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?

  • ambitiousslabEnglish
    121·
    3 months ago

    If you can afford it, I think the Librem 5 is the best linux-first phone at the moment. Both it and the PinePhone Pro are roughly as fast as each other, but the Librem 5 has a much more premium feel, and the hardware kill switches are much more accessible, if you’re into that kind of thing.

    Back in the day, when the Librem 5 was $1000+, it was a no-brainer for the PinePhone Pro, but I feel it is much more reasonable to recommend the Librem 5 now.

    You can make it work as a daily driver, but I wouldn’t want to depend on it for life and death situations. Calling generally doesn’t work very well - either one side can’t hear the other, or the audio quality is too quiet, or not very good. It’s probably possible to fix if you know what you’re doing, but I don’t know what I’m doing :)

    I carry around a dumbphone and a SIM removal tool, so that I can call someone if I really need to. If you’re happy to do that, I feel it gives you the best of both worlds.

    Otherwise, one alternative is to be an Android-first device, that has good support in PostmarketOS, e.g. the Oneplus 6/6T. Mobile Linux has had such an impact on these devices that the price of these on eBay has gone up in some areas over time :D

    Good luck!

    • aasatru@kbin.earth
      4·
      3 months ago

      Would love more input from Librem 5 owners about this. It seems opinions are, at best, a mixed bag.

      • ambitiousslabEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        I’m running postmarketOS v24.06. I could easily have messed something up though!

        • Sebastian Krzyszkowiak@social.librem.one
          4·
          3 months ago

          @ambitiousslab It’s probably PipeWire. AFAIK nobody adjusted the audio pipeline to work there with echo cancellation and noise reduction yet. I wouldn’t consider it suitable for phone use until that happens. It’s not rocket science, PipeWire is actually more flexible than PulseAudio for this kind of stuff, but… someone has to do it. Switching back to PulseAudio and reproducing the config from PureOS (including ALSA UCM profiles) would likely give you much better experience right now.

            • ambitiousslabEnglish
              3·
              3 months ago

              Thanks for explaining some of the history, it makes some sense and gives me some things to try. Thanks for all the work you’ve done on the mobile stack as well. It’s made my life a lot better. And maybe one day I’ll be able to ditch the backup nokia too :)

      • ambitiousslabEnglish
        4·
        3 months ago

        At least in my case! I ordered this year. It took 2 months, but it did arrive :)

        • selokichtli
          1·
          3 months ago

          That’s still reasonable if you are some typical customer.