Anyone use one of those Linux phones like pine phone or librem.

I was looking at a few months ago but settled on a deggooled phone. Are there user friendly distros for them?

  • CalcProgrammer1
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    1 year ago

    The battery on the PinePhones is pretty terrible unfortunately. The processors just eat way too much power. There is a patch being worked on that reduces idle power draw on the PinePhone Pro, but it still won’t get you near a modern Android phone. The keyboard case is helpful in part because it adds 2x the internal battery capacity, but it’s still going to need charging more often than a Galaxy. At least the battery is removable. Maybe they can fix it with software, but I doubt it will ever get to the same power consumption levels of a modern Android just because the PinePhone and Pro are using such outdated (and not mobile-focused) chips. They had to choose the chips based around what had good Linux support, not based on what had good power consumption unfortunately.

    The OnePlus 6T with postmarketOS is showing potential though, with much better battery life than the PinePhone. However, calling support still has some issues so I can’t recommend it as a daily driver even for the basic call and text use case. Hopefully soon, as the hardware is a lot better in both performance and power consumption/battery life.