One point that should be repeated ad infinitum for those reading about the Pinephone for the 1st time: it's all about the freedom, not performance. One doesn't buy the Pinephone to brag about its technical achievements with friends, but rather to contribute building an ecosystem, even just by spreading the word, of people who put freedom and privacy above everything.
I also should be repeated ad infinitum why its hardware is limited compared to other devices, and I don't mean the well known ones but also those built by the hundreds of thousands by Chinese factories then relabeled under a dozen different lesser known brands. The reason is that Pine64 had to make all of it from scratch since obtaining any meaningful technical information from those hardware makers is impossible, so they had literally to pick what hardware had the most open documentation available.
Supporting them is our way to send a strong message: "we've had enough of your black boxes". Big players of course won't give a flying damn since the market of privacy conscious users wouldn't represent a fraction of a fraction of their user base, but hopefully that will help convincing other manufacturers to publish their specs.
Phones aside, there are other ways to help them. I'm waiting for a beefier version of the Pinetab, am considering the PineBook pro (with EU keyboard which is out of stock) and in the meantime got their mini solder iron which works surprisingly well (and I have two Wellers).
To me the PinePhone and other Linux phones are also about performance. Yes the MVP prototypes will always suck and you would only buy these for freedom's sake, but a truly unified software platform encompassing both mobile and mainstream computing all running on openly documented reference hardware, will be far superior technically to what we have today.
As a purism owner, and a long-time linux user... I think that is a fantasy statement.
Theoretically, there could be an open platform like the PC (with usb + pcie + ATX case/power supply + etc..) with open interfaces. However the reason this came into existence was by microsoft's design to commoditize the hardware to drive software sales of its (closed) operating system.
With cellphones all of those interfaces are being subsumed so the trend is one chip + a display + a battery. The chip is IP of many vendors.
Additionally, the linux distributions have not had the highest performance. For example, frequently there is poor or no graphics acceleration.
I think Linux will always be behind commercial/proprietary platforms. One could arguably say that the iphone is a multi-billion dollar platform, with more careful engineering, development and tuning than any other device on the planet.
That said - I do believe linux based phones are nearing that "good enough" stage where dedicated users can make it work for them and people may at least have a choice.
> I think Linux will always be behind commercial/proprietary platforms. One could arguably say that the iphone is a multi-billion dollar platform
One could have expected the same wrt. proprietary *NIX workstation and server hardware in the 1980s and 1990s, and where are those today? Linux is dominating that market. Embedded brings more trouble because the hardware, far from being a "multi billion dollar" endeavor, is all-too-often entirely undocumented and sloppily hacked together, where a barely workable state is considered "good enough" for shipping. But even there, Linux is easily gaining ground over proprietary OS's. The underlying dynamic is clear enough.
> One could have expected the same wrt. proprietary *NIX workstation and server hardware in the 1980s and 1990s, and where are those today?
Server hardware is of course commodity and dominated by Linux.
The high end workstation proprietary workstation market seems pretty alive and dominated but a closed Unix still.
> Embedded brings more trouble because the hardware, far from being a "multi billion dollar" endeavor, is all-too-often entirely undocumented and sloppily hacked together, where a barely workable state is considered "good enough" for shipping.
But even there, Linux is easily gaining ground over proprietary OS's.
This is true of ‘embedded’ but phones are not embedded.
> The underlying dynamic is clear enough.
I think this is wishful thinking. Embedded and servers are quite different from phones and workstations.
> ...However the reason this came into existence was by microsoft's design to commoditize the hardware to drive software sales of its (closed) operating system.
Don't make the tail wag the dog.
IBM was in control of the hardware design and the rest of the ecosystem, heavily influenced by their previous work on the IBM System/23 DataMaster.
Microsoft just jumped on board for the expected lucrative ride, supplying a CP/M-like OS that they purchased from a local shop (SCP's QDOS).
IBM designed the original ISA bus PC. But with microsoft's non-exclusive agreement it was able to sell MS-DOS, and it kickstarted early clones like compaq. IBM tried to close things down with the PS/2 OS/2 and microchannel, but they couldn't close the barn door.
Besides a license for MSDOS, the PC clone makers also needed a compatible BIOS. Compaq was the first out of the gate with a mostly-compatible IBM PC BIOS.
The IBM PC-compatible BIOS from Phoenix Technologies allowed more companies to jump in the PC clone wars.
> I think Linux will always be behind commercial/proprietary platforms.
the dumb thing of this whole situation is that 50% of the "commercial/proprietary platforms" in this market are android phones, still using Linux as kernel.
It's not a "commodity", it's nearly 30 years of engineering that would take a multi-billion dollar investment to even come close to replicating. If it's so replaceable, why does everyone (except Apple) use Linux? When was the last time you bought an IOT device that ran, say, QNX?
All software is "just plumbing". The shiny-shiny on top is the mere tip of the iceberg and not what makes everything, you know, actually work.
it certainly touches the end user the moment they try to use the device for productivity and realize where the walls of the garden were established. But at that point maybe they're not a "user" anymore.
The whole phone will be a commodity soon if it's not already. When was the last time something felt like a significant innovation/differentiator in a phone?
(Personally I haven't been excited about a new phone feature since the S7's notification LED - and that apparently wasn't important enough to keep in newer versions).
Cameras and the accompanying image processing software have been getting exceptionally good. Not that I'm personally excited about these, but I think it deserves recognition.
Meh. I took some photos with a 10-year-old digicam a couple of weeks ago and it was much the same "marginally nicer than my phone" experience that it was when phones started getting cameras. Thank goodness I could get away from that horrible fake bokeh that recent phones do. I will admit that HDR support can be pretty nice.
Low light performance is also very nice in some phones. But what I'd like to emphasize is how automatic it all is. Surely someone with an entry level DSLR and a bit of Lightroom know-how can outperform an iPhone 11, but it's work to carry it around and apply the postprocessing afterwards, while on the phone it's just a few taps. So what I'd like to say is that it's not an achievement in imaging, but a big leap forward in automation.
totally agree. while I'm optimistic that arm chips will be more open in the data center and embedded space, looks like mobile arm id becoming more proprietary. Intel could shake things up if it starts to work on riscv and brings some of its graphics and wireless tech over to it.
while it is nice to have a powerful phone, it really doesn't need to be any more powerful than what is in a tv set.
