They seem to have resolved their supply chain issues for now. I could buy a Pi 5 and have it dispatched tomorrow, and I did buy a Pi 4b recently, no issues with delays or lead times.
A lot of the libcamera work done on Raspberry Pi boards is going towards improving the camera support on linux phones like the PinePhone, which is great!
Aside from that, sadly a lot of people (including myself) are kind of fed up with Raspberry Pi, after they essentially abandoned their mission during Covid to please corporations, and are preparing to go public despite being a "charity". Broadcom, their SoC supplier, also has left a sour taste in my mouth after their purchase and mass layoffs at VMWare.
If they created a phone it would likely end up being scalped to death, and maybe pretty pricey compared to a PinePhone
Aside from that, sadly a lot of people (including myself) are kind of fed up with Raspberry Pi, after they essentially abandoned their mission during Covid to please corporations
Just out of curiosity, could you state what you think their mission was?
(I'm just wondering if anybody even remembers their original original mission.)
AFAIK their original mission was along the lines of making computers accessible at a low price point, particularly targeting the education sector in parts of the world where computers weren't very accessible or affordable. Comparable to the OLPC, but not on an individual basis
Don't forget that Raspberry PI can't run a mainline Linux kernel. You can't install an official Debian build on it for example. I don't get why people are ok with that.
They made an entire Linux-powered portable game system that's revolutionizing Linux gaming at the moment...an embedded engineer is not the same skillset as an app developer. Not even close.
SteamOS is open source with some closed sources component. But most important think you seems not being able to understand is that Valve provide high support to Open source community, which means it wouldn't be surprising if they decided to drop a open source phone.
SteamOS is open source with some closed sources component.
So it is not free software. It's proprietary, unethical software that takes away your freedom. Just like Windows, Android, etc.
But most important think you seems not being able to understand is that Valve provide high support to Open source community, which means it wouldn’t be surprising if they decided to drop a open source phone.
By doing what? They only want to lock you in their proprietary platform. Most of heir software is proprietary, their games are proprietary and they restrict users with DRM. It's a terrible company, which abuses their users. If Steam Deck contains proprietary software, why would their phone by anything different?
Valve mainly makes proprietary software. Proton doesn't do anything new. It just contains some fixes for Steam games. Nobody cares about it other than Steam users. You are acting like they invented something here. They didn't. They just want to lock you in their platform.
I don't think you realise how this "little change" drastically affect linux gaming.
Nobody cares about it other than Steam users.
No shit sherlock.
They just want to lock you in their platform.
If they wanted to lock us on their platform, they would add a vendor lock on the steam deck(nothing stop you to install any others linux distro on it, or even windows even if i don't recommend it), they would not explain how to use proton outside of steam(which for them is a catch, because it gives the possibility to linux users to play steam cracked games), i probably forgot many others things but you got my point.
@Titou@lemmeee playing proprietary games based on proprietary libraries with proprietary art and music and stories but it’s ok because we didn’t use Windows
Right? What's the point of using GNU/Linux if you are gonna run proprietary software on it? Obviously, more freedom is better, but those people don't understand that their goal should be to have complete freedom. So they get trapped in Valve's ecosystem, just like with Microsoft/Apple/Google. The most bizarre part is not that it happens, but that they are unable to recognize it even when pointed out to them.
Maybe it'd be the first "specialty" phone with decent specs. I always get excited for these "specialty" type phones like "Linux on my PHONE? Fuck yea!"
Until I look at the specs and it's crap every single time and then I'm just disappointed, like the PinePhone Pro has just 4GB LPDDR4 (No not even the good LPDDR4x) lmao like what is this, 2015?? Lolol
Everything that matters is open source and upstreamed or on the way there. Haven't kept up with the state of things but as far as I am aware you can already run a mainline kernel on the Deck. Would love to see an open phone you can easily run your own distribution on without jumping through hoops.
But phones are hard. An x86 phone with decent battery life is even harder. But one can dream.
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.
There is a Debian spin for the Pinephone called Mobian. I ran that for quite a while with Phosh as the front end. It's probably still installed on the device.
