The SoC is not very power efficient. There aren't many to choose from. In case of PinePhone Pro it's a 2016 SoC running modern software.
lemmeee
I wrote a comment that might help you with your research: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/9202570
This thread contains some information too: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/9166918
When I was using my PinePhone I don’t think I was able to get music to play in the background for example. I imagine this has been fixed by now but it was still frustrating.
I've never had such issue and I've never heard of it, so it must be some old bug that was fixed long time ago.
Using the word Linux to describe the operating system makes no sense in general. You never know if someone is talking about the OS or the kernel. GNU was developed by different people with a different philosophy and goals. When people say Linux, they usually mean GNU/Linux (Linux Mint, Arch Linux, etc). But there is also Alpine Linux, which doesn't use GNU at all, so it's not exactly the same thing. And why even name the OS after the kernel? Doesn't the name Alpine Linux sound like it's just a fork of Linux? It's super confusing and people mix it up all the time, even this community of GNU/Linux users and under this post.
Android uses a heavily modified fork of Linux, so it doesn't use the same Linux that we use on desktop and it's definitely not a GNU/Linux operating system. So I don't know if we can call it "Linux".
Then there is Ubuntu Touch and I don't even know how to call that. GNU/Android maybe?
But the phones that we are talking about here I would say that those are GNU/Linux phones. Because even though many people run postmarketOS on them, they are designed to run GNU/Linux and they are shipped with it. But the phones designed to run Ubuntu Touch are something else. Maybe we should just call them Android phones, because I think that's what they are mostly designed to run.
Pine64 has nothing to do with it, but it’s their hardware, so they should.
I agree. I wish we had better companies making GNU/Linux phones, but this is all we have for now. It's either Pine64 or Purism.
The camera works on my pinephone, and it takes pictures that remind me of the digital camera I had in 1999 that saved images to floppy disks.
Yeah, the original PinePhone has only a 5 megapixel camera. PinePhone Pro's camera is way better, but I'm not sure about the current state of software support. The author of the Megapixels camera app is working on a new, improved version, but it seems very complicated: https://blog.brixit.nl/fixing-the-megapixels-sensor-linearization/
Bitwarden would run, but it was running as a desktop app and was a pain to use (no lib handy here), and it obviously wasn’t going to offer to auto fill across the entire OS.
I use Gnome's Secrets (available in Mobian Bookworm). It works well on mobile, but I don't know about autofill. For 2fa you can use Gnome Authenticator (not available in Mobian Bookworm) or Numberstation (available in Mobian Bookworm).
Phone worked, but I don’t receive enough calls to validate it, and pine’s own wiki states that the there are modem issues. It may be perfectly fine for me, but not something i fully trust, and that’s a factor in acceptance.
You would just have to test it. I only have the original PinePhone with the libre modem firmware and I haven't noticed any missed calls, but I don't get a lot of calls in general. According to this recent blog post there seem to be some modem issues with PinePhone Pro (but I'm not sure if that includes missed calls): https://zerwuerfnis.org/daily-driving-the-pinephone-pro
and signal I would assume I would have to waydroid. But I never got waydroid set up. Hopefully that’s something that has gotten easier in the past 2 years. 2 years ago there was multiple hoops to jump through with installing kernel modules or something, and seeing a list of steps to take (and not just being able to install it from a repo in 1 go), when I was already dealing with performance issues, I just assumed it wasn’t going to be worth it.
Ah, that sounds painful. I've never used Waydroid, but a lot of people say it works well for them. I don't see it packaged in Debian or Mobian, but 2 years is a lot of time in software development, so maybe it's easier now. There is also some alternative Signal client called Axolotl. Some people use it, but I don't fully understand how it works, so you would have to investigate on your own.
Who knows, maybe I’ll give it a try again and come to a more favorable “it’s fine i guess, but still not as good as my 2017 android phone in any capacity except ‘not google’”
Yeah, it probably won't be as good. It requires GNU/Linux experience and some workarounds. But if you manage to set it up in a way that makes you use Android less, that would be pretty great.
You are talking about the high prices of the EU store? Yeah, that pissed me off too. The only thing you are getting for paying this much is 2 years of warranty (the American store gives like 30 days or something), but that doesn't justify the price increase for me. You also get free shipping, but shipping doesn't cost this much. If you order from the American store, you will have to pay the VAT tax and possibly some other fee, so you will probably end up paying about the same. It sucks.
You might be able to get a used one, though. I've seem people sell them on Pine64's forum and on reddit.
Awesome! It will probably keep you busy for more than a week, unless you get bored with it :D. I don't tinker all the time with mine, but here is something I've been trying lately (the instructions/bugs shown in the video are outdated though and some steps are no longer necessary): https://youtu.be/ffEGdbXt2Qo
The point was that different people have different standards.
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.
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.
I also don't answer many phone calls, so it's possible I was just lucky or haven't noticed.
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).
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:
Making a piece of software that dumps camera frames from V4L2 into a file is not very difficult to do, that's only a few hundred lines for C code. Figuring out why the pictures look cheap is a way harder challenge.
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.
Oh. yeah. That’s probably a deal breaker for most people too.
Yeah, push notifications probably won't be solved for a while. There is some hope, though:
Internal WDS (Wireless Data Service) Client (in BETA!, expect problems)
Allows you to connect to the internet directly from the modem's userspace (only IPv4 for now, sorry!)
Allows for always on networking in the modem no matter if your PinePhone is sleeping
https://github.com/the-modem-distro/pinephone_modem_sdk/releases/tag/0.7.4
Thanks for clarifying. I also use the libre firmware and sometimes the modem doesn't wake up from suspend when I unlock the phone (I sometimes also have to restart wifi with a script). So maybe I just didn't notice the missed calls or something.
Lately I found that there is some USB controller and I saw some messages about it when running dmesg:
So maybe that causes the modem issues. When I use the keyboard addon, I can't get any USB device to work when plugging it to the phone and I suspect that might be a connected problem too. I don't know much about hardware, tough.
I'm glad I didn't scare you, haha! There is also another comment that I wrote, which contains a few more details: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/9202570
That makes sense, but there are other popular mobile distros too. For example: Manjaro ARM and Mobian (mobile Debian).
Flameshot should work.