I was going through Pine64’s page again after I found the latest KDE announcement. With that said, I seem to see a lot of issues with firmware on the Pine, whilst the Librem is just plain out of budget for me. Was interested in how many people here run a Linux mobile as a daily driver, and how has your experience been?
I’m considering purchasing the Pine but I’d like a better screen, more RAM and a better CPU. Don’t know if I should wait for a new model to be released (are they even planning to do that? Is the company active?). I will only really use it to browse the Web, and might even look to desolder a couple of parts that I know I won’t use.
Thanks.
Edit: I am willing to watch content and use banking apps from the browser. Do you think it’ll be fit for me?
Edit 2: overall, I am much saddened about the state of affairs regarding private computing on the go. I desperately hope that Linux on mobile takes off, even though its incubation looks disheartening at the moment. Thank you everyone for your comments.
Nope. I would like to but as long as android does an okay job I will stick with that.
Yeah Linux phone is a pipedream as long as Android works well at all.
The fact that you can use Termux kind of makes Linux phones moot, especially since you need a very specific set of hardware
Would really love to but have yet to see basic phone functionality covered in a way that isn’t a painful compromise. Stock Android is a privacy nightmare, which is why I left it. I had some fun with Cyanogenmod back in the day, maybe there’s another de-googled Android distribution around today but since I last checked I couldn’t find one that runs on modern mainstream hardware without really jumping through some crazy hoops to establish root.
Cyanogenmod became LineageOS. It can be run fully de-googled or with Gapps.
GrapheneOS is also worth looking at.
Both run on modern hardware and are super simple to install.
Will definitely give these a look, thank you for the updates.
Can you speak to your experience with any of these? Would love to hear a first hand account!
I would have to dispute your claims on this one. The only really modern mobiles running Lineage OS (by modern I mean released in this year and the previous year) are perhaps some European Xiaomi/Realme devices, maybe a couple of Samsungs, the last-gen OnePlus and some Motorola devices, and the Pixels.
As I have been complaining for a long while now, the entire custom ROM market is moving towards the Pixels, which is a dreadful move in my opinion, but what I can do
Motorola edge 30 runs just fine and has done practically since it launched, typing this on it now
Would really love to but have yet to see basic phone functionality covered in a way that isn’t a painful compromise. Stock Android is a privacy nightmare, which is why I left it.
I’ve been using GrapheneOS for about a year now and it’s a giant leap in privacy and security (much better than iOS), with very little compromise in functionality.
I’ve bought a Nexus 4 to play around with Ubuntu Touch many years ago, but I really don’t think I could daily drive even a more powerful Linux phone. Many apps from messengers to banking apps are Android/iOS only, so it’d be really inconvenient to use — not to mention problems with calling and a not-so-great camera.
Almost all things I want to do on a phone are possible with a Pixel + GrapheneOS, which also makes an open source, secure and private phone OS.
Usually ssh’ing into a server through termux is all I need, altough it’d be cool to be able to plug my phone into a monitor and have a desktop with me all the time. But it being “cool” is the problem, as it’s not useful day to fay for me. If I need a pc I’ll take my laptop. I’ll probably try it at some point, but that’s many years into the future.
Copying my edit here: I am willing to watch content and use banking apps from the browser. Do you think it’ll be fit for me?
Performance and bugs might still be a problem with these relatively young projects. But if all you need is a browser I do believe it might be worth a shot.
In the EU 2FA for banking is required by law which usually comes down to either an Android/iOS app or a chipTAN device. That’s why browser isn’t an option for me. Sadly I don’t think waydroid passes the basicIntegrity check of AOSP [1], so emulation is out of the picture too.
Banking 2FA can be done by SMS too, which is secure enough.
A world in which banking requires us to install spyware on our mobile computers is not a world we should accept.
Man, the call problems are a dealbreaker for any phone at all, imo. Maybe not for a toy, but it’s bonkers that they’d release a phone OS that isn’t 100% call stable.
There has to be a device to develop support for calling. Since there’re multiple open source phone projects it’s also not simple to just write an implementation for them. Additionally carriers don’t work all the same (different bands, …), so it’s really not easy to solve with the few resources available. As far as I know much of the development on these phone OS is done by volunteers and pine64 isn’t a big established company either.
I use Kaios , Another embedded linux
Life is nice this way, No bzz, Everything supposed to be done by a phone is handled perfectly by this small thing and for rest (like office,game and code) I go with PC
How do you do instant messaging? Isn’t typing with that harder than average?
I used a pinephone as my daily driver for about a month. Importantly, this was 3~4 years ago, things could be better now.
My take at the time: The battery life was bad, the phone was slow, MMS did not work, making a receiving calls was iffy at best.
I really really hope this improves/has improved over time. Android gets more and more difficult to de-google. A linux phone would solve a lot of privacy issues (not all, but some)
It sucks that GrapheneOS supports only Pixels and nobody came along and ported it to other devices, although less secure.
But “Android gets harder to degoogle” is not true. Pixels are just way too expensive
Pixels are just way too expensive
LOL what? The A series are some of the cheapest modern phones you can buy, and an incredible value…
Yup then that is pretty messed up. I was used to phones not costing over 200€, maybe 300