> However the reason this came into existence was by microsoft's design to commoditize the hardware to drive software sales of its (closed) operating system.
Couldn't get past your rewriting of history just to paint MS in bad light because you don't like them.
What rewriting of history? The PC (and then volume server) era very much saw previous vertical silos tiled into a horizontal structure with x86 at the processor layer and Windows at the operating system layer. In the 1990s, a lot of computer companies were ready to concede the OS crown to Windows.
(To the degree I'd argue with the statement, it's that it was as much Intel's doing as Microsoft's; Andy Grove even dedicated part of one of his books to this.)
Microsoft didn't set out to commoditize computer hardware, IBM did. IBM literally wrote the manual for IBM AT (later ISA) and then shared it with the world with the intent of commoditizing add-in cards for their PC. IBM however thought that by controlling the BIOS, they would retain control of the PC. COMPAQ reversed engineered the BIOS a year later and essentially dropped control of the PC market into the lap of the owner of DOS, Microsoft.
I think Joel is taking some liberties to push his narrative. Either that or he's regurgitating some nonsense barfed in his ear during his time at Microsoft in the 90s about how it was their plan all along. Microsoft wasn't being savvy with the way it licensed DOS to IBM, they didn't seen the coming reverse engineering of the BIOS. Quite simply, they didn't license DOS exclusively to IBM because they couldn't.
After licensing BASIC, IBM later approached Microsoft to source an OS in part because they had a deadline and because their failure to license CP/M was by virtue of the fact that they were IBM. Gary Kildall heard "IBM" and basically told them to get fucked. Microsoft became their Trojan horse to prevent another Kildall situation.
There's a lot of different stories about the origins of QDOS from Microsoft paying SCP to reverse engineer CP/M to QDOS containing CP/M source code. Regardless, Microsoft didn't have an exclusive license to QDOS when it re-licensed it to IBM. It wasn't a tactical move, Microsoft didn't provide IBM with an exclusive license of QDOS because at the time it simply wasn't there's to give. They managed to acquire ownership of QDOS from SCP prior to the PC launch but again that wasn't with the intent to commoditize computer hardware.
Post PC launch and COMPAQ clone, Microsoft wasn't fully at the helm either. IBM saw the error of their ways and sought to rectify it with PS/2 and MCA. If Microsoft had assumed control then IBM probably wouldn't have teamed up with them to build OS/2. Microsoft did however understand what OS/2 meant for their own bottom line and sought to subvert IBM. I would argue that up until the mid to late 90s, Microsoft was largely protecting it's own interest from IBM who was trying to wrangle back control of the PC market.
Again, Microsoft didn't design this. It wasn't their intent from the onset, the market fell into their lap and they fought off everyone else's attempts to take it away.
My hopes are that 5 years from now free hardware will be much faster than today. By then, even the bottom of the list should be able to support a working mobile environment.
To be fair, it's also priced dramatically lower. It's not fair to compare a current iPhone, priced at more than $1200 on the open market, with the Pine Phone priced at $150. This is where they chose to bring a phone to market and I think it's a smart move. They'll attract a bigger audience and make it easier for people to sim-swap and experiment.
When the distros get good enough, they can price out higher end hardware.
I'm all for having tuxphones but even a $100 Android phone creams the Pine Phone in every aspect regarding performance. The sad truth is until the soc vendors don't start properly supporting a mainline Linux kernel and offer open source drivers we will be stuck with devices that haven't left the "wow this is cool but I wouldn't use is as my only phone" territory.
That $100 Android phone is going to be carrier locked (subsidized by the carrier) and probably an older model where the R&D has already been paid-off, not an all new device. Once the Pine64 has been out for a few years, it's possible its price will drop to similarly competitive levels.
That's a function of the state of the SoC options currently. There are very few options for an open source phone design to choose from that have sufficient public documentation. The ones that do tend to be several generations behind on process nodes and have more modest capabilities generally as they are often targeting the low end of the market.
FOSS and OSH will always sit a few years behind companies which are investing billions of dollars in R&D. But we can try to lift what we can and catch up sooner or later.
FOSS UI/UX is at least two decades behind and the gap is growing.
A major problem is that people almost always underestimate the difficulty of a good UI. Good UIs can be a lot harder than the rest of a system and a modern UI toolkit has a feature set and difficulty level approaching that of a good 3D game engine like Unity.
i disagree, KDE has one, if not the best ui out there. it is consistent, customizable and not a resource hog.
windows's UI has been a mess since the XP days, and osx is atleast consistent, but hides a lot of functionality in name of clean design.
And I disagree with you. And it’s not because I think KDE is horrible… it’s not. I prefer the Gnome style but KDE is quite polished.
But I disagree because it is really rare to have a completely unified UI with Linux. We have separate applications for Gnome and KDE for most tasks. Sometimes one is better than the other, or one has a feature you need, but you have many different competing applications. If you want to use the “best”, you end up with a mix of different styles.
Or, if you want to use an office suite, Libre Office is a different style altogether!
So, you say KDE has a unified style. That’s great. But KDE != Linux. And Linux is never going to have a unified style. That’s just the nature of the beast. There isn’t one group out there that can make UI/UX decisions for all of Linux. No group that can set priorities and make decisions about what features stay and what can be removed.
But that’s okay. That’s the trade off we get when working with FOSS software. We get to make those decisions for ourselves. But it rarely results in a “unified” UX. Powerful, yes. unified? No.
I am interested to see how the new KDE/pine64 relationship plays out though. Hopefully it will be great. And maybe I’m just a bit pessimistic after the last time with Nokia/Qt.
> it is really rare to have a completely unified UI with Linux
I mean neither does Windows 10, which basically does a split between at least 3 different styles. Tacked on top of everything sits the metro post Windows 8 style, but is a toy UI for many aspects, click on a random setting and it is likely you will then encounter settings in the windows XP/7 style.
