PINE64 has announced the upcoming release of the PinePhone Pro. Let's take a look at its capabilities and see if it's a good daily driver candidate.
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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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We can make it a daily driver. But we need many years of development and to support early adopters. I think someday it is possible
That’s what waydroid and anbox are for. We only need to get a small subset of features working and then we can mooch off the android ecosystem like android mooched off linux
To be absolute honest, I cannot care less about KDE or anything being stable on my phone, nor running Firefox or Retroarch. Being a phone, its most critical job is making calls and not missing any calls and messages.
If the devs - and I understand most of them are unpaid volunteers - can’t make fancy packages work stably, can’t they focus on the drivers? Can’t the Pine Phone company choose a really easy-to-work-with MODEM? Why spend hundreds of hours on an SoC with bad upstream Linux kernel support? Pine Phone needs to prioritise its to-do list items.
As I see it, Pine Phone series isn’t gaining the popularity it needs for the years to come. The more people use it, the bigger chance someone will come along to contribute.
The PinePhone and PinePhone Pro hardware is specifically designed to use chips with good mainline Linux support. Same for the modem with some additional legal constraints.
The ARM and smartphone hardware space is an incredible mess (largely due to anti-competitive behaviour of Qualcomm), so even the best effort of Pine64 to do exactly what you demand is less then ideal.
Pine64 is already doing miracles at finding easy to support hardware.
No. What matters is a FLOSS software stack like Mobian and it needs an ecosystem of applications and a large enough userbase. The hardware can be a regular PinePhone, or a PinePhone Pro or a Librem Phone or something else in future.
I think so. Pine phone is pretty good already.
Have you actually used one? I was reading a review and the OS is so bad that people were missing text messages quite often. They just wouldn’t get delivered.
I am daily-driving a pinephone for a few months now, and YES it is not perfect yet. YES the modem has flaws (but as-libre-as-can-be software distro for the modem exist and it’s progressing fast!). YES if what you care the most in your life is receiving SMS, then don’t rely on a pinephone as a primary device for that task.
Yet, if you’re interesting in practicing everyday mobile computing freedom, with as much libre-software as one can possibly can -on such terribly bad platform as mobile computers equipped with baseband chips!- then the pinephone is for you.
Not only you can chose in betwen dozens distros, but all of them progress every single day. Every update on some git HEAD and bleeding edge distros may incur that some stuff doesnt “work” all the time, but again: receiving SMS is not what freedom is about, is it?
So if you don’t plan on doing a bit of sysadmin every now and then, well… i guess you’ll have to wait a bit more. To me that every day effort is not only rewarding, but also an occasion to contribute to vibrant communities and give back, even just by patiently daily-driving and giving feedback, filing in issues, etc.
Daily-driving a pinephone (postmarketOS+sxmo in my case) is much more rewarding an effort to me than the free labour that most people give away every day to companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. by their practice of predatory mobile computing… even if they do get their SMS alright. ;)
I think you inspired me to dig out my pinephone and give it another try. When i tried before hardware acceleration wasnt working on most distros and everything lagged extremely, has that improved?
well sxmo with wayland is just flying! and so low on resources… unsure about hardware acceleration though…
Im typing on one now. Yeah i miss calls every now and then. It gets better with every update
I have one as a daily driver. The thing to understand is that a lot of significant updates happen often since it’s a beta, and not every update is automatic. For example, updating the kernel simply requires one to use the terminal, software update from the distro just won’t do it.