My current Android phone’s battery is on it’s last legs (and it’s glued together so I can’t replace it), and I fear it’s time to move on to greener pastures. I’m really excited for the recent developments in “pure Linux” phones so my first thought was to get one of those when I switch. Either that or I could try to get a Fairphone and put a degoogled ROM on it, but it seems they only ship to Europe.
Does anyone have any experience with using the Pinephone as a daily driver? How are the Linux operating systems in terms of stability and availability of software that’s compatible with the mobile form factor?
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@nutomic@lemmy.ml has one. Might not be ready to be a daily driver yet tho.
Mine is just lying around. When I tried it a few weeks ago, the interface was so laggy that it was completely unusable. Not to mention that there arent any apps made for mobile (or they are very hard to find). Hopefully the situation will get better soon.
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I did that, and also tried some different distros. The only one without lag was Mobian, so hopefully the others will also be fixed soon (iirc its about enabling hardware acceleration).
I have one, but I don’t use it as my primary phone. There’s calling, SMS, and data so you can do the phone stuff, but it’s hard to do anything complex. I myself won’t be able to use it as my daily driver until MMS works.
Do you mostly just use mobile versions of websites or are there a decent selection of third party clients for things like Reddit?
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It’s mostly just websites. Generally speaking there barely any applications designed with mobile in mind.
I’m also waiting for MMS functionality. Oh and I need to buy a SIM adapter.
Flash Mobian (https://mobian-project.org) using Jumpdrive, it would go faster than loading it from an SD card, use a nightly image, as kernel 5.9 significantly improves audio call quality. I have my primary SIM card in the phone since that update landed a few weeks ago.
As for applications, there are a bunch of good ones I use:
- gnome-feeds for RSS
- gnome-dictionary - a dictionary
- gnote - Basic, quick note-taking
- geary for email
- setzer for Latex
- marker for Markdown
- sublime-music for subsonic (set scale-to-fit sublime-music on) in Terminal first
- tootle for Mastodon
- cawbird for Twitter
- Polari - IRC
- Fractal - Matrix
I have a Pinephone and it depends on what you need. If you just need basic web stuff it should be adequate. I’m using UT on mine but going to give Mobian a try. UT is kind of limited and it is root only, changing it can break the system. No auto-mounting of drives so you have to do it manually on logging every time. It’s also annoying that there is no automute in alsa so when you plug in your headphones, it doesn’t silent the phone. At least it is still that way in the release candidate channel that I’m using. The music player it uses is limited and very sluggish, and the media player for movies I could never get to play movies, at least not the .avi’s that I have. Also saying the camera is sluggish is being too generous.
