It is fun to play with, but it is not suitable to use as a primary phone. It has poor battery life and is very slow.
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
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Linux Phones
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Community about running GNU/Linux on phones. Projects like Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, PostmarketOS, Mobian etc. Either on former Android phones or hardware like the PinePhone.
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thanks, any idea what to buy instead? I'm okay with buying an android, and just flashing myself.
A pixel phone, and then you can put any rom on it.
GrapheneOS gives you the most control.
I was trying to avoid google, but whatever, its not that expensive on eBay.
Thanks!
Check in again around the Holiday season. Chances are that Google will sell at or close to a loss.
i doubt theyll go below 100€, plus on eBay my money doesnt go to Google, very happy.
I'm curious about the 100 euro figure. Is that the sum of component costs?
i dont know, thats just ideally the highest i wanna pay for a mobile phone.
Ah right, well that's also totally fair. Glad you found something decent on ebay
The Librem phone from Purism is like Pinephone, but a bit more cohesive and with better specs. Also more expensive, but if you're considering a Linux phone, then Librem might be a better choice
A pixel phone or a fairphone 4. The pixel 3a has alot of support but is old, and the fairphone 4 has alot of support and is newer. Depends on your preference
do you think the pro is more suitable at least computing power wise? like could it run matrix clients / simplex?
I have a PinePhone Pro, and it runs nheko very well. Fractal is a little slower, but still usable. Not sure about Simplex I'm afraid.
My advise is not to buy one. It's a nice idea. But even with the tech enthusiasts and Linux nerds (like me)... A lot of them will tell you it spends most of it's existence in your drawer of unfinished projects.
It's slow, has quite some annoyances and quirks. And by now the chipset that was already old on release, is ancient. It's generally unusable in every-day situations. And the hardware limits what kind of Linux use you'll get out of it. The newer pro version makes it better, but not substancially. And it'll add it's own quirks in return.
And the software (Linux) doesn't work great either. Things have settled down and I don't expect substancial change by now. Yet, you'll have issues with the touchscreen keyboard. Copy-pasting things. Lots of things aren't adapted for mobile. Any browser is sluggish and struggles with playing videos.
I've bought the hardware keyboard, too. And I can't recommend that either. It's just not a great product. It's not great to type on it and it has more quirks. And it constantly drains the battery for me and I expect it to someday discharge the battery to a point where it'll destroy it. I've tried several things and couldn't fix that.
You might be better off buying a regular phone that is supported by postmarketOS. But I don't have any experience with that. And I'm not aware of any good one that I'd recommend at the moment.
oh wow, that's sad :( Thanks for the reply, its weird that in 2024 phones are still so -boring and useless.
I'd love to see some Linux phone again. For me, propably something like the Nokia N950. But I'm fine without a keyboard, too.
Designing a phone from the grounds up, then also getting into the business of manufacturing for the first time... And having to adapt a whole operating system since it wasn't optimized for mobile is just a lot of things at the same time. I'm really impressed by what Pine64 and the community were able to pull off. But it's more a prototype.
I think what we'd need is some modern, normal and attractive phone that is produced by some established (or clever) manufacturer, went through extensive testing and mass production. It'd need to be affordable to attract developers. Have a decent and modern chipset and gain some good mainline Linux support. That always proved to be a bit difficult in the ARM ecosystem. And we'd still need to then proceed and change a lot of things about Linux. As of now it just doesn't have any clever mechanisms to do something like a connected standby... i.e. save power while also listening for instant messenger messages. And ideally you'd like it to receive messages while in your pocket and not just SMS and calls. And we'd have to change a few more desktop apps to be responsive. All of that is quite some work that hasn't been tackled yet.
I'm currently using GrapheneOS for my daily life. Maybe someday I'll find some phone that has all the columns green with the components and features that are supported by a Linux kernel.
If you can afford it, I think the Librem 5 is the best linux-first phone at the moment. Both it and the PinePhone Pro are roughly as fast as each other, but the Librem 5 has a much more premium feel, and the hardware kill switches are much more accessible, if you're into that kind of thing.
Back in the day, when the Librem 5 was $1000+, it was a no-brainer for the PinePhone Pro, but I feel it is much more reasonable to recommend the Librem 5 now.