The third one is the older Windows XP style UIs, which you still encounter once you have to venture outside of regular user territory (registry editor and the like).
> So, you say KDE has a unified style. That’s great. But KDE != Linux. And Linux is never going to have a unified style. That’s just the nature of the beast. There isn’t one group out there that can make UI/UX decisions for all of Linux. No group that can set priorities and make decisions about what features stay and what can be removed
You can run a complete desktop on KDE and have a good, well-integrated experience. Maybe some people will try to tell you that Firefox would be a better browser or whatever, but as long as Konqueror is good enough for you then why do you care? (Personally I actually think it's significantly better, and a lot of the KOffice tools are better than their LibreOffice counterparts, but taking it as a given that there are "best" versions of some things that are not on KDE).
Maybe you value one particular tool that doesn't fit into your integrated desktop, but that's a common experience on other platforms as well. But if a unified UI is what you want, you absolutely can have that.
Open any actual application on a pinephone and you'll see that whatever fanciness/usability KDE has falls short instantly. There's quite a way to go still.
I would argue it's the other way around - FOSS UI/UIX is two decades ahead, because it didn't participate in the UX regression that has plagued us in those past two decades.
This isn't entirely true, because e.g. Gnome has been an enthusiastic adopter of all those anti-patterns. But, unlike other platforms, you still have other DE options to choose from.
We can all discuss whether or not a certain UI/UX pattern is appropriate or not (and I certainly agree that many of the changes Apple have made in the last decade have been for the worse). But all personal preferences aside, Linux UI/UX feels to me at less consistent than macOS - both aesthetically/visually (between different UI toolkits etc) and in terms of behaviour (keyboard shortcuts, how well they work with touch screens, etc).
I would agree with this sentiment across different DEs/toolkits, but the reality of the modern Linux desktop of a normal user is that it's just not that common. And within a single DE, they're plenty consistent. More so than Win10, say.
So currently, it's a couple days after police and intelligence agencies worldwide raided the owners of ANOM-using phones that were allegedly private and built to exclude common hardware/software that's used for tracking. I'm not saying the governments of the world were wrong to bring those people down. But do you really expect anyone to buy a phone - with any combination of hardware and software - and retain any expectation of privacy whatsoever? Am I paranoid to think that this sounds like a continuation of the ANOM project... selling a supposedly secure, home brew and private device to the gullible who desperately want a secure channel?
Here's a secure channel: Dump your phone. There's no personal security with a device like that if you live in a state that might use your affiliations against you.
> Am I paranoid to think that this sounds like a continuation of the ANOM project... selling a supposedly secure, home brew and private device to the gullible who desperately want a secure channel?
The difference being that the point of the PinePhone is that the whole stack, from the hardware up to everything software, is open source or runs on open source firmware.
The Anom was a completely closed-source solution which required a large amount of trust in a single entity. The Pinephone (and by extension every other Linux phone, whether it exists yet or not) leverages the strengths of the Linux community and is in no way comparable.
Didn't test its maximum temp, however connected to a laptop power supply (from memory: about 20V, 4A) it reaches enough temperatures to do clean shiny solder joints on fairly big contacts compared to its size. I think it's mainly conceived for portability and soldering small parts, however it seems powerful enough to be used as a general purpose solder iron as well.
edit for more information: all tests done with leaded solder.
The biggest threat to Linux on phones could be Fuchsia. If/when Google decides to switch to a Fuchsia base for Android, all the chipset vendors will follow suit and that will make it even harder to find chipsets that can be used with a Linux kernel - upstream or not. That will dry up the amount of effort put into making Linux a good mobile platform.
Maybe the stable binary api of Fuchsia drivers will be usable on Linux with a wrapper, but that obviously won't be open enough for projects like the Librem5 (I'm not sure what is Pine64 position on binary drivers).
Fuchsia has separated the drivers from the kernel[1], enabling proprietary drivers that are never updated to become acceptable. This can result in Blueborne[2], GPU vulnerabilities[3], and any other proprietary driver remaining permanently vulnerable as the hardware manufacturer has no incentive to update the driver.
In Fuchsia's model, you can run the latest OS with these vulnerable, non-updated drivers, or your device ODM could even release nothing and you don't have the GPLv2 to fall back on to get the Board Support Package for your hardware to build your own updates with.
I see that as a sort of capitulation. What is actually needed is manufacturers who remain responsible and responsive when it comes to the quality of their drivers. They need to support them much longer than they currently do, and they need to release security fixes promptly.
I think having a sandboxed driver model is a great idea in general, but this will only encourage hardware manufacturers to care even less about supporting their drivers beyond the initial more-or-less-working release.
> What is actually needed is manufacturers who remain responsible and responsive when it comes to the quality of their drivers. They need to support them much longer than they currently do, and they need to release security fixes promptly.
That requires a level of investment in engineering competence that they aren’t doing because there is little incentive.
There exist more or less standard times for fixing security bugs. Let's say 90 days. If a company cannot provide security for their customers in a reasonable time, they must be held accountable.
Fuchsia has a lot of good features technically, there is no doubt about that - it was time to revisit how an OS should be designed given the usage patterns of devices it powers. I hope the capability model will put to rest the insanity that is SELinux (just look at the amount and complexity of SELinux rules in AOSP).
The license choice for the kernel is more controversial, but no one expected Google to ship under the GPL.
It also happens to solve some of the pain points with Android: in a way it is "Project Treble on steroids" aiming to resolve the issue with fragmentation and lack of long term support from Android chipsets and OEMs.
Except there still won't be long-term support from OEMs, you've instead just pushed the security responsibility onto Fuschia and hoping that the kernel maintaining a strong sandbox will be sufficient to mitigate all driver security vulnerabilities (hint: it won't be).
Worse yet, the OS itself is non-GPL, an OEM can modify Fuchsia outside just the drivers to support their device (eg: create a board support package) and never release their modifications to their customers, meaning the community can't compile their own updates to the software running on the device (worse than our current Android situation).
