How many of you run a Linux phone (Pine64, Librem etc) as your daily driver?
How many of you run a Linux phone (Pine64, Librem etc) as your daily driver?
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.
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for about one year i used exclusively motorola droid4 as mobile device. it runs maemo-leste: mobile linux distribution with nokia's hildon desktop (revived maemo fremantle sources) on top of devuan linux.
i also myself maintain about ten packages in maemo-leshe repository.
but most of the people won't use motorola droid 4 and maemo-leste.
they won't tolerate small screen and they need their 'apps' for 'banking' or 'twitter' or whatever.
i do not use banking apps or twitter or reddit or instagram or whatever they use, so i don't care.
i used pidgin on that device, even connected to 'ms teams' for work via pidgin.
worked more stabre than real 'teams' client, but of course pidgin is not the mosh usable app on a small screen.
today i use dino on it for e2e encrypted xmpp messaging. in devuan chimaera dino is old and buggy. well what can i do?
it is okay.
but how many people are ready to give up shiny androids or ioses for this cyberpunk device?
even camera doesn't work on it.
well, it is normal for mobile linux distributions that camera doesn't work ot most devices. if it works for photos then not for videos.
well i carry an old small point and shoot with me. i think though it is crappy it makes pdotos better than many phones do.
but i cannot recognize qrcodes with phone.
recently i am trying to use pinephone.
it is more powerful and it has more recent software in postmarketos. my environment is sxmo. it is hde best phone environment ever created, i think. but how many people will agree with me? even pinephone users prefer phosh or kde plasma or something more fancy.
'''''''''what i do with pinephone?
first of all i charge it always. it is like tamagocci, if you don't feed it it will die. so i carry a power bank with me.
it runs about six hours if i dont touch it (without suspend) and about two hours if i run dino.
in best case, if dino won't make the device unresponsive.
i have an open source program called songrec on it, it can use shazam api and it recognizes music played around. it is a very useful app. and it is adaptive, works in both portrait and landsgape modes.
what else do i do with it? well, browse the web sometimes. but it is often a torture. and i wondur why dont i just do the same on laptop.
yeah and podcasts with gpodder-adaptive.
and radio with shortwave.
i know why i do this: i want to use mostly libre software so i am ready for inconveniences. but not many people are ready to this.
for many years i used sailfish. it is very polished. i would recommend it to 'regular people' instead of android.
but i do not like that it doesn't run on mainline on most devices, so proprietary linux kernel is necessary, the ui framework isn't libre so we cannot use an app we used to on other platform most of the time. so u r getting locked to sailfish. it is hard to leave it because u cannot take your apps with you. in order to port apps written with their silica classes one needs to rewrite the ui completely.
so i am a person who only used linux phones for years asd i know it is not easy foc regular people.
for me it is ok. i do not need much more than sxmo as environment. i only wish pinephone to not hang as often because of dino. (: