBook Pro has been discontinued. But it is well listed in their devices, a shop exists just fine, with a price tag, it is just out of stock. Forever, apparently. I thought they were just being stingy with their production sizes, or they just didn't have enough traffic to make more. Oh well, you can install postmarketOS on Chromebooks with ARM processors, and "normal" Linux is going well on other ARM devices, too. You can also find RISC-V laptops on Alibaba.

172 points by fsflover 1y ago

ge96 1y ago

Kind of sad, I had both PP and PPP When they were "new" the tech was old already and then the lack of drivers for the camera for example which I can't talk, I'm not a driver developer. I thought it would make me get into developing drivers but I never did. Or writing Qt/C++ apps vs. cross platform/web that I was used to. For some reason I was obsessed with the thought of Dex/your phone being a computer if connected to a big monitor, it was cool using VS Code on the PPP but there would be problems. The external monitor I think was capped to 1920x1080 (if connected to a 1440P display a huge chunk was just static) I had my fun with it I was interested in the Pine 64 eInk tablet but that seemed to not be in stock at the time. I had the Remarkable 2 at one point, I want to get it again. edit: looks like the PineNote is in stock right now my consumer brain is getting tickled, might get a PineNote, what I liked about the RM2 is I didn't have to charge it for like a month was crazy, unfortunately PineNote doesn't seem to have that, and no tilt support on pen but ehhh. I don't know if RM forces you to have a subscription now, I didn't have it on mine when I got it in like 2022.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
Yeah for these kinds of things to work the hardware has to be at least somewhat competitive and the overall device reasonably usable. It doesn’t need to be a flagship or anything, just relatively recent, and the experience doesn’t have to be perfect, just actually suitable as a daily driver. That’s what gets people interested, inspires devs to contribute and fill app gaps. This kicks off a virtuous cycle where less technical family of those devs see the device and want to try it, which in turn creates more demand for apps pulling more dev interest and so on and so forth. It’s critical to be good enough to clear that initial hurdle, though. Without that, the device is relegated to the most curious of tinkerers which just isn’t sustainable. As far as dev experience goes, from my limited dabbling I think GTK+Adwaita might actually be overall nicer for mobile development than Qt, due to furnishment of a full set of widgets without having to pull in anything else, as well as bindings to way more languages. It’s considerably more comparable to UIKit and Android Framework at the very least.
- bruce511 1y ago
  >> That’s what gets people interested, inspires devs to contribute and fill app gaps. Alas, no, sorry. It's really not the number of apps that matters. Any phone OS could have less than 500 apps and be wildly successful. On the other hand you can have a million devs cranking out apps and the device would still be useless. Turns out the only apps that matters are the ones everyone actually use. Your banking app. Facebook. Whatsapp. Uber. Airbnb. Etc. All the product of big corporates. And my bank (to pick just 1) is simply not interested in developing their app for yet another platform. The effort in building it, supporting it etc simply makes no sense. Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, ESPN, and the next 40 "must haves" simply don't care. And independent devs simply cannot fill these holes. Without these the phone is simply useless as a daily driver for anything other than complete techno fanatics. Crumbs Microsoft couldn't convince this cohort to get on board. Some random Linux phone certainly won't. I don't say this with glee. They're nice toys. But Joe public doesn't reject them because of the hardware specs. He rejects them because they're functionally useless in the actual world.
  - ge96 1y ago
    That is true, you have to have two phones
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    I think this is wildly more individual-dependent than you may think. Speaking personally, while I do have a number of big commercial apps installed, the number that couldn’t be filled either with a web app or the Android version via a compatibility layer is tiny. The native apps I find most difficult to replace are those by small to midsize devs, which are exactly the ones most likely to be the primary contributors to a new platform early on. I don’t think this is particularly unusual, either. Plenty of people have absoutely no need for video streaming on their phone outside of maybe YouTube for example, which works well enough on the web. Microsoft’s not the best example here, because they had momentum with both devs and users but shot themselves in the foot repeatedly on both sides of the fence: warring internal factions reset Windows Mobile development multiple times consecutively and burned through dev goodwill and poor strategy on the consumer side killed things there. Mozilla’s foray into phones failed because they insisted on sticking to entry level devices which were both not interesting to most of the market and not powerful enough to handle a new unoptimized OS.
jolmg 1y ago
> The external monitor I think was capped to 1920x1080 (if connected to a 1440P display a huge chunk was just static) That happened to me with the PP, but I can reliably use a 1440P monitor with the PPP. Not sure if it's the phone, or the fact that I added a power cord to the phone while it was connected. I can't remember if I did that with the PP. EDIT: Scratch that. It's because I used the official dock with the PP, and for the PPP I used one I got on Amazon. The official dock is docked (:P) to 1080P.[1] I wonder how it happened that the de-facto standard here is for the protocol going over USB-C to be DisplayPort, but for the hardware connection to be HDMI, and so leading to docks needed to be spec'ed to the resolution you want instead of being passive. [1] https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-pro-usb-c-docking-bar/ https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-pro-usb-c-docking-bar/
- zorgmonkey 1y ago
  The answer is boring and annoying, they almost certainly want it to work with TVs and cheap monitors both of which commonly only have HDMI inputs. It has been my experience that you typically have to pay more for a USB-C dock with displayport outputs, even though they don't have the chip just cause of economies of scale.
- ge96 1y ago
  To be clear when I say 1440p I mean 3840x1440 which might be obvious I was using random USB-C to HDMI/usb that I bought on Amazon, I primarily used Mobian
  - jolmg 1y ago
    I meant 2560×1440. Checking online, I didn't realize there were so many different 1440p resolutions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1440p https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1440p Random adapters on Amazon specify 4K though, so I would've thought they'd work for you too.
gunalx 1y ago
you might habe an old enough rm account to have free base subscription.
ge96 1y ago
I bought a Pine Note, probably a mistake with how poor I am But maybe motivates me I'm already concerned since it runs a full OS, its battery will be shit compared to an RM2

