paying for free software
lemmeee @ lemmeee @sh.itjust.works Posts 2Comments 185Joined 1 yr. ago
lemmeee @ lemmeee @sh.itjust.works
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1 yr. ago
The camera isn't going to be as good as modern high-end smartphones, but it should be usable. But I have a separate camera for taking photos and don't know that much about mobile cameras, though.
I’m already invested enough in bitwarden, and not interested in migrating back to keepass. This is a prime example of “I could make it work, but also, they need to meet me where Im at, I’m not redoing my entire life for a phone”
You wouldn't be doing it for a phone, but for freedom (and with that comes better privacy and security). That should be your goal. But I understand that it's difficult.
Could probably also use waydroid for this
Yeah, sounds like that could work.
I’m already not just using Android as is, and use LineageOS on my phone. Which isn’t GrapheneOS (which isn’t available for my phone) but at least allows me to not need to have gmail installed on my phone, etc.
Nice, that sounds like a big improvement over normal Android.
In conclusion, I want to thank you for such a cordial and friendly conversation. I’ve borderline forgotten how decent people on the internet can be. I can’t imagine a “debate” remaining this civil on reddit. (And if I was anything less than civil, I apologize! The broader internet has trained me for a fight or flight response for replies.)
Thank you too, I don't always meet nice people either (even on Lemmy). Have a nice day!
Edit: I checked and the instructions for installing Waydroid don't look that complicated nowadays, but this might depend on the distro:
https://wiki.debian.org/Mobian/How-to#How_to_run_Android_apps_via_Waydroid
What is the current state of Gnome mobile? I thought that it wasn't finished yet. Is it as good as Phosh?
PS. I managed to run Thunderbird usable on pinephone, I just play around with the look&feel and now I simply have just the mail cards and I am able to interact with it without too much scaling issues.
Phosh comes with Geary. I haven't used it, but it looks like it should work well on mobile.
Flameshot should work.
The SoC is not very power efficient. There aren't many to choose from. In case of PinePhone Pro it's a 2016 SoC running modern software.
I wrote a comment that might help you with your research: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/9202570
This thread contains some information too: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/9166918
When I was using my PinePhone I don’t think I was able to get music to play in the background for example. I imagine this has been fixed by now but it was still frustrating.
I've never had such issue and I've never heard of it, so it must be some old bug that was fixed long time ago.
Using the word Linux to describe the operating system makes no sense in general. You never know if someone is talking about the OS or the kernel. GNU was developed by different people with a different philosophy and goals. When people say Linux, they usually mean GNU/Linux (Linux Mint, Arch Linux, etc). But there is also Alpine Linux, which doesn't use GNU at all, so it's not exactly the same thing. And why even name the OS after the kernel? Doesn't the name Alpine Linux sound like it's just a fork of Linux? It's super confusing and people mix it up all the time, even this community of GNU/Linux users and under this post.
Android uses a heavily modified fork of Linux, so it doesn't use the same Linux that we use on desktop and it's definitely not a GNU/Linux operating system. So I don't know if we can call it "Linux".
Then there is Ubuntu Touch and I don't even know how to call that. GNU/Android maybe?
But the phones that we are talking about here I would say that those are GNU/Linux phones. Because even though many people run postmarketOS on them, they are designed to run GNU/Linux and they are shipped with it. But the phones designed to run Ubuntu Touch are something else. Maybe we should just call them Android phones, because I think that's what they are mostly designed to run.
Pine64 has nothing to do with it, but it’s their hardware, so they should.
I agree. I wish we had better companies making GNU/Linux phones, but this is all we have for now. It's either Pine64 or Purism.
The camera works on my pinephone, and it takes pictures that remind me of the digital camera I had in 1999 that saved images to floppy disks.
Yeah, the original PinePhone has only a 5 megapixel camera. PinePhone Pro's camera is way better, but I'm not sure about the current state of software support. The author of the Megapixels camera app is working on a new, improved version, but it seems very complicated: https://blog.brixit.nl/fixing-the-megapixels-sensor-linearization/
Bitwarden would run, but it was running as a desktop app and was a pain to use (no lib handy here), and it obviously wasn’t going to offer to auto fill across the entire OS.
I use Gnome's Secrets (available in Mobian Bookworm). It works well on mobile, but I don't know about autofill. For 2fa you can use Gnome Authenticator (not available in Mobian Bookworm) or Numberstation (available in Mobian Bookworm).
