I think I’m reading this blogpost correctly: Mobian devs working on maintaining Linux kernel support for Pinephone painted themselves into a corner with tech debt, and may not be able to continue porting new kernel updates. Pinephone Pro runs a different chipset with wider community support, so it’s not affected.
I didn’t see any communities or articles talking about this, so either it’s not a big deal, or nobody is talking about it.
I couldn’t believe the spec of that pile of garbage when i first saw it. The worst being that It has a Mali-400 MP2 (2 cores, the most famous and used varient is MP4 with 4 cores), a GPU from 2008. I know it’s supposed to run linux but they choose the cheapest SOC they could find and then asked the seller if he had any unsold SOCs from the last decade they could use instead.
The saddest part is that when I pointed this, I was always told that it’s made for tinkerers and not users, but this doesn’t excuse the use of extremely outdated hardware. I didn’t expect the latest powerhouse but even 30$ Chinese tvboxes had the latest rockchip SOCs…
The phone is from 2019 and i think even back then the SoC was a compromise.
It has more quirks. There have been some hardware issues. And mainline Linux and a Linux Desktop is still struggling today with power management. Like getting chat messages while it’s asleep. It’s really not for use except for tinkerers.
But I’d agree. A newer, properly usable and powerful Linux phone would be great. Idk if there are good SoCs out there with fully open-source drivers and bootloader. And power consumption that lasts you a day.
A newer, properly usable and powerful Linux phone would be great.
Totally ! Honestly, when i first heard of a linux phone, I had stars in my eyes. I expected medium-low tier specs but that would likely more than enough to for Linux. The actual specs made me cringe because the phone was e-waste before even launch. I think I actually over exaggerated calling it a piece of garbage, I just expected too much from a small company on a niche market.
Yeah, a Nokia N950 with a proper SoC and 8GB of RAM. Or something like the APU from the Steam Deck.
That’d be great 🤗
AMD APUs are beasts !. That would be a computer disguising as a phone. Now, that’s what I would call a revolutionary product. Kinda like Samsung Dex but libre.
I think back in the day, we had more diversity on the market. In the pre-smart-phone era Nokia came out with silly keyboard designs regularly. We had blackberrys at one time. And now they all look the same. Slightly different form-factor but that’s about it. You can spend $1200 to get a status-symbol phone but that does practically the same my $350 phone does. (Okay, Samsung tries silly flip-phones but I don’t like them.) All the more recent attempts kinda failed. Like Motorola doing attachable acessories, or Google trying to invent a modular phone. (I believe Samsung Dex, LG’s WebOS etc are also a thing of the past.)
I’d like some company to be bold and try new things. For Linux it’d be probably enough if some current SoC got free software support (and drivers for the camera, peripherals etc). We could buy a standard phone then. But currently I don’t see that happening. All the phones with mainline support are very old and/or severely underpowered. And there is no one phone with a big free software community behind it. Well, Pine64 tried…
Valve seems to be more successful with their Linux endeavours. Maybe we can expect more from that corner of portable Linux devices. And the Steam Deck costs like half an S23 Ultra (or iPhone).
And mainline Linux and a Linux Desktop is still struggling today with power management. Like getting chat messages while it’s asleep.
And the really sad thing is that the power management improvements devs have been working on for the PinePhone are really very specific to that particular device and don’t help mobile Linux in general (so it’s basically wasted effort).
Well, to do it properly I believe we need a whole API for applications that does connected standy. (Like Android Apps have)
Well, let me put it plainly, if you are selling better, I’m buying. So far the one thing Pine has done better than a lot of people talking is doing. They are not the only ones, e.g Purism, but at that price range and who actually did deliver I haven’t seen better. Pointers welcomed.
Do you think releasing a phone with hardware that is 10 years ou of date is logical ? let’s transpose it to the laptop market. What if system76 sold a laptops with a Pentium 3.x Ghz Core 2 duo, 4GB ddr3 and a Radeon HD 3xxx GPU and a 240 HDD for the price of a current medium-low end computer ?
I’m not sure what your point is. I’m not arguing that you are wrong, I’m saying it’s “just” talk, meanwhile I’m ready, today, to buy better if you can provide.
I’m saying it’s “just” talk, meanwhile I’m ready, today, to but better if you can provide.
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A 200 dollar Xiaomi phone or a used pixel phone is at least 10x more powerful than the pinphone. After unlocking the bootloader and rooting it, you can use termux and have a linux environment at hand. You can even install a DE and access it. Enjoy. The plus is that you don’t lose any compatibility with android apps .
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I really hope you don’t go around telling anyone that is criticizing something to just make a better version, do you ? You don’t need to be chef to say bad food is bad. To make it easier to understand let’s transpose it again : There’s a novel motor design that is free and open source. Someone make a car using it and sell it but the car can’t go beyond 20km/h and has a range of 50km. Would you tell anyone that says it’s unusable to just make a better one ??
You focus on performance while I focus on the ability to tinker. That’s perfectly legitimate and we don’t have to have the same needs. It though shows me that we don’t have the same understanding about the point of Pine64, especially as you mention Termux or rooting (which I’ve both used and done numerous times, sadly) as if it was equivalent to selling an actual Linux phone in the first place. I actually do NOT want Android. The point I believe is not to sell a replacement for end users today (even though, clearly, it would be nice, and I believe Purism is closer to that) as it says on the product page, but rather show that a legitimate (again, not hacks) alternative is possible but it must be built by the community. And yes, I do tell people who make criticism that it’s not enough because very often it shows what I believe is the case here, a lack of understanding of what it takes. That being said, again, I sincerely enjoy being proven wrong (means I can learn, new opportunities), hence why I’m not teasing you when I say I can put my money where my mouth is if you can do better. I believe in fact that’s what open source is all about, we’re in it together, to do better, to be better.
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I’ve recently decided to just focus on turning my OG pinephone into a mobile hotspot (and maybe running some remote services on it eventually). It’s booting postmarketos but just to a login shell. I ssh into it from the usb tether if I need to make changes. It’s working pretty well but sometimes after several hours the modem drops off the mobile network and I can’t get it to reconnect even by hard power cycling. The next day when I pull it out again it has reconnected and works again.
Couldnt you also just use a WWAN adapter? I dont know what Laptops have that.
I didn’t see any communities or articles talking about this, so either it’s not a big deal, or nobody is talking about it.
More than likely very few people own a pinephone, and the few that do don’t read pinephone news. Thanks for posting this.
As for me, I’m not buying another pinephone/GNU+Linux compatible device until both the community and the manufacturer get their shit figured out. I bought the PInephone expecting it to one day become more useful to me, so I guess that’s on me.
The pinephone is cool but so underpowered. Hoping to get some use out of of it as a audio looper controller. Looks like I can anticipate a sharp drop in support in the next year or two.
Mobian devs working on maintaining Linux kernel support for Pinephone painted themselves into a corner with tech debt
Not the Mobian devs but megi and everyone who used his kernel. Which is everyone.