You can make it work as a daily driver, but I wouldn't want to depend on it for life and death situations. Calling generally doesn't work very well - either one side can't hear the other, or the audio quality is too quiet, or not very good. It's probably possible to fix if you know what you're doing, but I don't know what I'm doing :)
I carry around a dumbphone and a SIM removal tool, so that I can call someone if I really need to. If you're happy to do that, I feel it gives you the best of both worlds.
Otherwise, one alternative is to be an Android-first device, that has good support in PostmarketOS, e.g. the Oneplus 6/6T. Mobile Linux has had such an impact on these devices that the price of these on eBay has gone up in some areas over time :D
Good luck!
Would love more input from Librem 5 owners about this. It seems opinions are, at best, a mixed bag.
Do they actually deliver the phones you buy now?
At least in my case! I ordered this year. It took 2 months, but it did arrive :)
That's still reasonable if you are some typical customer.
@ambitiousslab @urheber > either one side can’t hear the other, or the audio quality is too quiet, or not very good
Which OS are you using? I haven't had call audio issues for ages on PureOS (I'm not a heavy caller though 😜)
I'm running postmarketOS v24.06. I could easily have messed something up though!
@ambitiousslab It's probably PipeWire. AFAIK nobody adjusted the audio pipeline to work there with echo cancellation and noise reduction yet. I wouldn't consider it suitable for phone use until that happens. It's not rocket science, PipeWire is actually more flexible than PulseAudio for this kind of stuff, but... someone has to do it. Switching back to PulseAudio and reproducing the config from PureOS (including ALSA UCM profiles) would likely give you much better experience right now.
@ambitiousslab (I have to admit that it's partially my own fault; I have reworked L5 UCM profiles from the ground up long time ago, but neglected upstreaming them and now there are flawed profiles in upstream repos ☹️)
Thanks for explaining some of the history, it makes some sense and gives me some things to try. Thanks for all the work you've done on the mobile stack as well. It's made my life a lot better. And maybe one day I'll be able to ditch the backup nokia too :)
Sorry if i am late to that party, but i have been daily-driving a pinephone for 4+ years now. 1/ It's not for the faint of heart. it is work. serious admin work. 2/ i chose a hard line of PostMarketOS edge (equiv of debian "unstable" updated continuously) and sxmo (a lovely, experimental interface, fully hackable, lightweight etc.) 3/ most of the shortcomings described by people who tried it only or expected a lot from it are related to comparing it to android or ios. it's a mistake i think. it should be treated as its own thing, with no expectations, and most of the shortcomings can be fixed by adaptation and custom work.. for me: most tasks via CLI (mail, matrix, mastodon, etc.) and lightweight browser, combined with lightweight interface (sxmo) considerably extend battery life. in suspend i get 48h (which is more than most android phones i used before) and with moderat use it lasts way over 24h for me.
I would totally recommend it IF you value computing freedom, autonomy and taking back control of your communication infrastructure and data more than an ideal of "comfort" or standardized streamlined processes modeled after the ones that put everyone in the hands of big US corporations (aka "user-friendly" lol)
Also that feeling that whatever tiny bit you may invent, fix or hack for yourself, can be put back into a wild community of avid trailblazing hackers is invaluable. Yes it's all work, but it's work for you and other people who value freedom. not work for Google and such...
@JoeBidet @urheber I'm one of the "tried Pinephone" people. Not nearly adept enough to do all the CLI work you did. I can edit config files if someone tells me what to type in 😆.
I use a laptop for the fun stuff. A phone to me is for texts and calls. I gave up on the Pinephone because of problems with that. Big one: not waking from sleep to ring. I get about 2 calls a month, but they're the sort I can't miss. After about the 3rd miss, I had to give up. Yes, I'd try again after updates 😖
for sms+calls to work much much there i a little bit of very easy work: to install the "modem distro" instead of the original OS running the modem chip. yes it means you can ssh into your modem and edit its crontab also...:)
@JoeBidet I settled on mobian. I think I tried pmOS (this was back in '21? '20??) and a couple of thers I don't remember. I do remember ssh-ing for something else, never edited crontab though. Sounds interesting! I'll have a look at that. Still have the phone. Be great if I could make it useful 😆
wow! thats very long battery life, my phone right now only lasts for 8 hours, with no to moderate use.
I'm betting on 2 phones on eBay right now, and if I don't get either, I'll get a pine phone.
Thank you so much!