I think I'm reading this blogpost correctly: Mobian devs working on maintaining Linux kernel support for Pinephone painted themselves into a corner with tech debt, and may not be able to continue porting new kernel updates. Pinephone Pro runs a different chipset with wider community support, so it's not affected.
I didn't see any communities or articles talking about this, so either it's not a big deal, or nobody is talking about it.
I couldn't believe the spec of that pile of garbage the phone when i first saw it. The worst being that It has a Mali-400 MP2 (2 cores, the most famous and used varient is MP4 with 4 cores), a GPU from 2008. I know it's supposed to run linux but they choose the cheapest SOC they could find and then asked the seller if he had any unsold SOCs from the last decade they could use instead.
The saddest part is that when I pointed this, I was always told that it's made for tinkerers and not users, but this doesn't excuse the use of extremely outdated hardware. I didn't expect the latest powerhouse but even 30$ Chinese tvboxes had the latest rockchip SOCs....
The phone is from 2019 and i think even back then the SoC was a compromise.
It has more quirks. There have been some hardware issues. And mainline Linux and a Linux Desktop is still struggling today with power management. Like getting chat messages while it's asleep. It's really not for use except for tinkerers.
But I'd agree. A newer, properly usable and powerful Linux phone would be great. Idk if there are good SoCs out there with fully open-source drivers and bootloader. And power consumption that lasts you a day.
A newer, properly usable and powerful Linux phone would be great.
Totally ! Honestly, when i first heard of a linux phone, I had stars in my eyes. I expected medium-low tier specs but that would likely more than enough to for Linux. The actual specs made me cringe because the phone was e-waste before even launch. I think I actually over exaggerated calling it a piece of garbage, I just expected too much from a small company on a niche market.
And mainline Linux and a Linux Desktop is still struggling today with power management. Like getting chat messages while it’s asleep.
And the really sad thing is that the power management improvements devs have been working on for the PinePhone are really very specific to that particular device and don't help mobile Linux in general (so it's basically wasted effort).
Well, let me put it plainly, if you are selling better, I’m buying. So far the one thing Pine has done better than a lot of people talking is doing. They are not the only ones, e.g Purism, but at that price range and who actually did deliver I haven't seen better. Pointers welcomed.
Do you think releasing a phone with hardware that is 10 years ou of date is logical ? let's transpose it to the laptop market. What if system76 sold a laptops with a Pentium 3.x Ghz Core 2 duo, 4GB ddr3 and a Radeon HD 3xxx GPU and a 240 HDD for the price of a current medium-low end computer ?
I've recently decided to just focus on turning my OG pinephone into a mobile hotspot (and maybe running some remote services on it eventually). It's booting postmarketos but just to a login shell. I ssh into it from the usb tether if I need to make changes. It's working pretty well but sometimes after several hours the modem drops off the mobile network and I can't get it to reconnect even by hard power cycling. The next day when I pull it out again it has reconnected and works again.
I didn’t see any communities or articles talking about this, so either it’s not a big deal, or nobody is talking about it.
More than likely very few people own a pinephone, and the few that do don't read pinephone news. Thanks for posting this.
As for me, I'm not buying another pinephone/GNU+Linux compatible device until both the community and the manufacturer get their shit figured out. I bought the PInephone expecting it to one day become more useful to me, so I guess that's on me.
The pinephone is cool but so underpowered. Hoping to get some use out of of it as a audio looper controller. Looks like I can anticipate a sharp drop in support in the next year or two.