Unless the OEMs customize the whole stack to only allow the kernel to talk to their drivers. That is only enforceable by legal constraints from Google akin to the CTS [0].
The pine64 position on binary drivers is not as hard as the purism one (perhaps they try to balance more with cost), but there are still projects to reverse-engineer and replace some non-free firmware, such as the modem firmware: https://github.com/Biktorgj/pinephone_modem_sdk.
I agree that Fuchsia will become a problem going forwards, even if Fuchsia drivers can be reverse-engineered. It's also possible that phone hardware is commodified enough that google will be unable to lock us out, or that google abandons or delays the Fuchsia project.
The PinePhone has the same security properties as the Nokia N900 where the modem is connected over USB rather than an interface with direct memory access (eg: PCIe) where the proprietary software running on the modem can read anything in main memory.
Don’t you think we will see more general computing ARM chips with the M1’s success? Aren’t we approaching a world where your phone, tablet (hopefully eating the laptop…), desktop and server all run more or less the same chip?
Yes, but I don’t understand how Fuchsia prevents pine64 to offer a Linux compatible chip. Not being able to unlock an android/fuchsia/iOS phone doesn’t really matter, does it?
Either way, I was hinting at a possible liberation through the laptop/desktop/server ARM SoC market, which is certainly coming. I think x86 is “over”.
Well: if fuchsia becomes the standard phone OS, the current practice of providing kernel source (to the point it can be compiled into working firmware) will end.
It doesn't prevent anyone from providing linux firmwares, but it takes away the reason they must do so.
No, because the M1 is like every other phone and tablet out there in that they're ARM SoCs. There are significant downsides to ARM SoCs compared to x86-64 machines in that they have no standardized architecture, nor enumerable buses.
It will definitely be more secure, but probably drastically less open, since there won't be any GPL code underneath for people to demand copies of.
Fuchsia, once it reaches the level of polish required of proper Google products, will be as closed as iOS. And security will be the justification for it.
The Fuchsia code itself is open, and while a vendor could make changes and not release them, a project like Pine wouldn't do that. That would indeed be a major motivation to use a Pine-like over other vendors.
For now. It doesn't yet have all of the proprietary bits added in, nor has it been shipped to OEM devices using mobile device hardware. Most of the proprietary Google bits of Android are proprietary by choice, there's no way Google is going to be any more open with Fuchsia.
I disagree. Fuchsia will eliminate the need for the hardware vendor to supply open-source drivers. In this regard, it is a major step backwards in security and upgradability.
I want the PinePhone to work. The Librem too. In fact I had preorders for both. I canceled them looking at the performance.
They’re excellent toys. Great effort to ship such a difficult product. But if your phone is going to struggle with running things besides terminal, it’s not going to be a great daily phone.
I’d love them to be on par with the latest Android flagships in terms of power. Cost is not an issue. I just want to be able to actually use Linux on a phone, rather than just run it.
I’ve been keeping an eye on the Windows side of things. Windows 10x looked really promising on top of the Surface Neo, but both seem to be shelved. Now the closest alternative is handheld devices like the GPD Win 3, but that lacks LTE unfortunately. No ditching Android just yet.
Personally, I'd rather something equivalent to a mid-range android phone. Something that works decently well, but still affordable enough adoption isn't limited only to the wealthy looking for toys. I see most flagship phones that way myself.
For me, i need more than what the pinephone offers, but it doesn't need to have all the features of a high end phone. A decent processor and RAM would make the pinephone a lot more appealing just by itself.
if it was equivalent to a $300-$500 android phone, you still wouldn't have all the bells and whistles, but it would be a lot more viable for daily use.
> A decent processor and RAM would make the pinephone a lot more appealing just by itself.
The 3GB of the bigger model are enough for most users (LibreOffice or Firefox with several tabs open can run on a XFCE PC deskop with 2GB), but the CPU is indeed limited, and battery life is short.
Admittedly just by optimizing the software they recently squeezed out a lot more compared to the first iterations of the software, however we're not there yet. I wonder if having a much beefier battery could allow the use of faster processors although not aimed at the mobile world.
Personally I can't even keep in my hand a modern phone without it risking to fall, I find their thinness extremely uncomfortable, and would be thankful if producers made a full 1.5 - 2cm thick one with the additional space occupied by a decent battery.
I don't need much performance-- my present phone is a 2-year-old $220 Umidigi F1, and it's entirely performant for my needs-- but the problem is the likelihood of showstopper app needs.
I don't want to carry two devices, or have to reboot twice daily, so that I can still the weird 2FA app my employer uses. I wonder if the ideal endgame is a VM style model-- you have an Android VM that you give 2% of CPU to, just enough to keep that app alive, but normally spend your day in LumeOS or whatever your flavour is.
I think this (terminal) might be a key market segment to focus on, though. Lots of people are turned off by the colorful yet wasteful designs of modern smartphone apps. Third parties are never going to get anywhere trying to compete with Android or iOS. If you want buy-in, you have to target the people who want to leave the mobile app paradigm. This is either people who want all-in on web (Firefox OS) or people who want all-in on CLI (nothing really exists here except SSHing into a Linux VM).
It might honestly be pleasant to use a smartphone with a terminal-like interface if you can provide vim-esque keyboard shortcuts to accomplish complicated tasks, like creating content (documents / todos / calendar events / songs / photos / videos / websites / etc). It would only ever appear to power users, but those power users would become life long customers.
I think if they can nail the low-end or mid-end phone, and get enough volume out there to make an ecosystem possible, ramping up to high-end phones is the easy part. It's not like the factories manufacturing these phones don't know how to make high-end phones.
But the problem with $800 phones is people can't afford to buy them unless they're daily driver ready. At $150, you can buy it as a testing phone/a spare phone, and start building apps for it.
Windows Mobile was murdered first and foremost by the lack of wider support and a larger app ecosystem. Getting as many phones out there as possible is the key to avoiding this with Linux phones.
