Alt text: Spongebob screaming “I fucking love right to repair. I want to fucking excercise my legal right to maintain my property to reduce electronic waste and save money instead of supporting planned obsolescence in the technology space” with an iFixit knife and smartphone in his hands.

  • CalcProgrammer1
    3·
    1 year ago

    I think at that point you aren’t really concerned about anything region-specific so much as you’re concerned about the general state of Linux as a viable mobile OS. That is entirely understandable, at the moment it does not provide the same degree of functionality you would get from an Android phone, even a de-Googled one.

    Maps (and GPS for that matter) are not really usable. GNOME Maps exists and does work as a map viewer for OpenStreetMap, but it does not do real-time navigation and, more importantly, I have not been able to get GPS to work reliably. Location works when connected to WiFi but it’s just using a WiFi map location service not GPS. For some reason I can’t get a good GPS fix on either PinePhone. Google Maps works in a browser, but only to the degree you can use it on desktop. Right now, you’re not going to use your PinePhone as a proper GPS navigation device.

    The phone functionality seems reasonably solid these days, but it’s very basic. It places calls, it receives calls, and that’s about it. No Bluetooth, no using USB headsets. The audio routing is pretty much fixed to the hardware audio path from the earpiece and mic to the modem. There is an option of using USB audio for the modem with the open firmware which theoretically will allow the audio routing to be flexible, but it isn’t reliable in my experience.

    SMS seems pretty solid. Sending and receiving texts works, MMS now works provided you have the mmsd service set up and running. Can’t complain too much there.

    Visual Voicemail is available and was working fine, though in the past week or two it doesn’t seem to be working but could just be an issue on my end.

    Mobile data works as expected.

    The PinePhones still have an issue where the modem drops out and reconnects, sometimes it doesn’t want to come back up but restarting eg25-manager fixes it.

    It sounds like the state of mobile Linux and the PinePhone aren’t there yet for you, but I would say the same holds true for the Librem 5. It might not have the modem dropout issue, but otherwise it’s running much the same software stack.