I wish Valve would make a Steam Phone. They seem to know how to do Linux devices.
they don’t know to make a good android app, and you want them to make an entire cellphone💀💀
I have a PinePhone. ama
…are we ignoring android?
Daily drivin Manjaro (Plasma mobile) on my Pinephone Pro for over a year now. If you are not into the whole “taking pictures all the time” thing you can easiy use it as a daily driver. (This message was typed on it)
I respond to you just because yours is the last of the “I daily drive a PinePhone” comments, but this is meant for everyone with the same opinion.
Do you, in all honesty, feel comfortable enough with your device that you would confidently run a business solely through it?
I’m not an influencer, so my job isn’t “taking pictures all the time”, but still I wouldn’t rely on a Linux phone to run my business because I cannot risk:
- to miss a phone call, a text or an email;
- to run out of battery if I’m outside my office all day long;
- to have a faulty GPS should I use a navigator to meet a client;
- that Bluetooth disconnects mid-call for the 5th time in a day while I’m driving;
- that I have to take a picture to collect information and the latest update borked the camera.
All of these things happen frequently on a Linux phone, and if you have a job where you can live through it good for you, I envy you TBH.
On the other hand, keep in mind that it’s not just the “Instagram people” that need a reliable device.
Of course, everyone has different requirements on their phone, so the question if one would be comfortable running their buisness of a pine phone is quite divers.
Phone calls, texts and E-Mails
Text and E-Mails pretty much work as well as on every other phone. Phone calls work too, but the audio quality is below what one could expect from a modern iPhone.
Battery
While the battery runtime of one battery is definitely lower compared to competing devices, it is also replaceable. I usually spend my day in the office were the phone can be charged, so the battery life does not become an issue. When I am traveling I bring some extra batteries. The form factor is commonly available and batteries cost around 10 €, so I got 4 of them, which last me for ~36 hours until I have to charge them. I have so far never spend more time away from an outlet.
GPS
Works nowadays pretty reliable, accuracy of around 20 m is also good enough to find were I need to go
Bluetooth
Definitely not perfect but random disconnects happen rarely. On the other side I have an headphone jack, which always works reliably
Camera
Ok, this point goes to you, the camera is not usable. When taking pictures of documents I usually have to use my tablet.
So now to the overarching question:
Do you, in all honesty, feel comfortable enough with your device that you would confidently run a business solely through it? No, I would not feel comfortable to run a business through a phone, I need a real computer for my work. If I could only use a phone I would choose the pine phone, because at least it can run all software I require for my daily work. Connected to keyboard, mouse and a monitor it could be a slow, but acceptable work machine I can certainly imagine that there are jobs, which rely more heavily on a phone. But in these cases one should have separate work and private phones anyway
So what you’re saying to me is you can daily drive a Linux phone if you also daily drive a power bank, a bluetooth or wired headset and a camera?
The voyager PWA. Works really great and feels pretty much like a native app
Who’s gonna tell him Android is based on Linux ?
Android is Linux, they literally use the Linux kernel. They replace most other stuff, but Linux it is.
They even work towards mainline kernel support, making updates easier for longer times.
Android is a good example, why “Linux” is not a good term for “Desktop Gnu+Linux”.
I think they use some very old and heavily modified version of the Linux kernel, so it’s not the same Linux kernel we use on desktop. Then each phone manufacturer adds custom patches on top to support their hardware. GNU/Linux phones also require a custom kernel, but the community is working on upstreaming those patches, so that they can run mainline kernel some day (PinePhone Pro and Librem 5 probably already can now, but some stuff might not work).
Yeah, using the name Linux for both the kernel and the operating system makes no sense and it’s super confusing. When people say Linux when talking about the operating system, they almost always mean GNU/Linux (like Linux Mint, Arch Linux, etc). But then there is Alpine Linux, which isn’t GNU/Linux and that makes things even more confusing. If I didn’t know what Alpine Linux or Arch Linux was (and had no knowledge of distro names), based on their name I would assume they are some kind of fork of the Linux kernel. Arch Linux should have really been called Arch GNU/Linux and Alpine Linux should have just been called Alpine OS.
They use the current LTS kernel that exists when the phone exists. If your phone has an outdated kernel (mine had one too, and I thought the same) it is simply really outdated.
Yeah the problem lies in the many Distros I think. The BSDs are all different bundles, not like Linux+Gnu+Systemd+pipewire+wayland+glibc and some minor differences. FreeBSD is actually different from OpenBSD for example. Then Android is also a single project, just like this “modern desktop linux bundle”.