This is why we're really very lucky, IMO: We have two companies doing both, right now. We have an $800 device for the "high" end, and a cheaper device to get the word out. The timing seems better than if it had been one or the other.
I’m not convinced that low cost devices are the way to go. Android has it covered. Tizen tried and failed. If Linux can be a viable system that most of the Chinese and Korean manufacturers can adopt and push, I would agree. But I don’t see how that would shape up in practice.
Which performance exactly? Both phones can play video and provide smooth scrolling in Firefox. They support not too heavy desktop applications (convergence). Are you going to run GPT3 on them?
My only phone is a Pinephone. I don't "daily" drive it because I'm not really much of a phone user but it's still loads better than the experience I had with Android/iOS.
I feel like the phone respects me. It's a computer and when I decide that I want to do [X thing a computer can do] it lets me do that. It feels much better to struggle against real problems I can solve than it does to struggle against fake problems inflicted upon me by other people in order to extract value from me.
I would seriously much rather deal with "Which file do I pipe `1` into using a shell on a phone screen in order to turn on the flashlight LED?" than having to deny Google location tracking privileges for the millionth time because they will just keep asking me until I accidentally hit yes instead of no one day.
Recently went to a security conference and really wanted a secure low-feature phone to coordinate with friends and keep up with email/web... Speed and features don't matter, don't need games or even video. Can't imagine I'm alone... is this a niche market for a linux smartphone to take off?
Nope, not alone. I would go with an oldschool mobile, but I need navigation and modern, encrypted internet-based communication. Tethering, calls, SMS, mail, Signal, GPS, OSMand, calendar. Maybe a good camera and payment stuff, but that’s probably too much niche then. But no web, no social networks, no games, no music/podcasts/video. Can be thick as a can of sardines for all I care, but please be operational with a single average hand (not just men’s average hand).
Minimalism/down-sizing is a lasting trend, I think quite a few people are fed up with being hooked to modernity’s love bombing and are up for making the phone a tool again.
The pinephone (and a linux distro) is privacy-oriented at most, but most definitely not secure. For that, choose an iPhone or a Pixel phone with GrapheneOS.
This is probably gonna come as a shock to some people, but I wholly think I could live with a Linux smartphone today. I really only use my phone for two things: text/calling and staying connected to my desktop/laptop. As long as it supports the KDE/GDE connect protocol (I doubt it doesn't), I could see myself actually being one of the early adopters here.
KDEConnect is supported in KDE/Plasma-based distros. Work is in progress to add it to Gnome/Phosh. KDEConnect is definitely a killer app!
Can't speak for the other distros, but Mobian/Phosh has reached a point where it's usable as a primary phone. Tons of work from the community has brought battery lifetimes up from ~1 hour to the point where it lasts me the day under normal use. Firefox is usable, and most every piece of software I need has a workable counterpart.
That said, the experience is still quirky (think c.a. 2000 linux on desktops). Most things work, but the final mile still requires a decent amount of poking at config files and trawling wikis. Doable, but not everyone's cup of tea.
GNOME has gsconnect. It talks with KDE connect apps using their protocol. I've been using it for years until a couple of months ago, when it started to eat into CPU and make all my desktop lag. There is an open issue for that. I'll check if new releases fixed the issue. My devices can still talk between themselves.
GSConnect (which I already use) is written as a GNOME shell extension in order to provide support for clipboard sharing. Unfortunately, none of the mobile-friendly shells/desktop managers support GNOME extensions (yet). There's an effort to port GSConnect to Phosh-based environments (https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/phosh/-/issues/514), but that's still exploratory. It's also possible to install KDEConnect on Mobian, but it doesn't work fully and the UI isn't quite mobile-friendly yet.
I would be totally fine using such a phone for almost everything I do. The only big gap would be using Sweden's identification app BankID and the money transferring app Swish. Unless these were ported to the phone, I would unfortunately lose one of it's most important functionalities for me.
Of course I could just have an Apple/Android phone sitting at home for such purposes, but it is definitely less convenient.
This is one of the things I worry about - a duopoly not just backed by two wealthy and shady megacorps but also effectively by law as it mandates a mobile app for some things yet the app only exists for iOS and Android & no public API is available.
Several of the “challenger” / “FinTech” banks in the UK (e.g. Monzo, Starling) require the use of their app. They offer limited read-only views via web, but only offer all features via app. No iOS / Android phone? Go to a different bank.
Mobile banking apps will probably be the hardest challenge in the long term. In my cases, for social media and communication, it's easy. I don't use whatsapp and facebook messengers on Android, and for Telegram there is a native client that works well enough (and Tok[1]), for Matrix I wrote NeoChat[2], for mastodon, I'm writing Tokodon[3], there is also some activity around a QML Signal client and implementing other open protocols is doable.
But for banking there is absolutely nothing and bank in the EU requires a mobile phone app to unlock the account. I fear that the only way to solve that is at a political level but this probably also means something unreachable for now. This sucks.
Same for banking apps here in Italy and the OTP generator of our id system.
Plus some apps I don't strictly have to use but I want to: WhatsApp (to use the web app I should run the android one somewhere it can receive messages with my phone number, cough), Telegram (probably OK), OSMAnd, NewPipe as a YouTube adless replacement (YouTube web is not OK), Google Street View and satellite maps (the web app is vastly worse), car sharing apps (less of that now), random apps from my customers.
All considered I'll have to carry an Android phone anyway so I'm carrying only an Android phone. No Linux phone. But I've been using Ubuntu as my only OS since 2009.
While I'm not entirely sure on the specifics, this is where Anbox can hopefully create a workable Android runtime layer. While it would be a bit overly optimistic to assume that "secure" authentication type apps would work, it could help with adoption for people like me who are missing that one vitally important app required to make the PinePhone a daily driver.
Unfortunately, Anbox isn’t a longterm solution for non-libre Android apps. The problem is that more and more Android apps require passing SafetyNet. It started with banking apps, then spread to games, and Google may one day simply encourage every app to require it. Even Android ROMs stripped of Google services like LineageOS are finding it a challenge to pass SafetyNet, let alone Anbox.