ethagnawl 1y ago

This is a bummer. If there was ever a time this sort of device was needed, it's now / in the near future when Google (probably) starts requiring all Android apps to be signed by approved developers and further locks down the Android platform. I kind of regret not buying one of these instead of a Pixel 7 but, unfortunately, I'm pretty tethered to the Android ecosystem at the moment.

fellowniusmonk 1y ago
The situation with RCS means Google and Apple have a complete douopoly on the texting market.
- CharlesW 1y ago
  SMS will outlive us all.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    The problem is SMS sucks major ass and it's, by far, the least secure channel for... well just about anything, but especially for private, personal conversations.
    - 1718627440 1y ago
      Nothing stops you from encrypting the message you send over SMS.
      - const_cast 1y ago
        Nothing stops me from running 150 miles too. That's just hard and I don't want to do it.
      - port11 1y ago
        This is somewhat of a silly take. With SMS size restriction and their limited amount in many people's mobile plan, it's somewhat of a nonstarter. We already have better infrastructure. Nothing stops you from being more considerate of other people's reality.

mixmastamyk 1y ago

Not surprising. These phones were out of date when they debuted and not updated, in like five years? I played with one for a bit but then mobian trixie updates bricked it twice and I gave up. Only wanted it to be on par with my old iPhone 6s, but it never achieved that. Star labs makes a great Linux tablet, the starlite, so it is near possible to make a decent floss phone these days.

bee_rider 1y ago
Oh wow, that Star lab tablet looks great. For quite a while I used an iPad+NUC, which was perfect and I loved it, except it could only really run terminal programs (via ssh) or iOS programs nicely. VNC kinda works but not well. Eventually I switched to a folding convertible laptop, but it is a significant downgrade in terms of form-factor. Nice to know that exists, hopefully they’ll stick around until I’m ready to turn this thing into e-waste…
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  Yes, though haven't used it as a convertible yet. I usually use tablets as my home movie machine since we don't have a proper TV. At this, the Starlite with Phosh and recent Fedora/firmware updates is fantastic. Freetube, Netflix and Kanopy on Firefox via widevine, PBS, and homegrown .mkv's are more than I have time to watch. On the go a Framework 13 is fantastic, tall screen, light and powerful. Only waiting on coreboot and ECC RAM.

