lemmeee

Ah, I see. It's often hard to tell if some issue is still there if I don't experience it myself. Some things get solved eventually, but you have to run the latest software (and I'm not) and then test things to see it. I think nowadays people recommend to install the libre modem firmware, so that's also another variable.

Cool!

I use Mobian with Phosh too! What I love about Mobian is that it's just a small overlay on top of Debian. The project's goal is literally to upstream everything into Debian and to stop existing. You can see that it doesn't add a lot of packages: https://packages.mobian.org

Yeah, you are right about ARM. It seems to be true about RISC-V as well. It's so weird that so many people think those kinds of devices will be good for us. Sometimes I watch reviews of single board computers on YouTube and the reviewers never mention that the device can't run mainline Linux. They can't install Debian from debian.org on them. So instead they install some distro provided by the manufacturer and for some reason they are just fine with that. Raspberry PI is the same and almost nobody seems to be talking about this. So that's why I'm not sure if you can install a normal distro on PinePhone Pro or Librem 5, even though they can run mainline Linux.

Also ARM SoC manufacturers don't seem to try to have upstream Linux support. So I think that's why PinePhone uses a 2010 SoC (if I remember correctly) and Pro uses a 2016 SoC. It's a bad platform.

It's hard to say if it will work for you. For some people it does and for others it doesn't. It's just something you would have to see for yourself and it might require some time to set everything up the way you want it. It's a device that requires tinkering. Voyager seems to have a web version and so does FluffyChat. I use Nheko Matrix client (available in Mobian/Debian repo) - it's a native app that works pretty well. I don't know about the other apps, but in general you can run Android apps through Waydroid. Maybe those would work too.

There are no push notifications, so if you want the phone to suspend and still receive Matrix notifications, you would have to setup a script that will wake the phone up periodically.

Pictures (taking and viewing, maybe nextcloud upload but that could be done by a script as well)

This works on the original PinePhone, but the camera itself is pretty bad. PinePhone Pro has a decent one, but I'm not sure what the current state of that is. My understanding is that it works, but the pictures might not look that great. I think it's only one guy working on the camera app and he is currently working on a new version: https://blog.brixit.nl/fixing-the-megapixels-sensor-linearization/. For syncing files with a desktop I use SyncThing, but Nextcloud should probably work too. For sending just a few specific files from time to time you could use KDE Connect or even just SSH.

Web browser

That works. I use Firefox. PinePhone doesn't have a lot of RAM, though, so you won't be able to have a lot of tabs open at once.

Music

Definitely works. I use Lollypop app (available in Mobian/Debian), which works well on a mobile screen. The phone has a headphone jack if you need it. The speaker isn't very good.

Calls

This works, but audio quality during phone calls isn't always good. There also seem to be some modem issues on PinePhone Pro: https://zerwuerfnis.org/daily-driving-the-pinephone-pro. I think it's currently recommended to install the free modem firmware and I'm not sure if the author was using that (the phone doesn't come with it installed).

I'm not sure if MMS works (SMS does), since I don't use that. Support for emergency broadcasts is now being added to Phosh: https://phosh.mobi/posts/cellbroadcast/

You should also know that the battery life isn't very good. So if you use the phone a lot, you might need either an extended battery case or spare batteries (the battery is replaceable) or the keyboard addon.

Edit: I have a stupid idea! I fondly remember my blackberry from back in the day. Obviously its not for the mainstream but pinephone isnt either. Wouldnt a step back to a blackberry design be pretty awesome for us nerds? :)

I don't know which one you mean, but I would love to have a slider keyboard! Technically you could make one and I've been wondering how hard that would be. PinePhone has some pins on the back that you could use - one of them is i2c. The keyboard addon from Pine64 uses them (they have other addons too). It's probably a lot of work to make something like that, though.

Interesting! I would love to see a progress update video some day, even if the project isn't finished.

It's certainly great that you can install any distro with mainline kernel on the deck (even if some things don't work). But my point was that Valve doesn't care about user freedom. Their OS and the Steam client are proprietary. If they made a GNU/Linux phone, there is no guarantee that you would be able to install a free distro and it almost certainly would come with non free software by default, which would be bad.

Would love to see an open phone you can easily run your own distribution on without jumping through hoops.

I think PinePhone Pro and Librem 5 can run a mainline kernel. It's possible that some things won't work, but a lot of stuff has been upstreamed. I'm curious if you can easily install an ARM build of Debian on them, but couldn't find any information last time I looked it up.

But phones are hard. An x86 phone with decent battery life is even harder. But one can dream.

Oh yeah, that is the dream. I wonder how are the current mobile Ryzen CPUs. I'm curious if there is any that could work well in a phone.

Not all Linux distributions use GNU.

Almost all popular ones do.

I daily drive mine and it's not good, but I prefer that than running spyware.

GNU-like Linux

PinePhone and Librem 5 actually run GNU/Linux. Same software that you can run on desktop. Only Ubuntu Touch uses Android kernel I think.

But it's not the same Linux kernel that we use on desktop.

I daily drive mine and haven't noticed any missed calls, but maybe I'm just lucky or it's the Pro version that has the issue. The battery life can be increased with extended cases, but the performance will always suck and there are lots of annoying software issues too.

Can't do anything about the camera, but there are extended battery cases that you can get. I got the keyboard addon with the battery and that helps, but it's also pretty big and heavy.