What I hate about ARM is that you basically need a separate image for every device instead of one for everything like with x86.
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.
They are all equally capable in my opinion. I really think it’s down to personal preference. I’m not sure if it’s still a thing, but the multiboot SD card images wereVERYhelpful for me.
In the US store it costs 200$ for the original PinePhone and 400$ for the Pro version. The EU store is a little more expensive.
I'm not the person you asked, but I've had mine for 2 years.
Pros:
free software and freedom (and with that increased privacy and security)
runs the same software that you can run on desktop as long as it has an ARM build (a lot of Debian packages do) or you compile it yourself - this includes not just apps, but also terminal programs and servers
killswitch to power off the proprietary modem for when you don't want phone carrier tracking you
like in other modern phones the modem is isolated (here it's connected over USB)
multiple distros to choose from
multiple desktop environments to choose from
replacable battery
headphone jack
replacement parts available in case you break something
you can boot from the microSD card, so distro hopping is easy
can run Android apps through Waydroid
Cons:
slow - you are running modern software on an old SoC (the Pro version is faster, but still slow compared to modern phones)
not all GNU/Linux apps have a responsive UI that works well on mobile
some old apps might not have touch support
short battery life - the SoC is not very energy efficient. Possible workarounds: get the keyboard addon with builtin battery (but it makes the phone bigger and heavier), carry spare batteries with you, or buy/3D print a bigger case and use a bigger battery
runs hot
GPS isn't super accurate
audio quality during phone calls isn't great
the non-pro version might not be able to run a mainline kernel, so you might not be able to install a desktop distro on it
the Pro version should be able to run a mainline kernel, but there might be things that don't work
experience with GNU/Linux is required
sometimes workarounds are needed - for me, on Mobian stable sometimes the modem or wifi don't wake up from suspend and I have to reset it with a script (I added it to the apps menu for quick access, but it's still annoying)
[on original PinePhone] bad camera and the default app can only take pictures - there is a script for recording video, but then there is no preview
I'm not sure if you can use the camera as a webcam in most software
[might depend on the model] video playback is not GPU accelerated, so it makes the CPU hot and drains battery and you might be limited to 1080p@30fps or 720p
you can run a stable distro with old software and old bugs (and sometimes things change very fast) or a less stable one with current software, but then things will sometimes break after update and you will have to fix it (probably more than on desktop)
on Mobian stable (old software) the proximity sensor acts weird during a call and sometimes you can't see the screen
no Xbox gamepad support in Mobian stable (but Playstation gamepads work)
they keyboard addon isn't perfect and requires some setup
with the keyboard addon I can't plug in any USB devices to the phone and I don't know why - charging works though
[original PinePhone] uses micro SIM standard instead of nano SIM
sometimes there is screen flickering in non-pro version
killswitches could be a bit easier to flip (they are very small)
[on original PinePhone] poor 3D performance (even SuperTuxKart doesn't run smoothly), WebGL doesn't seem to work (at least for 3D)
not a lot of RAM, so you can't run too many apps at once or have too many browser tabs open - you can still run Electron apps, though (just not too many at once)
no push notifications, so if you want to be notified when you get a message in some app, while the phone is suspended, you would have to setup a script to wake the phone up periodically
Edit: I corrected a mistake with the SIM card. I turns out that PinePhone Pro uses nano SIM and it's only the original PinePhone that uses micro SIM
Youre a treasure trove of information my friend. One of those lemmings that really keeps this place running with content and helpful stuff at that. Thanks mate! :)
I used mine on T-Mobile almost daily. It worked okay. Think of early Android days where everyone had their own custom rom and none of them were as smooth as you felt they should be.
Yeah it just means if someone rang the phone would still be routed to my e-sim. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I am waiting for the right combination of time and energy to add all my chats into matrix bridges on my server. Not having a direct phone to call would almost be ideal... 🤔
I haven't used it on the PinePhone or PinePhone Pro in a while, but Waydroid is solid on my OnePlus 6T with postmarketOS. Android apps that only need an Internet connection work fine. I installed microG and have push notifications working for Discord and Teams. However, notifications don't get passed through to the Linux side so they only show if you open the Android UI. Screen rotation doesn't work on Waydroid which can be very annoying. Apps that use other hardware features such as location, Bluetooth, vibration, access to calls/texts won't work properly.