storus 1y ago

PinePhone Pro's main drawback was the low-res display for a price of a midrange Android with far superior specs. I was thinking about buying one but it was barely better than the regular PinePhone.

fsflover 1y ago
https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/ https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/

BariumBlue 1y ago

I really like the phone/desktop convergence concept. Mostly I think because I want the freedom / open experience of my desktop on my phone though, I think. But I think most folks interested enough in the concept are also rich enough to afford a phone and a laptop, and if you want a keyboard for your phone you might as well just use a laptop. I still think conceptually it's the right direction for tech that our devices should be so flexible, but it's hard enough in practice that it's not generally done.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
solardev 1y ago
Don't most Samsung phones and tablets already do this? Dex or something?
- semi-extrinsic 1y ago
  Huawei as well. Used to have a P30 Pro. It felt like a true downgrade when I bought a Pixel 8 Pro two years ago and it had no desktop mode and a worse camera to boot.
  - peaseagee 1y ago
    Android 16 (coming to Pixel 8 series if it's not there already) supports this.
  - Xss3 1y ago
    Tbf huawei got heavy subsidies and just wanted marker share, google actually tried to make a profit.
    - codedokode 1y ago
      I always read here that China gives subsidies to everyone, they must be rich to afford it.
- 1y ago

rpnx 1y ago

Pinephone pro... The phone was not specced well enough and had issue. Hoping the FLX1 isn't vaporware.

andrewmcwatters 1y ago

I looked into buying one a while back, and the spec sheet said it was using a 9 year old processor, and PinePhone uses a 13 year old processor. It wasn't "discontinued," no one was working on it for years, and it was pointless to purchase. The PinePhone is an outdated ripoff.

linmob 1y ago
"No one was working on it for year" is both untrue and unfair. There have been continued improvements (both PinePhone and PinePhone Pro), and I know that there are people who have put in the midnight oil to make them happen. What that work was not is 'paid for by PINE64'. It's also not been enough to raise the bar enough to make the phone work well enough; but if you consider what's involved there, it makes sense. You don't just need to write/fix a driver, you need upstream (or at least a distribution) to accept it and include it for that work to make a meaningful difference for anyone else.
yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
> It wasn't "discontinued," no one was working on it for years, and it was pointless to purchase. If it was being made and sold and now it's not, then it was discontinued. You may point out reasons why it was discontinued, but that is in fact what happened.

mrbuttons454 1y ago

I bought one as soon as they were released, as well as the keyboard case. It never really worked correctly, but I loved the concept and wish they would have succeeded. I know it's a niche product, but I'd love a pocket sized Debian device with cellular, decent standby time, and a physical keyboard. Anything out there I should look in to? I've tried to make various GPD devices work, but they are too big, and the standby time isn't great.

sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
> I know it's a niche product, but I'd love a pocket sized Debian device with cellular, decent standby time, and a physical keyboard yes they're called netbooks and x86 tablets but you may need a time machine back to 2015 to get one.
- MrGilbert 1y ago
  GPD makes decent small devices, that can be equipped with cellular, and work fine with Debian. So no need for a time-travel here. :)
- tempest_ 1y ago
  You don't have to go to 2015 GPD has a bunch, they are not exactly cheap though https://gpd.hk/product https://gpd.hk/product
  - hnlmorg 1y ago
    Those aren’t netbooks. They’re another class of device which I’ve forgotten the name of. Something like umpc or something. But the idea was netbooks were the bottom end of the market and this other class were the same form factor but at the top end of the market.
    - mananaysiempre 1y ago
      GPDs used to be much cheaper[1], and IMO made much more sense that way. Unfortunately, GPD indeed seems to have caught the expensive bug. [1] https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2022/08/18/i-love-my-gpd-micro-pc/ https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2022/08/18/i-love-my-gpd-micro-p...