I'm not convinced. I'd love a Linux phone but there must be some standard that ensures apps are easy to develop and the apps must grow significantly for this to catch on. Otherwise it'll be just like Linux on the desktop. It'll become a mess of 15 different standards and apps devs will not bother with that.
There are many standards on linux, but in my experience they are mostly inter-compatable. I have KDE/X11 programs running just fine in my GNOME/Wayland environment. I also have alsa, pulseaudio and pipewire playing nice on my laptop.
I've heard binary distribution is a problem, with many overcomplicated methods like Appimage, Snap, and Flatpack. But it doesn't matter because linux users will prefer installing from source code or a trusted repository anyways. And they should: This is the more secure way of doing things. Closed source programs need not apply.
Some can be operated via the web but they tend to require a hardware authentication token, which is as inconvenient as carrying a second phone (each bank requires a different token or card reader).
Some can be operated via the web but use their phone app as an authentication token for web access.
And some don't provide full functionality via the web at all.
Plus, the apps are way more convenient than logging in via the web in practice.
I can't speak to your spending habits, but if a bank exclusively operates on a single-platform native app, I'd consider that a dealbreaker for if I want to use it or not.
When you need credit, you take what you can get and if your rating is poor there isn't a choice of providers. Sometimes that's exclusively mobile.
I opened a business account with an (at the time) exclusively mobile bank last year, because other banks took too long to authorize setup (they generally take weeks or even months), and I had a new company starting. I went with the only bank I knew where I could get set up within a few days to start taking revenue, as I had a client ready to pay from the start. It turns out that being mobile also meant they had a streamlined electronic setup process, and no visit to a branch during a pandemic. It still took a few days, as various people checked out my identity, read my LinkedIn profile to confirm what kind of business I was in, etc.
Last time I opened an account for a new company it took over a month and two in-person interviews, so the mobile bank was a big improvement.
Since then they have added web access as well, which is great, but use the phone as an authentication token, which is a bit annoying. It's not ideal, but neither are any other options I know about. Having to carry a separate physical token/reader around (or in practice, leave it at home and not have it when needed), as all the other business banks I've used require, is more annoying.
This is about like saying that Javascript will never catch on unless there is a single Framework that all developers use to create applications....
Not only is that unnecessary, it is also not practical as the entire purpose of Open Source is that if you do not like something you fork it and make it your own.
Linux on the Phone should absolutely avoid the Wall Garden draconian approach of iPhone and modern Android
In general I really like that this is a low-end device, affordable. I feel like phone prices have gotten totally out of control, but meanwhile we have very low cost pretty excellent chips available. It feels like ARM has let their low end cores languish, which seems to be changing, and I'm hoping we see some natural, logical follow ups to this phone in ~2023.
That said, Snapdragon 845 is inching towards becoming a good general purpose Linux platform, with decent upstream support, and some phone platforms supported. Alas, like the rest of the Android ecosystem, only like 2% of the phones made with this chipset have unlocked bootloaders & will be able to be good long term devices that are well supported by mainline kernels. The rest of these devices are already running out the end of their support life, either no longer getting security updates or real soon about to end support.
I feel like once a device manufacturer no longer offers security support, then is when Right to Repair laws have a moral, ethical, legal obligation to step in & demand the bootloader be unlocked, so it's possible for owners to maintain their devices, given that the manufacturer wont.
Unpopular Opinion: I don't want a Linux Desktop (XFCE, KDE, etc) on my phone. I don't care about being able to run terminals or `chown -R user xyz` or `htop` on my phone.
I want a phone with a decently polished OS, smooth (given hardware constraints) that can run apps that I control (deny ads, location info. etc) and provides an alternative to the Android/IOS duopoly.
I just hope that the Pine Community will realize this and focus energy and work towards having a canonical OS on the PinePhone that just works.
Agreed, but irrespective of Librem/PinePhone, companies in general can build much better products when they focus on doing few things good than many things bad.
My Pinephone doesn't work for me as a primary phone (yet), but I think it's still a very capable device at home with good integration (via KDE connect).
Without millions of dollars in corporate support, hardware vendors like Pine64 and Linux on mobile developers need user support to make progress. If you want a performant Linux phone, put some skin in the game.
> If you want a performant Linux phone, put some skin in the game.
The reality is that this ain't going to happen. There will be never enough volunteer-based work to enable the level of effort that it requires to develop consumer devices like smartphones. Commercial actors have so much money and power, and people have bills to pay. This is something where full open source model just doesn't work.
Even Linux desktop suffers from a lack of contributors. Even many core-infrastructure projects are shockingly dependent on 1–2 devs who have been unsuccessful in attracting more contributions.
One example of where the manpower just isn’t there for both Linux desktop and the PinePhone is a solid maps app. All solutions are little more than tech demos compared to OSMAnd on Android. Yes, OSMAnd itself has grown through contributions from the community, but it basically soaked up already what little manpower there is. There are other examples where running Android apps on the PinePhone under a compatibility layer is seen as a necessity to get around the PinePhone's lack of manpower.
I don’t think Anbox is not so much about man power. It’s for proprietary services or services that don’t have a decent Linux app. I recall the early days of Android very well [0], it had a similar lack of apps (then compared to Symbian and Windows Mobile). I don’t think it’s wise to say “this is not going to happen” one year after the first Community Edition PinePhones were delivered.
For an overview of the current PinePhone app landscape I suggest a look at https://LINMOBapps.frama.io – contributions welcome!
[0] I recently brought back old posts to my blog https://linmob.net that I wrote 1.2 years after the G1’s initial US release.
Sure, Purism puts in a lot of effort. But after a year of the PinePhone drawing on Purism's effort, the community can plainly see that it a drop in the bucket of what needs to be done.
Everyone I know working on something PinePhone-related is concerned about the small size of the dev community.
I think the idea is the array of phones is so comparatively vast, and their release schedule is so frequent, that it's just much harder to reach any really reasonable market coverage for things like good drivers.