Phone worked, but I don’t receive enough calls to validate it, and pine’s own wiki states that the there are modem issues. It may be perfectly fine for me, but not something i fully trust, and that’s a factor in acceptance.
You would just have to test it. I only have the original PinePhone with the libre modem firmware and I haven't noticed any missed calls, but I don't get a lot of calls in general. According to this recent blog post there seem to be some modem issues with PinePhone Pro (but I'm not sure if that includes missed calls): https://zerwuerfnis.org/daily-driving-the-pinephone-pro
and signal I would assume I would have to waydroid. But I never got waydroid set up. Hopefully that’s something that has gotten easier in the past 2 years. 2 years ago there was multiple hoops to jump through with installing kernel modules or something, and seeing a list of steps to take (and not just being able to install it from a repo in 1 go), when I was already dealing with performance issues, I just assumed it wasn’t going to be worth it.
Ah, that sounds painful. I've never used Waydroid, but a lot of people say it works well for them. I don't see it packaged in Debian or Mobian, but 2 years is a lot of time in software development, so maybe it's easier now. There is also some alternative Signal client called Axolotl. Some people use it, but I don't fully understand how it works, so you would have to investigate on your own.
Who knows, maybe I’ll give it a try again and come to a more favorable “it’s fine i guess, but still not as good as my 2017 android phone in any capacity except ‘not google’”
Yeah, it probably won't be as good. It requires GNU/Linux experience and some workarounds. But if you manage to set it up in a way that makes you use Android less, that would be pretty great.
You are talking about the high prices of the EU store? Yeah, that pissed me off too. The only thing you are getting for paying this much is 2 years of warranty (the American store gives like 30 days or something), but that doesn't justify the price increase for me. You also get free shipping, but shipping doesn't cost this much. If you order from the American store, you will have to pay the VAT tax and possibly some other fee, so you will probably end up paying about the same. It sucks.
You might be able to get a used one, though. I've seem people sell them on Pine64's forum and on reddit.
There is already one: /c/pinephone@lemmy.ml. But not a lot of activity there.
Awesome! It will probably keep you busy for more than a week, unless you get bored with it :D. I don't tinker all the time with mine, but here is something I've been trying lately (the instructions/bugs shown in the video are outdated though and some steps are no longer necessary): https://youtu.be/ffEGdbXt2Qo
The point was that different people have different standards.
Ah, you are right about that. But I do wish that freedom was the main goal for people, because that's the point of the Free Software movement. Switching to GNU/Linux is inconvenient too and there might be things that a person won't be able to do on it. Obviously an average person won't be able to handle a PinePhone, so I don't have hope they will try (and they probably shouldn't), but an average GNU/Linux user might. It all depends on how much a person values freedom. But at the same time I understand that getting freedom is usually a gradual journey, which might take a lot of time.
That’s awesome. I rarely answer phone calls anyway, so that doesn’t impact me much. This was purely reflective of the state of things. “Probably fine” and “definitely works” can be a MAJOR difference in the scope of daily driver readiness for most people.
I also don't answer many phone calls, so it's possible I was just lucky or haven't noticed.
The camera on my pinephone actually opens and can take pictures. it just looks terrible. To the degree that I’m at least 75% sure that it’s a sensor issue, and no amount of software tuning is going to bring the sensor up to the level of other phones. Considering my primary use for my phone is taking pictures, “the camera works, but its terrible” doesn’t fit my use case (admittedly, this may be a specific to me use case).
If you are talking about the original PinePhone, then yes, it's a 5 megapixel camera and it will always be terrible. PinePhone Pro's camera is much better, though. There seems to be a lot of very technical stuff that goes into making pictures look good. For example stuff like auto-exposure and color correction. Here is a quote from the developer of the Megapixels camera app from the blog post that I linked:
Making a piece of software that dumps camera frames from V4L2 into a file is not very difficult to do, that's only a few hundred lines for C code. Figuring out why the pictures look cheap is a way harder challenge.
I have a separate camera for taking photos, but I understand the need to have one in a phone that you can take with you everywhere.
Oh. yeah. That’s probably a deal breaker for most people too.
Yeah, push notifications probably won't be solved for a while. There is some hope, though:
Internal WDS (Wireless Data Service) Client (in BETA!, expect problems)
Allows you to connect to the internet directly from the modem's userspace (only IPv4 for now, sorry!)
Allows for always on networking in the modem no matter if your PinePhone is sleeping
https://github.com/the-modem-distro/pinephone_modem_sdk/releases/tag/0.7.4
Thanks for clarifying. I also use the libre firmware and sometimes the modem doesn't wake up from suspend when I unlock the phone (I sometimes also have to restart wifi with a script). So maybe I just didn't notice the missed calls or something.