fsflover 1y ago

Fortunately, Pinephone and Librem 5 still exist and work quite well, despite being relatively slow. Sent from my daily driver Librem 5.

alchemist1e9 1y ago
Anyone have thoughts on Purism’s Liberty Phone? Looks like it’s an upgraded Librem 5 of sorts.
- woodrowbarlow 1y ago
  what you're really paying for is a difference in manufacturing; the spec bump is just to make the very high price hurt less. $2k instead of $800. they designed an elaborate process which theoretically guarantees that your phone was not tampered with at the factory or in transport. it was sort of a reaction to Bloomberg's "The Big Hack" article, which claimed Apple devices were compromised en masse at the factory in China by state actors (and the story was later retracted due to lack of evidence). i do think it's a cool effort, even if the threat is only hypothetical. but it's a lot to pay unless you're operating under an extreme threat model.
canadiantim 1y ago
Do you use WhatsApp, signal or Uber from your Librem 5? Is that possible?
- jolmg 1y ago
  I haven't tried Whatsapp or Signal. The problem I've had with Uber is feeding it GPS coordinates. Talking about Waydroid, for some reason, while I can get Google Maps to see my coordinates, Uber seems to try to get the coordinates some different way. IIRC, you can still use it, you just need to be more explicit about where you want it to pick you up.
- fsflover 1y ago
  I don't use them, but some people do. You can use Waydroid to run Android apps. Also, concerning Signal: https://forums.puri.sm/t/building-and-running-signal-desktop-on-the-librem-5/14999 https://forums.puri.sm/t/building-and-running-signal-desktop... https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/3410 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/3410 Concerning Whatsapp: https://forums.puri.sm/t/how-to-install-whatsapp-and-discord-on-librem-5/28433 https://forums.puri.sm/t/how-to-install-whatsapp-and-discord...

jchw 1y ago

The PinePhone Pro just wasn't a very good product. There was frankly unnecessary drama regarding the bootloader of all things, which was a bad start. The specs were obviously a bad value compared to any mass-produced phone, though it did bring the Linux phone down to a price point where an enthusiast could reasonably buy it, so I can't say it was priced that poorly. But, the big problem was software. Getting the damn device to work reliably was a true pain in the ass. If you could get "deep" sleep to work, then it would last longer than a couple hours on battery, which was nice... But sleep/resume on the device was buggy and slow. Getting a phone call can wake the device, but by the time it actually wakes up you might've already missed the call. And audio routing for calls was shockingly ugly... Most of the time it was routed directly by the hardware, bypassing the Linux audio stack entirely, but it was quite flexible and you could route it into Pipewire/etc. The microphone quality is "it works" tier, though the person on the other end may be occasionally alarmed by a flash bang of noise for unknown reasons. There are two piss-quality cameras that sometimes work for a little bit until they stop working. I waited a long time and occasionally checked to see if anything had changed, but it was clear that Pine64 had again taken the approach of "build it and they will come" hoping for other people to clean up the mess and make the phone usable. And to be fair, they were up front about this, to some degree, but they built it and nobody really came. The truth is it's just too damn hard for random people to fix all of the software issues on a device like this, especially when it's basically not usable as a daily driver yet. Working on a device like this is a full-time job, and you can't really replace that full-time job with 20 hobbyist weekends stacked in a trenchcoat. I did realize this when I bought one, with full intent to be one of those hobbyists spending weekends on it, but at least to me, it was simply too broken. So I think the PinePhone experiment is a failure. Then there's the Librem 5, which I presume is at least more stable and usable, but it's at a price that is less easy to stomach. I think until the software is ready and a market is proven, the best route for Linux phones is going to be by taking Android phone parts and trying to make it run regular Linux, a la libhybris. It may not really work out either, but it does seem like it is a path of significantly less resistance, where the software can be worked on with solid hardware and hopefully solid enough drivers to build on. There are some folks working on this angle, too. The latest I've seen is the Liberux NEXX, no idea how it's going, not affiliated in any way. https://liberux.net/ https://liberux.net/

deleted 1y ago

Ezhik 1y ago

I'm so sad I couldn't get my hands on that Psion-like keyboard for it.