(I'm not sure I agree, I just think that's the argument)
Because state-of-the-art desktop hardware tends to work with Linux, due to the historical origins of the PC as a relatively non-proprietary technology. The same cannot be said of modern mobile phone hardware.
Non-proprietary only because IBM failed to sink Compaq reverse engineering efforts, and weren't able to drive the PC industry into MCA, PS/2 architecture.
Great question. This probably isn't the answer, but it feels to me that I've had the same desktop hardware since the earth cooled, but a new phone comes out every 2 weeks.
Disagree completely. webOS and Maemo were pretty great and open source. It took half of a decade for Android and iOS to adopt some of the principle features webOS shipped with. Both had large communities developing, often open source, software for them.
Since I no longer play games on my mobile device, I’m comfortable with lower performance (to run Anki, a password manager, Firefox, text editing, play music and podcasts and audiobooks and text-to-speech ebooks—this might be resource-intensive?, record and view photos and videos, send and receive texts and calls). Battery life is also important, though most of my phone use is while it is plugged in.
The biggest performance issue is going to be the browser. Because for any type of rendering performance hardware acceleration is a must. And Firefox disables that by default on Linux (needs to be manually enabled in about:config).
The second issue, which I saw based on reviews alone was a very slow camera interface.
One surprise with PinePhone optimized distros is Ubuntu Touch (ubports). Not sure what type of magic they are on, but accelerate 1080p video in the browser and fluid mobile interfaces.
Check out the Short Circuit youtube channel for their PinePhone video. Watched it expecting to see just laggy interfaces, but ubports really takes it to the next level.
Speaking from experience with the pinephone, the browser situation is actually pretty good on postmarketOS because they have a custom firefox configuration for mobile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co6qnlw4hgE
I can also confirm that the camera interface is slow. It takes like 30 seconds to dump a single image and render it into a jpeg. The main camera app is called "Megapixels". I'm not sure, but i've heard there are some paralellism changes coming downstream that may improve performance somewhat now that they have updated to gtk4.
I want something small like Palm Phone, which is beautiful and refined.
But Palm Phone totally screws it up by marketing themselves as "companion phone" (your second mobile phone, why would I have 2 phones??) and the battery life is 5h (wtf is this??).
Other minimal phones focuses on calling, and guess what? 99% of my calls in the past few years were with spam.
Currently, there is absolutely no minimal small smart phone.
I've got Unihertz Jelly 2. It is smaller than "Palm Palm" in width and heigth, but a bit thicker in depth, which is a good thing. Screen is a bit tad too small, but good enough for calls and other basic functions. Typing in portrait mode is tricky, at least.
I had an earlier version of one of these, when they had a ridiculous sale (it was like $40 or something).
It ran quite well. Most apps worked fine. It was a little slow, but it almost never had problems. Typing aside, I'm surprised how reasonable it was, I used it as my only phone for a few days and I really had no complaints.
What about the Palm phone? It's waterproof, 2oz, and has a feature that cuts power to the cell and wifi chips when the screen is turned off, so no calls or texts until you turn it back on. I love it as my daily driver for a year now.
I would buy a pinephone at the moment but the performance is just not that much compared to Android phones. It's not good for a daily phone to use at the moment. Until then, I'll stick with my OnePlus 7 Pro until there's a linux phone with good performance, even if it costs more.
There are a few Snapdragon 845 phones (PocoPhone F1, OnePlus 6(T) that are getting closer and to fully working with postmarketOS and/or Mobian. Maybe that’s something to look out for, currently IIRC the OnePlus 6 is the closest.
It’s all about killer apps for me. My phone is for anki, taking notes that my other devices can read, using authy, and for podcasts, and a password manager app. A discord app would be convenient but optional. A step counter. Once pinephone or librem can do all those, I’m sold
Using a low power phone for everyday use, for a year now. I would say the "convergence" of the android and iOS devices is creating a device that is tuned to suck you into the marketing and advertising of google, apple, etc.
Android and iOS devices are tools and platforms to gather data and use the consumer as a product more than anything else.
Break the slab like form factor and my addictive habits dropped, drastically. Break the app stores, and marketing and I got a lot more time back in my life.
I have a separate hotspot for internet, a tablet for internet access, a phone only simple communication with a 2GB plan and an offline GPS. The convergence of these is an optimized tool to farm the consumers.
> Break the slab like form factor and my addictive habits dropped, drastically.
I think this is an important point and one of the potential problems with the PinePhone - by having the same form factor as Android and iOS devices, it will end up being sucked into copying along with their designs the way the Linux desktop iterates towards MacOS.
I've moved my sim card over to a pinephone, and I have to say, the main pain point right now is battery life. I think the thing is a great little linux system, and while the UX of things like Phosh isn't perfectly slick, it can come with time and I mostly use my phone as a way to get interrupt-level messages and serve cellular data as a wi-fi network anyway. But power management for this device seems really immature, so the battery lasts maybe a couple hours in real-world usage at best. I think that's down to power management ultimately, so I think it needs to be a development priority if adoption is to pick up
This review is totally correct and I share the hope/idea that this might be the big linux-on-phones jumping-off point. I've been daily driving the Librem 5 with postmarketOS/phosh for a couple of months now, and though I certainly wouldn't give it to my grandmother right now, I can already start to imagine her using a maybe PureOS/phosh on a librem 5-v3 five years from now.
I've seen the pinephone in action and while I'd love to contribute to it, there is an immense amount of work that still needs to be done. Even the basic text editor they have for it takes a while to load up. The phone call app barely worked as well. I mean, the idea is awesome and I want it to succeed. But in order for me to put a dime up for it, phone calls have to work without question, I need a text editor of virtually any kind, a web browser that doesn't take ages to start, a calendar app that works, and the ability to simply listen to mp3's. The phone hardly has any of those features working in a remotely feasible state right now.
I really do admire the project, but it's far from ready. It needs financing I know, but I don't like funding things for a subpar experience. I certainly do have excess cash to devote to these projects, but I have no recourse that they will get at the state I want it in in a reasonable time frame.