Lately I found that there is some USB controller and I saw some messages about it when running dmesg:
So maybe that causes the modem issues. When I use the keyboard addon, I can't get any USB device to work when plugging it to the phone and I suspect that might be a connected problem too. I don't know much about hardware, tough.
I'm glad I didn't scare you, haha! There is also another comment that I wrote, which contains a few more details: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/9202570
That makes sense, but there are other popular mobile distros too. For example: Manjaro ARM and Mobian (mobile Debian).
Ah, I see. It's often hard to tell if some issue is still there if I don't experience it myself. Some things get solved eventually, but you have to run the latest software (and I'm not) and then test things to see it. I think nowadays people recommend to install the libre modem firmware, so that's also another variable.
I use Mobian with Phosh too! What I love about Mobian is that it's just a small overlay on top of Debian. The project's goal is literally to upstream everything into Debian and to stop existing. You can see that it doesn't add a lot of packages: https://packages.mobian.org
Yeah, you are right about ARM. It seems to be true about RISC-V as well. It's so weird that so many people think those kinds of devices will be good for us. Sometimes I watch reviews of single board computers on YouTube and the reviewers never mention that the device can't run mainline Linux. They can't install Debian from debian.org on them. So instead they install some distro provided by the manufacturer and for some reason they are just fine with that. Raspberry PI is the same and almost nobody seems to be talking about this. So that's why I'm not sure if you can install a normal distro on PinePhone Pro or Librem 5, even though they can run mainline Linux.
Also ARM SoC manufacturers don't seem to try to have upstream Linux support. So I think that's why PinePhone uses a 2010 SoC (if I remember correctly) and Pro uses a 2016 SoC. It's a bad platform.
It's hard to say if it will work for you. For some people it does and for others it doesn't. It's just something you would have to see for yourself and it might require some time to set everything up the way you want it. It's a device that requires tinkering. Voyager seems to have a web version and so does FluffyChat. I use Nheko Matrix client (available in Mobian/Debian repo) - it's a native app that works pretty well. I don't know about the other apps, but in general you can run Android apps through Waydroid. Maybe those would work too.
There are no push notifications, so if you want the phone to suspend and still receive Matrix notifications, you would have to setup a script that will wake the phone up periodically.
Pictures (taking and viewing, maybe nextcloud upload but that could be done by a script as well)
This works on the original PinePhone, but the camera itself is pretty bad. PinePhone Pro has a decent one, but I'm not sure what the current state of that is. My understanding is that it works, but the pictures might not look that great. I think it's only one guy working on the camera app and he is currently working on a new version: https://blog.brixit.nl/fixing-the-megapixels-sensor-linearization/. For syncing files with a desktop I use SyncThing, but Nextcloud should probably work too. For sending just a few specific files from time to time you could use KDE Connect or even just SSH.
Web browser
That works. I use Firefox. PinePhone doesn't have a lot of RAM, though, so you won't be able to have a lot of tabs open at once.
Music
Definitely works. I use Lollypop app (available in Mobian/Debian), which works well on a mobile screen. The phone has a headphone jack if you need it. The speaker isn't very good.
Calls
This works, but audio quality during phone calls isn't always good. There also seem to be some modem issues on PinePhone Pro: https://zerwuerfnis.org/daily-driving-the-pinephone-pro. I think it's currently recommended to install the free modem firmware and I'm not sure if the author was using that (the phone doesn't come with it installed).
I'm not sure if MMS works (SMS does), since I don't use that. Support for emergency broadcasts is now being added to Phosh: https://phosh.mobi/posts/cellbroadcast/
You should also know that the battery life isn't very good. So if you use the phone a lot, you might need either an extended battery case or spare batteries (the battery is replaceable) or the keyboard addon.
Edit: I have a stupid idea! I fondly remember my blackberry from back in the day. Obviously its not for the mainstream but pinephone isnt either. Wouldnt a step back to a blackberry design be pretty awesome for us nerds? :)
I don't know which one you mean, but I would love to have a slider keyboard! Technically you could make one and I've been wondering how hard that would be. PinePhone has some pins on the back that you could use - one of them is i2c. The keyboard addon from Pine64 uses them (they have other addons too). It's probably a lot of work to make something like that, though.
Interesting! I would love to see a progress update video some day, even if the project isn't finished.
Remember kids:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html