mlok 1y ago
Oh they look really cool : https://pine64.org/documentation/Phone_Accessories/Keyboard/ https://pine64.org/documentation/Phone_Accessories/Keyboard/
- ge96 1y ago
  This is one of those things seems cool but is it (usability)? My own opinion, I bought a Toshiba Libretto CT50 and the keyboard is really cool but also so small/hard to use.
  - jolmg 1y ago
    It's just big enough that it might be barely usable to touch type with sufficient practice, not comfortably though. Definitely seems smaller than the Libretto from glancing at pictures. If the idea is to have a portable keyboard to then sit down somewhere and work, there are pocket BT ones that fold in half and are comfortably big. The only use-case I can think for the Pinephone keyboard is if for some reason you want a physical keyboard to use while walking.
  - spankibalt 1y ago
    When your fingers are too fat and/or your hands are too big for a Libretto, or you have pathological issues troubling the relevant appendages, then do yourself a favor and don't bother. It's obvious: These keyboards are, or should be, primarily made for mobile people, so high quality and tray or coffee table compatibility are a must. The Psion 5-series keyboards are ideal for this as long as you don't fuck with the formula.
  - ikkun 1y ago
    they discontinued it because of quality control reasons, which tracks with my experience. the key mechanism is weird, a circular membrane around plastic posts, and it makes some of the keys (especially the top row) constantly miss inputs. there's a 3D printed shim 'fix' but that barely helped me. off-center keypresses also bind really badly. the pogo pins that connect to the phone are flaky, which can make it lose connection and require a reboot. like the keys, there's a shim you can use (putting some paper behind the contacts) which only sort of helps. a benefit of the keyboard case is the battery it has that extends the phone's battery, which is nice, but it's an odd setup too. the charge controller on it was originally designed for a power bank and seems like a bit of a crude solution that's lead to multiple issues, like how you could damage the phone having it plugged into USB while the keyboard case is connected. it's slow to charge too, often it can't even keep up with the phone during use.

whitehexagon 1y ago

I think the PP still makes for a great educational device. I was following the Lupyuen tutorials for PinePhone nuttx for a while, and then got inspired to have a go at following his revese engineering journey using Zig. It has been slow going but great fun! Just started on volume keys. They say they continue production on the PP for 2 more years, so hopefully I'll have a bit more than 'Hello, world' by then. But buy a serial debug cable and SD card extension if you decide to have a play with one, huge time savers! I only just got mine and it has speeded up things no end.

canadiantim 1y ago

Are Linux phones viable? Eg even the librem 5 seems like not workable as a daily driver.

mixmastamyk 1y ago
Librem 5 was good enough for a few years. Too old to buy now at the price they're still charging however.
- fsflover 1y ago
  Why is it too old? See also: https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/ https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
    It’s a decade out of date, and can’t keep up with my EOL iPhone 6s. Charging $700 for that is unacceptable. I have hope for the furiphone.
    - fsflover 1y ago
      This is a quite misleading statement, since Librem 5 is still supported, will forever be supported and always had features that no other phone has, like true convergence and user ownership. You should clarify what you mean by "can't keep up with" if you want to argue that.
      - mixmastamyk 1y ago
        Not really, my 6s is snappy when running apps, even heavy ones like (unfortunately) a browser with a webgl page. Also been revised 5-10 times. My pinephone had user ownership but didn’t work well.
        fsflover 1y ago

mhitza 1y ago

It costs 600 euros in europe (plus shipping?) I don't know why they expected that it would have sold more. Even the "200 dollars" PinePhone is 350 in euros. It was on my list of devices that would have been fun to hack on, but not at that price.

