this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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I used a pinephone as a daily driver for a year. It served me fine. Waydroid for any android apps I absolutely couldn't go without.
I believe you, but the hard part about "It was good enough for me" is that an old Nokia brick phone is "good enough" for some people. I have no idea what your standards are.
Maybe there's a way to get it to that state. But the lock screen on my pinephone pro stutters, much less "making apps work". I was able to do all the things I wanted to do, it just was a horrible experience.
I bought two pinephones. I REALLY want this to work out. I'm not some sort of anti-linux phone antagonist. I've tried to make it work personally. I would love to know what the setup (what OS, phosh, etc?) I need to make my devices work great, if they are truly that usable.
edit: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Pro#State_of_the_software
The "official" state of the software from pine64.org itself states the modem crashes often and results in missed calls, camera still a WIP, and no push notifications when the phone sleeps (so the phone just never sleeps, thus the terrible battery, i presume).
"Good enough" feels like it's only true if you're the kind of person who otherwise argues that smart phones are bad, and not if you're the kind of person who uses your phone as a multi-tool in your pocket.
I distro-hopped a bit, but if I'm remembering correctly I settled on Mobian with Phosh. I don't like desktop Gnome but Phosh is nice IMO. It's also smooth if a bit slow due to the age of the hardware. It's not a stuttery slowness. Plasma mobile seems a bit further behind in that regard.
This was an original PinePhone, not the Pro, so maybe the community simply had more time to mature the software (there's not exactly many developers). I still have it but the screen is smashed and I need to replace it.
Note: this was over a year ago, things have most likely changed, maybe Plasma mobile is where Phosh is now.
The main difference is that the old Nokia phone runs proprietary software. You also can't run any desktop programs or apps on it. But PinePhone requires GNU/Linux experience and sometimes workarounds are needed.
I haven't noticed any missed calls on my original PinePhone, so this is surprising. I don't have the Pro version to check, but the cited bug report is a year old, so it might be no longer the case. On the other hand, this recent blog post says there are some issues with the modem and some other strange bugs. That would be a shame, because it's been 2 years since its release and I was hoping to switch to it at some point.
I think there is only one guy working on the software. Here is his last blog post, if you are curious: https://blog.brixit.nl/fixing-the-megapixels-sensor-linearization/
There are no push notifications. So you won't be notified when you receive a message in some app, while the phone is suspended. As a workaround you can use a script to wake the phone up periodically. Short battery life is caused by an old and inefficient SoC, not by software, so there is nothing we can do about that other than getting a bigger case and a bigger battery (some people do that).
The point was that different people have different standards. There are a lot of people on places like HN that will say things like "People use their phone too much, a Nokia has everything that everyone needs! That's what I use!" without accounting for other people's use cases. That's a very self centric view. I need X, some people might need X+Y or X-Z. If you have to hedge your "it's good enough" with "if you can handle these 100 workarounds" then it's more accurate to say "it's not good enough, unless you're ok dealing with these 100 workarounds."
That's awesome. I rarely answer phone calls anyway, so that doesn't impact me much. This was purely reflective of the state of things. "Probably fine" and "definitely works" can be a MAJOR difference in the scope of daily driver readiness for most people.
The camera on my pinephone actually opens and can take pictures. it just looks terrible. To the degree that I'm at least 75% sure that it's a sensor issue, and no amount of software tuning is going to bring the sensor up to the level of other phones. Considering my primary use for my phone is taking pictures, "the camera works, but its terrible" doesn't fit my use case (admittedly, this may be a specific to me use case).
Oh. yeah. That's probably a deal breaker for most people too.
And to re-iterate. I can totally see this being a usable device. I own two. I've seen how it can perform. and I'm excited for the possibilities. It just feels a bit too jank for me still, and im pretty tolerant of jank. If other people are more tolerant than me, I applaud them.
Ah, you are right about that. But I do wish that freedom was the main goal for people, because that's the point of the Free Software movement. Switching to GNU/Linux is inconvenient too and there might be things that a person won't be able to do on it. Obviously an average person won't be able to handle a PinePhone, so I don't have hope they will try (and they probably shouldn't), but an average GNU/Linux user might. It all depends on how much a person values freedom. But at the same time I understand that getting freedom is usually a gradual journey, which might take a lot of time.
I also don't answer many phone calls, so it's possible I was just lucky or haven't noticed.
If you are talking about the original PinePhone, then yes, it's a 5 megapixel camera and it will always be terrible. PinePhone Pro's camera is much better, though. There seems to be a lot of very technical stuff that goes into making pictures look good. For example stuff like auto-exposure and color correction. Here is a quote from the developer of the Megapixels camera app from the blog post that I linked:
I have a separate camera for taking photos, but I understand the need to have one in a phone that you can take with you everywhere.
Yeah, push notifications probably won't be solved for a while. There is some hope, though:
https://github.com/the-modem-distro/pinephone_modem_sdk/releases/tag/0.7.4