this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I have a Pine phone that I bought some time ago.
I tried a couple of distros/environments:
My experience: As a basic phone, it mostly works. Everything else is pretty bad. The Pine phone is underpowered, the environments are not very well optimised and polished, basic browsing was almost unusable, things didn't work properly, I had to use the CLI to get around UI issues (which is very sucky on a phone), etc. Battery life is bad, the camera is a joke (if it works), the screen has dead pixels after less than a year, it's not a great picture.
I fully support what Pine phone is trying to do, in fact I bought 2 of them and I don't regret buying them, but know what you are getting into. It's nowhere near ready for mass adoption. If you're a hobbyist then it's a fun toy to play around with.
Purism is more expensive/better hardware and uses the Phosh graphical shell. I haven't tried it but I imagine the experience is a lot more polished. You could probably use that as a daily driver if you were happy to give up most of the apps / quality of life stuff your spyware phone currently does for you.
If you're not, then going the degoogled route is probably your best choice.
I owned a Pine Phone Pro for a while and it was a disaster. The software is still coming together, which is expected, but the hardware was also hobby project grade. As the previous poster mentioned, battery, camera, and screen were all bad, and on top of that the phone would refuse to charge with most chargers and could not charge at all while not booted, so once the battery was dead you had zero recourse beyond an external charger. The clamshell keyboard also wouldn't work without shimming the pogo pin connectors forward, and even then it was hit or miss. The company was terrible to deal with and only finally accepted a return after escalating a dispute with Paypal. I hate dumping on a company providing hardware for mobile Linux, but these guys seriously do more harm than good.
Strongly disagree. All things you mentioned are software issues. And they providing a phone with a bad specs intentionally. Because no one will buy an expensive GNU/Linux phone. We simply do not have software. The idea is to provide relatively cheap hardware, so developers can start working on it. And another reason was to provide hardware that have some GNU/Linux support already to avoid asking community to start from scratch. Very few phones can run GNU/Linux because of lack of drivers.
And yes, the keyboard is bad hardware-wise, I not satisfied with it either. But Pine did a lot for GNU/Linux on phones. Enthusiasts started writing software seriously only after PinePhone appearance.
There's a difference between budget or low end components and flawed implementation or design. I didn't go in expecting a newer Snapdragon and a 144hz display- but neither did I go in expecting that it couldn't charge when dead. I didn't go to Denny's expecting filet mignon, but neither was I expecting a dirty tennis shoe on a plate. That was the whole point of my comment. The last thing mobile Linux needs is for people's first experience of it to be a semi-functional piece of hacked-together hardware- even if someone's willing to deal with in-dev software, when the thing straight up won't work it's not a good look.
Oh, I'm so sorry, I wanted to write "software". Edited. For example, charging when the phone is dead will be fixed soon with proper bootloader, megi already submitted patches to u-boot. It will also reduce power consumption in suspend.