There seems to be some progress with the call audio issue, so it might get fixed soon. As for WhatsApp you can probably run that with Waydroid (but eventually you should switch to some free software messenger).
My bad I have not phrased my sentence properly, I am already using signal and with hopes that WhatsApp allows ppl to send messages to another WhatsApp number from my preferred app here signal then I can communicate with my friends and colleagues
I thought you could just use the Android open source project? I thought the tracking was mostly baked into Google's flavor of Android not the open source product
I don’t know if a phone that uses the open source version as base. Usually they build off open source or google and add in all the manufacturer/carrier bloat. For me to get off One Plus’s built in OS I had to go through this whole process on their website to get the code to unlock the boot loader.
I have lineage os as a replacement and it’s really cool. My mobile internet stopped working on it though :( my next phone is gonna roll with Graphene
I mean not technically.. those products use a separent kernel that has its own development path away from the Linux kernel. Linux is just a compatible Unix kernel but I wouldn't classify it as a Unix operating system since it diverges into its own thing.
Android still uses the Linux kernel not some piece of code that they developed and not some commercial Unix product
GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix!",[6][12] chosen because GNU's design is Unix-like, but differs from Unix by being free software and containing no Unix code.[6][13][14] Stallman chose the name by using various plays on words, including the song The Gnu.[4]: 45:30
Same, on desktop and mobile. I don't know if it's funny or sad that a community called "linuxmemes" can't tell the difference between Linux, GNU/Linux and Android.
See, this is why, yet again, Stallman was right: insisting on "GNU/Linux" is necessary in order to disambiguate between the fully-Free Software OS and bastardized half-proprietary stuff like Android.
Exactly. Even in this community and in this post people keep mixing Linux, GNU/Linux and Android. It's crazy that even people who use this operating system are confused. Almost always when they say Linux they really mean GNU/Linux. Linux Mint or Arch Linux are GNU/Linux. But Android isn't and it doesn't even use the mainline Linux kernel.
The issue of freedom is a separate thing, because even most GNU/Linux distros contain proprietary software just like Android.
I guess most ppl who are supporting the gnu/linux phone are the ones who want a similar apple like features like how the prism os had promised to provide.
I have a "braveheart" pinephone (one of the first ones) and I just use it to play around with it's features, do distrohopping etc.)
Most of the time i used an arch build with phosh. But actually I highly recommend postmarketOS, the installer is straight forward and let you build whatever you want. Actually I run postmarketOS edge with encrypted f2fs and gnome-mobile on it. gnome-mobile works better on newer phones but it is still usable.
I prefer my grapheneOS phone because it is faster has more apps, apps are scaled correctly etc. Not too much battery drain...
PS. I managed to run Thunderbird usable on pinephone, I just play around with the look&feel and now I simply have just the mail cards and I am able to interact with it without too much scaling issues.
I think Linux phones needs more time. My dream would be a phone I can plug into a docking station and work on where I stopped. Most platforms gave this dream up. But Linux is on it's way to do it. It's actually possible, thx to gtk4, libadwaita etc.
What is the current state of Gnome mobile? I thought that it wasn't finished yet. Is it as good as Phosh?
PS. I managed to run Thunderbird usable on pinephone, I just play around with the look&feel and now I simply have just the mail cards and I am able to interact with it without too much scaling issues.
Phosh comes with Geary. I haven't used it, but it looks like it should work well on mobile.
Phosh is definitely more polished and an attempt to make gtk mobile friendly. I actually prefer gnome-mobile for testing purposes. It's exactly like gnome-desktop and apps are opened each in an workspace, which is an impressive solution. It also needs more resources, and its not recommended for the first pinephone.
I know about Geary. But it's not the same as a complete Thunderbird install. There I can use my smime/openpgp certs and tags are also synchronised.
