They are not ready for regular use yet. Performance is poor and battery life is bad. It's fun to play with my Pinephone and watch the software slowly improve, but there is no way I could use it as my primary phone.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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The only real issue holding it back for me is the battery life. I update the danctnix distro regularly to check progress, but the battery life is not production ready.
I have a Pine phone that I bought some time ago.
I tried a couple of distros/environments:
- Mobian
- Manjaro + Plasma Mobile
- Manjaro + Phosh
My experience: As a basic phone, it mostly works. Everything else is pretty bad. The Pine phone is underpowered, the environments are not very well optimised and polished, basic browsing was almost unusable, things didn't work properly, I had to use the CLI to get around UI issues (which is very sucky on a phone), etc. Battery life is bad, the camera is a joke (if it works), the screen has dead pixels after less than a year, it's not a great picture.
I fully support what Pine phone is trying to do, in fact I bought 2 of them and I don't regret buying them, but know what you are getting into. It's nowhere near ready for mass adoption. If you're a hobbyist then it's a fun toy to play around with.
Purism is more expensive/better hardware and uses the Phosh graphical shell. I haven't tried it but I imagine the experience is a lot more polished. You could probably use that as a daily driver if you were happy to give up most of the apps / quality of life stuff your spyware phone currently does for you.
If you're not, then going the degoogled route is probably your best choice.
I owned a Pine Phone Pro for a while and it was a disaster. The software is still coming together, which is expected, but the hardware was also hobby project grade. As the previous poster mentioned, battery, camera, and screen were all bad, and on top of that the phone would refuse to charge with most chargers and could not charge at all while not booted, so once the battery was dead you had zero recourse beyond an external charger. The clamshell keyboard also wouldn't work without shimming the pogo pin connectors forward, and even then it was hit or miss. The company was terrible to deal with and only finally accepted a return after escalating a dispute with Paypal. I hate dumping on a company providing hardware for mobile Linux, but these guys seriously do more harm than good.
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PostmarketOS on oneplus6 is nice. 👍
+1 for this. PostmarketOS is definitely best privacy minded linux portable on smartphone.
Unfortunately it's not fully usable on the OnePlus 6/6T yet. I would love to daily drive my 6T but it only has working audio for the first call before you have to power cycle it. VoLTE doesn't work so you have to use 2G mode if you want to receive calls.
For the uninitiated, what is that? I am using lineageos on oneplus 6t at the mo
Linux operating system that is compatible with a few of android phones.
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/OnePlus_6T_(oneplus-fajita)
Very cool! Is the battery life any good? Tempted to try it
Battery life has been excellent on the oneplus6. As others have said, there are some major issues, such as GPS and the camera not working at all. Calls were giving me issues a few months ago, but nowadays with "edge" (the latest release) they're quite reliable.
With all the bugs and problems, I could use PostmarketOS every day with minimal issues, I used it exclusively for just over a week and it was fine. I think in ~2-3 years I'll be using Linux on mobile as my main device.
Battery life is pretty decent, but I haven't had a 100% success rate with some of the basics like calls and texts. I've enjoyed using it as a kind of mini-tablet though, with no SIM (will keep trying again periodically).
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The big sticking point for me is the camera. It seems like they all have bad (or even non-functioning) cameras. I don't own a camera. My phone is my camera. I can't switch to a phone that can't be my camera.
I have been daily driving a PinePhone/Pro but I keep my old Galaxy Note 8 close by if I'm going anywhere I want a camera.
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Ubuntu Touch on an Android phone might provide some middle ground. I have an old Nexus 6P with Ubuntu Touch on it, the camera is performing surprisingly well - better than some popular open source camera apps I have tried on Android. :)
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Purism is a fucking scam company. Look intoFairPhonre or just do what most of us do: get a Pixel and reinstall without gapps
Ah yes, Librem, 100$ aliexpress phone specs for flagship prices lol
I don't think so. They providing GNU/Linux phone and invest money into mobile development for Linux. I would not recommend buying their Librem (better buy PinePhone Pro instead if you want GNU/Linux), but they definitely not a scam company.
