I was gonna buy a pinephone, but i want to know if this is really the best choice. I’m a real fan of the hardware switches. Any recommendations?
I was gonna buy a pinephone, but i want to know if this is really the best choice. I’m a real fan of the hardware switches. Any recommendations?
My advise is not to buy one. It’s a nice idea. But even with the tech enthusiasts and Linux nerds (like me)… A lot of them will tell you it spends most of it’s existence in your drawer of unfinished projects.
It’s slow, has quite some annoyances and quirks. And by now the chipset that was already old on release, is ancient. It’s generally unusable in every-day situations. And the hardware limits what kind of Linux use you’ll get out of it. The newer pro version makes it better, but not substancially. And it’ll add it’s own quirks in return.
And the software (Linux) doesn’t work great either. Things have settled down and I don’t expect substancial change by now. Yet, you’ll have issues with the touchscreen keyboard. Copy-pasting things. Lots of things aren’t adapted for mobile. Any browser is sluggish and struggles with playing videos.
I’ve bought the hardware keyboard, too. And I can’t recommend that either. It’s just not a great product. It’s not great to type on it and it has more quirks. And it constantly drains the battery for me and I expect it to someday discharge the battery to a point where it’ll destroy it. I’ve tried several things and couldn’t fix that.
You might be better off buying a regular phone that is supported by postmarketOS. But I don’t have any experience with that. And I’m not aware of any good one that I’d recommend at the moment.
oh wow, that’s sad :( Thanks for the reply, its weird that in 2024 phones are still so -boring and useless.
I’d love to see some Linux phone again. For me, propably something like the Nokia N950. But I’m fine without a keyboard, too.
Designing a phone from the grounds up, then also getting into the business of manufacturing for the first time… And having to adapt a whole operating system since it wasn’t optimized for mobile is just a lot of things at the same time. I’m really impressed by what Pine64 and the community were able to pull off. But it’s more a prototype.
I think what we’d need is some modern, normal and attractive phone that is produced by some established (or clever) manufacturer, went through extensive testing and mass production. It’d need to be affordable to attract developers. Have a decent and modern chipset and gain some good mainline Linux support. That always proved to be a bit difficult in the ARM ecosystem. And we’d still need to then proceed and change a lot of things about Linux. As of now it just doesn’t have any clever mechanisms to do something like a connected standby… i.e. save power while also listening for instant messenger messages. And ideally you’d like it to receive messages while in your pocket and not just SMS and calls. And we’d have to change a few more desktop apps to be responsive. All of that is quite some work that hasn’t been tackled yet.
I’m currently using GrapheneOS for my daily life. Maybe someday I’ll find some phone that has all the columns green with the components and features that are supported by a Linux kernel.