My Nokia N900 ran Linux back in the day, and was a more polished experience than the iPhone it was then contemporary with. Too bad that particular line went precisely nowhere.
Not officially, from what I recall. That was possibly one of the plans for it's alleged successor, the N950, which turned out to be vaporware. Sailfish OS then went to be used on the first Jolla Phone, which probably sold in single digit numbers. Jolla now manufactures nothing, although they apparently continue to develop Sailfish for licensing to embedded applications, and their main deal seems to be the "Appsupport" compatibility layer for Android apps to run on Linux.
That works if youre kinda an enthusiast. Not saying its perfect. But it works.
for context I've run a librem 5 and a pinephone and they both are not there yet imho.
True. It was absolutely useful in the Android 4 era when it first came out. Jolla phone was more advanced and useable than contemporary android devices. Android simply has far more resources to truck on.
Yes. When people talk about a Linux phone, they mean a Linux like experience where the user is in charge and there is no data harvesting or other shitfuckery. That's not something any Android phone delivers out of the box.
I tried to daily drive a PinePhone for a long time, then a PinePhone Pro. It is not really ready. Too many dropped/failed to answer calls and missed texts. I love having a fully capable Linux PC in my pocket and am typing this on my OnePlus 6T with postmarketOS, but as a phone it is not ideal. My setup now is that I have a OnePlus 6 with stock Android and my main SIM for doing phone stuff (calls, texts, some apps, Bluetooth handsfree) and the OnePlus 6T with pmOS for Linux experimentation and doing pocket computer things (browsing, coding, SSH, VPN, testing Waydroid). I got a second cheap SIM so I can have service on both devices, but as the 6T with pmOS can't receive calls in 4G mode it really doesn't work as a phone. The PinePhones can work as a phone but the modem dropouts make it less than ideal and their battery life and performance leave much to be desired while the OP6T has fairly good performance and battery life on pmOS.
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.
I had call drops on both the original and the Pro. They both use the same USB-attached modem and the modem has (had?) an issue where it would lose USB connection to the main processor sometimes, so you would just randomly lose cell connectivity. Sometimes the USB connection would restart right away and sometimes it would not and you'd have to restart eg25 manager to reboot the modem.
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.
I had this issue using the libre modem firmware on both phones. I'm not sure if it's a modem side issue or a Linux side issue. I haven't used either PinePhone with a SIM card in almost a year though so my knowledge could be outdated.
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: screenshot
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.
Everyone saying Android is completely missing the point. I mean yeah, it runs the linux kernel, but i feel like most of yall wouldn't call ChromeOS linux on the other hand.
The obvious connotations are privacy, choice, wayland/x11 support, a useful terminal, a rich foss ecosystem, and arch btw.
I'd agree with you in the context of standard (google) android.
One caveat that I'd like to highlight, though, is that for me GrapheneOS and F-Droid handily achieve the privacy and rich FOSS ecosystem parts. Useful terminal depends on your definition :) but for my use case Termux fills the void.
It doesn't feel like Linux (you can't even use Wifi and Ethernet at the same time for crying out loud) but for a relatively cheap low-power device, I like the flexibility.
It's far enough from being a foot gun that I can give a Pixel 5 with GrapheneOS and some F-Droid apps to my grandmother and know she'll have no problems. Balancing that with having enough extensibility to scratch the itch for 99% of tinkerers is a feat to appreciate in my view.
My point is really just that it is an entirely different software stack than the traditional linux experience. I cant just download the source for a standard linux app and compile it for android, it needs to be ported.
I think pinephone and librem are the closest we have gotten to a proper linux phone. But the specs suck, and the mobile optimized app ecosystem isnt there yet. Thats the point of the op meme.
I can confirm that my PinePhone runs the same software that I run on my desktop. I usually don't even need to compile anything, since a lot of packages in Debian repo have an ARM version. Not all apps have responsive UIs and some of the old ones lack touch support, though. But that is something that keeps improving over time (GNOME 4 and libhandy for example). You can also use CLI programs if you want.