I paid $2,000 for a laptop. It broke the same week it arrived. I returned it. They said they'd give me my money back.
That was about a year ago. I'm still waiting for my refund. They keep say it's coming soon and won't give me an ETA.
That's not a scam?
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Buddy had one. Second-hand, it seemed like a tremendous pain in the ass, didn't allow him to do most things, and in the end it seemed a moot point. The radios are all closed source/proprietary, it connects to closed source/proprietary/corporate-controlled towers, and you're sending data to people running totally insecure devices. Ultimately his use case was to just establish a VPN connection to his home computer and route everything through that.
I can see getting into a Linux phone for the interest of the operating system and trying to push the technology, but if it's a security/privacy issue, I think you're much better off either using a dumbphone or a burner.
Yeah I'm mainly interested in the tech and pushing it as an option. Android ROMs are waaaaay better for privacy/security. It's hard to recommend a Linux phone unless you're a techie, Linux enthusiast, or a dev.
I don't have one yet but I'd like to try one when I can casually spend a few hundred bucks on one.
I started daily driving a PinePhone with Mobian over two years ago, upgraded to a PinePhonePro when they first came out, and then I finally got my Librem5 about a month ago. They have come a long way. The core functions you'd expect from a phone work; calls, texts (SMS and MMS), camera (pictures and video), email, web browsing, all that works perfectly fine on my Librem5. However, I understand they are not for everyone. While there are things like twitter and mastodon clients for Linux you are not going to get a banking app for a Linux phone (for example). I just use the browser for those kinds of things though.
The things keeping me from fully migrating to Linux on mobile are apps like Uber/lyft. They don't have a web ui version, but I actually use them often. Also google maps navigation doesnt have any realistic alternative in my experience.
Uber and lyft do have web versions you can use to use the service, however app notification services and more detail stuff on the driver are not available like it is on the app versions.
For lyft: https://ride.lyft.com/
For uber: https://www.uber.com/us/en/ride/
As far as maps, i used this when i had ubuntu phone, it was pure maps running offline with osm scout server. I had to go on a browser to get the coordinates of where i wanted to go and input that on the puremaps. Its an extra step but once i saved the default locations it made it easier use.
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I'm using a Librem 5 for about two months now very happily, but I admit its not yet for everyone.
my librem 5 just sits in my drawer, not usable as a primary smartphone IMHO.
Have the PinePhone and PP Pro. Partial to SailfishOS on both. It has the most smartphone feel if you will. Like with most the camera is pretty much a no go but I rarely use them anyway.
Do you use the PinePhone as a daily driver, or just for tinkering?
Just for tinkering so far. I have a habit of tossing the devices aside for long periods of time when an OS breaks badly. 😁
Technically SailfishOS handles most of the requirements to make the device a daily-driver-in-training. All but one of my Android devices are VoIP now. Getting away from carrier-based stuff (and saving money).
At the moment there isn't really anything usable on the mobile linux side (SIP, calls via XMPP - I have JMP.chat numbers) that I am aware of. On SFOS that is. Though I can use movim via browser.
Guess it is time I took the devices seriously and try to use them more regularly.
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Define user-friendly...
PostmarketOS or Mobian
After having had a Nokia N900 they are a big disappointment. Especially from a performance standpoint. I have no idea why that is. Especially if I compare them to something like an old Raspberry Pi which can still give you a good desktop experience.
I still use my N900, basically just for ssh over wifi these days. It is so so so much better than typing on a virtual keyboard, especially in a terminal where I have keyboard shortcuts set up for home/end/pgup/pgdn/tab/etc. The original Nokia battery from 2009 is still live and kicking! The keyboard and slide form factor were great. Even the resistive touch screen, when used with the stylus, is very accurate.
The only usable distro is sailfishos, but it is not fully free software. It even has android app support.
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Did the same as you. On CalyxOS on a Pixel 5 ATM. Figured I'd circle back & try my PinePhone again at some point.
i do love my choice so far. my also came with email an cloud storage so i have taken steps to deggoole more of my life
I have a librem 5, i use it to make/receive calls and it seems to work fine, though for anything else it is too anemic. Also eats through the battery like crazy, even shut down, it slowly drains.
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