marci 1y ago
Those price are from the (non-official?) european reseller. You can still get the pinephone at the original price from the original store https://pine64.com/product-category/smartphones/ https://pine64.com/product-category/smartphones/

adamredwoods 1y ago

>> On the other hand, the PinePhone (A64) will continue to be sold for around two years. It is currently still selling well. Interesting! Well, there's a hint at your market.

dotancohen 1y ago
Enough stock on the shelves for an expected 2 years of slow sales.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago

Really sad about this. I recently bought another Android and was checking out the PinePhone Pro, but only wanted something with a little better specs..

mystraline 1y ago

Good riddance. That pile of garbage had crazy critical hardware faults they never fixed. 1. If the battery is discharged, then in order to recharge it, you have to take out the microsd and sim cards, press an SMT button, and plug in with battery. 2. If you bought the keyboard/battery, and you plug in USB on the phone, you fry the keyboard/battery. Shit burns up, haha screw you. And if you say anything, you the user are at fault. You didn't read, or follow their discord, or whatever, because it is 'Your Fault' ™. Pine's primary game here has been to paracitize off of FLOSS folks, pump out incompetent and/or broken hardware, and summarily blame FLOSS for their not-working. At minimum, they should be funding the projects they want to build on/paracitize. But they do none of the sort. We would be better if Pine died as a company. Then they wouldn't be sucking the oxygen out of the FLOSS arena, and might get more respectable orgs here.

jbm 1y ago
I do not understand why so many companies have that charging issue with Linux devices. Anbernic has the same issue with the RG35XX series. If the battery reaches 0, you may need to pull it out just to get the charging to work. And if you accidentally connect the wrong kind of usb-c charger, it won't charge, so you may have it plugged into the wall for days and come back to it being dead and needing battery surgery. Great devices for hacking because they are cheap though — cannot understand why an expensive phone would have that problem too.
- numpad0 1y ago
  Some of pre-HSDPA Nokia phones had the same issue. You needed a clip-on raw cell charger to revive them. It's manufacturer skill as well as a bit of cost issue.
- fakedang 1y ago
  > Great devices for hacking because they are cheap though — cannot understand why an expensive phone would have that problem too. Because the more I read about Pinephone, the more it seems like a grift.
  - 1y ago

mcflubbins 1y ago

Pine has an attention problem, they produce a lot of different things but the ones that people really wanted like the PinePhone Pro just were never there, with they'd have just doubled down on something and made that REALLY good first. I preordered the Pinebook, it was never really awesome but it was neat, I accidentally broke the screen and was never able to get a replacement (at least from the store - they were always sold out.) Turned into ewaste. PinePhone Pro wasn't too good either, I really tried but had lots of flaky issues with basic phone functionality, eventually gave it away to a friend. It's collecting dust for sure and will eventually be more ewaste.

Aurornis 1y ago
Pine’s approach has always felt like they wanted to make the hardware and then hope that the community would sort out of the software for it. There isn’t a lot of motivation for the community to sort out the software for them when the products aren’t attractive enough to build a community around. I wish they would narrow their focus, shift some resources into software development, and produce at least one very good product. As it stands, the Pine brand has become associated with buyer beware.
- rjsw 1y ago
  As someone who doesn't run Linux on any of my Pine64 systems, that suits me fine.
  - fsflover 1y ago
    What do you run?
- RealStickman_ 1y ago
  To be fair to them, they at least tell you that software support is largely community provided. However, you probably won't know how that is in practice until you experience it once or twice.
  - 1y ago

guywithahat 1y ago

Honestly the company is kind of a nightmare. When I ordered mine, they shipped it with no packaging from Hong Kong. Obviously it arrived broken, and when I told them they said I could pay to have someone fix it in CA. It ended up taking 2 months for my chargeback to go through, and they were threatening me the whole time. It was only after they lost (which of course they would, it's like they've never worked with a credit card processor before) they got really sweet and sent me a return label. Just a terribly run company. I'm sure it's better if you're buying bulk boards from them but after my experience I wouldn't work with them again.