That all being said, I can't wait until this gets better.
I'm a bit confused by this attitude. You want the project to get better, and get better sooner than later.
You could donate, in the hope that donating will make it get better faster (or, depending on the amounts involved, you could get an agreement that they'll use the funds to work on the specific things you care about).
But you won't donate, because they still need orders of magnitude more funding than what you can provide? Well then you're going to be waiting longer. But then, you will donate once they're good enough, which is when they no longer need your extra funding to do the work?
Edit I think I figured it out after thinking about it further.
Let's say they're at e.g. 10% of the way to towards a usable device, and you could afford to donate enough to fund 10% progress. If you donate now, 20% usable is still useless and there's no visible difference in how long until it's 100%, but donating later when they're at 90%, if they ever get there, would "immediately" result in a useable device.
Unless they manage to get the apps then they'll always be hobbyist or not a daily driver for the vast majority of users. Sure it's fun it's linux but nobody else in my family would use one if they couldn't access banking apps etc.
I’ve read that open hardware is not as important as some claim — I did buy a pinephone and occasionally play with it (and I am very grateful to the small but enthusiastic community around it), but it having stale firmware which never gets updated doesn’t sound good.
Also, hardware kill switches are useless — if you can’t trust the software to not listen to you than all is lost. Also, sound can be recorded through the motion sensors as well.
And my all around point: Linux’s user space’s security is a joke. If it ever wants to grow out of the niche of 5 tech enthusiast, something should be done.
Nope. The Linux ecosystem for some reason is fixed on recreating a purist GNU/Linux experience and toolchain which simply doesn't suit smartphones, or making 2nd class copies of typical smartphone interfaces.
By comparison, the toolchain isn't so bad for Desktop, the copies are mature or experimenting in their own ways, and there's wine (Wayland is unfinished, but most users can still use X for now). Still Linux Desktop has a minute marketshare.
I don't think mobile phones are the best place to go with Linux. I feel tablets are better. I would be happy to pay a tonne of money if someone could install Ubuntu or some other Linux based OS on my iPad as I still feel the hardware is great but the software is still pulling it back. A full desktop experience still isn't there though what the experience on the iPad is,I enjoy quite a bit.
Love the idea of Pinephone, but I don't see even remote plans/talks to get to 1/3rd of modern phones performance, my 300$ phone is literally 11 times faster (multicore).
Once you'll get decent hardware performance a lot of devs will happily give up on their laptops and switch to mobile. And that will bring a lot of traction to software for mobile linux...
Why not just use android on such phone, and remove google dependencies?
Android is open source. Android is already using linux. I really don't get it. I wish somebody could answer this question with convincing arguments, because writing another mobile OS doesn't seem like a trivial task.
So, the problem is that Android is open source in concept and name only, not in practice: Code is developed in the dark, and then published later, it's not a collaborative environment. And the important part is that Google fully controls what direction Android development moves in. So they're going to design it to advantage themselves and disadvantage others.
So the first problem with that is that the work to remove their influence becomes progressively harder, and the bigger problem is that if you want to maintain app compatibility, you basically have to accept nearly everything Google decides to do as is... you can't really "just fork it" without losing the main perk of running Android: Running Android apps.
As it is, most Android apps won't work on a device without Google Play Services, because Google has pushed app developers year after year to switch from depending on Android platform APIs over to Google Play Services APIs for basic functions like location.
> So they're going to design it to advantage themselves and disadvantage others.
How so?
> you can't really "just fork it" without losing the main perk of running Android: Running Android apps.
> As it is, most Android apps won't work on a device without Google Play Services
Most, so you mean it's still possible to not depend on google play services. Although of course, app developers will always prefer the play store as it's the only way for them to make money in a reliable way.
> for basic functions like location.
What do you mean? All phone have GPS chips, they don't depend on google for that.
Even with all those problems, the main one being that app developers want to make money by participating to the ad ecosystem or with microtransactions, to me it doesn't seem like android is completely tied to the google ecosystem.
> What do you mean? All phone have GPS chips, they don't depend on google for that.
So, basically, an app has to import the location functionality it wants to use: android.location is such an API, and when Android first came out, most apps used it to get location information. However, most apps on Android now import Google Location Services instead from com.google.android.gms:play-services-location which only works on a Google-flavored Android device signed into a Google account.
If an app is written for the latter, it won't be able to work on a forked Android device, because the dependency it uses to get location information is missing, regardless of the presence of the physical GPS chip.
As an example, back when I had Android, I found I couldn't use Skype without having Play Services on the device. Even Microsoft, Google's direct competitor, didn't ship Android apps that would work without Google's proprietary components.
> What do you mean? All phone have GPS chips, they don't depend on google for that.
In many everyday instances, the phone won't quickly get a signal from GPS satellites, rather it relies on network-assisted GPS. Even the open-source Android distribution (AOSP) uses Google's servers. It used to be straightforward for phone owners to switch to a different location assistance service like Mozilla's just by installing from F-Droid and then changing a setting. However, in a subsequent Android version Google made a change to require location-assistance services to be installed as a system package, not a user package. That requires connecting to the phone over ADB and using the shell, which means that only a tiny, tiny minority of techies will ever do it. That is just one example of how, over time, Google has made design changes to Android to benefit itself at the expense of privacy and competition.
Bring on the real spec Linux phones with flagship CPU / ram / cameras. If only to act as a catalyst to improve the other platforms. But mostly so I can run What I Want (tm).
But first, the market needs to be tested. So, these early devices are a good idea.
Sandstorm.io is a sandboxing/app-deployment system that runs on Linux servers, which uses capability-based security and fine-grained permissions. (As a note, it sandboxes individual "grains", which are single-documents/instances, not entire apps.
Of course, Sandstorm is built to present a cloud-like web app interface, not local desktop or mobile apps.
I still think personal servers are the eventual way to go, such that people's mobile devices they carry with them aren't the definitive location of lots of their valuable data.
I’m no security researcher but have read one who said that due to it being a setuid program, it can potentially turn a bug in firejail into an exploit with root access.
