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Seems like a good+kind opinion.
2023-06-16 · 11 months ago
This was basically the conclusion I came to with the Pinephone. It mostly worked most of the time but was unreliable enought that I stopped using it as a phone and now I use it like a pocketable laptop. A couple other issues I have are that the battery life of the Pinephone is not good enough and you can't keep a network connection alive to deliver non-SMS notifications.
I read this article earlier and it makes me kind of sad. My financial situation is such that I can't possibly justify a Pinephone unless it's going to be my only phone, and since I'm definitely going to be replacing my current phone soon I was really hoping that things had improved enough to make that a viable choice.
This makes me sad too. I was just in the process of researching which mobile linux distro to try due to feeling grossed out by android when I came to this post. Now I am reluctant to even try to play with them.
Flip phone is in my future.
I've had the odd breakage on PostmarketOS but nothing that couldn't be resolved. The team have put a lot of work into testing rigs and recently pulled together a team of manual testers. I can only see things improving. I've daily driven a pinephone and the battery life is a bit of a let down and its a little underpowered but usable. The OnePlus 6T is better in those regards but lacking some functionality due to how the devices are designed but patches for various sensors are waiting to make it into a release. It's all about tradeoffs; none of the mobile Linux offerings are currently perfect but I'm willing to have a few rough edges to not be using iOS or Android.
I have a Librem 5 that I turn on every couple of weeks to update. It's still nowhere near usable, but I am definitely supportive of the concept of a general Linux-based phone at some point in the future. That's why I never sought a refund despite all the problems and delays Purism had while shipping the phone. One day, maybe. But there's vested interest in the industry to keep free and open alternatives out, so it's a real uphill battle. Not to mention that people are immediately dismissive when they find that it can't immediately do everything their current iPhone/Android phone can do...
I bought an original (non-Pro) PinePhone back in late 2021 and, while I also threw the towel after a few months, I started to daily drive it again since early 2023, and the experience has been steadily improving so far. However, it requires a lot of tweaking and hacking, but this is what is all about, I guess! As for the unstable modem and battery life issues, I wrote or readapted a bunch of shell scripts: https://gitea.privatedns.org/xavi/pinephone-scripts . For IM, I use a forked version of Dino (still based in GTK3): https://gitea.privatedns.org/xavi/dino/src/branch/pinephone
That said, I agree with another article Drew published some time ago that stressed the importance of solving low-level issues, such as kernel or modem stability issues. Unfortunately, there is little the community can do to solve the latter, except from putting pressure to the modem manufacturer (Quectel) to fix their source code, or even better: release it under a free software license so we can improve upon it.
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