jolmg 1y ago
> When I ordered mine, they shipped it with no packaging from Hong Kong. As I understand, customs (in your country) will typically check what's being imported, to verify the invoice is true for correct taxation, and also to check that it's something allowed. It might be that your customs authority didn't put it back in its package after inspecting it.
- guywithahat 1y ago
  Could be, but this seems to be a common problem with them other people have complained about.

storus 1y ago

With the Android becoming a privacy nightmare, Pine was like the only hope for some FOSS phones. Their main drawback was the software. Now given the coding LLMs available these days, would generating a set of useful apps for Pine be a major problem? They can be pretty minimalistic but must be 100% reliable for the platform to take off. Right now they are super buggy and basic features work randomly.

xethos 1y ago
I used a Pinephone Pro as a daily carry. It wasn't actually the lack of apps that killed it for me. Fractal, the Gnome Matrix client, was great. Phone calls were functional, Mobile Thunderbird (thanks to PmOS packagers), Mobile Firefox, and Gapless (my preferred music player for mobile) all worked well, and I could actually use native apps for most of my use-cases, like Gnome Password Safe (the Keepass client), Gnome Calendar, etc. The battery life and performance absolutely murdered it though, and it was worse for the Librem 5. The PPP at least had external chargers for sale, and was made to be compatible with Samsung batteries, so I could, and did, carry 3 on me. The (larger) dev community for the PPP also put out things like Sleepwalk (to periodically wake the modem for notifications), and had more stable, cooler- and longer-running modem software for the PPP. Somehow, the software for Linux Mobile isn't impossibly far off. Modems are a bitch though. Like, buy Qualcomm stock levels of "This shit is insane, how does any of it work as well as it does".
- fsflover 1y ago
  > and it was worse for the Librem 5 I guess it should be better now: https://forums.puri.sm/t/status-of-suspend-for-librem-5/13918/558 https://forums.puri.sm/t/status-of-suspend-for-librem-5/1391...
  - xethos 1y ago
    Note that this improves reliability for suspending the modem, not power draw while the modem is awake. The Pinephone (and Pro's) modem stil runs circles around the L5's modem for power draw and data reliability, and I say that having used the L5 with the improvements you pointed to.

codedokode 1y ago

The situation with phones is pretty bad now. The phones that have or support open-source ROM (Pinephones, Pixels etc), are usually expensive and cost like 2-3 normal phones. So it might be cheaper just to buy a non-free phone and keep it in airplane mode (and connect it only to a airgapped home WiFi network to transfer data), and a second dumb phone for calling. Or have one phone with your data, connecting to Internet via second $50 phone, which has connectivity, but no data, and DPIs all requests from first phone, basically serving as a portable router. And proprietary phones are really bad, today I read the news that Samsung promised to comply with law and auto-install Russian software (like Vk, Kaspersky, Rustore) when the phone is connected to the Internet. And that's a Korean company. Consumers are treated like garbage today. It's understandable that you earn more on expensive phones, and freedom is not free, but I don't want to buy a phone that costs like 2 cheaper phones + a guitar. I would prefer simply having something like GrapheneOS with root access.

rgreekguy 1y ago

Last time I bothered with news from Pine was with that Manjaro and bootloader drama. I am not even sure what came out of that... But the other issue is I just found out from this post that PineBook Pro has been discontinued. But it is well listed in their devices, a shop exists just fine, with a price tag, it is just out of stock. Forever, apparently. I thought they were just being stingy with their production sizes, or they just didn't have enough traffic to make more. Oh well, you can install postmarketOS on Chromebooks with ARM processors, and "normal" Linux is going well on other ARM devices, too. You can also find RISC-V laptops on Alibaba.