People pick up a PinePhone for the freedom to choose an operating system, to enjoy privacy by default, and to truly own the device they purchase. From the moment a PinePhone departs from our warehouse we no longer have any insight into what happens to it. I frequently get asked questions about PinePhone’s user base, the percentage of people daily-driving it, and the most popular operating systems on our platform. I have no real answers to offer to these questions. Today I am turning to you for help to paint a picture of the PinePhone community by volunteering answers.
We’ll let the survey stay up for about a month to get the largest possible sample. Once the survey gets taken down, we’ll crunch the numbers and share them with you in the February community update.
Before I let you get to it, PinePhone and PinePhone Pro related news will be dropping very soon, so I encourage you to subscribe to this blog – the subscription widget can be found at the bottom of the page.
231 responses to “PinePhone community poll”
Love the work being done here. Keep it up guys!
I supported to increase the range and eco system
Nice Work, thank you.
I like what you are doing, keep it up
I use it occasionally as the speed I need do not match the one of the phone but my laptop is a Teclast F15 with Ubuntu and I feel confortable with Linux. I need a better speed for pine phone to be my daily use phone but, anyway I love it. Thanks a lot. But I am not a reference, I am 75 years old
all specified desktop environments are deadly slow on pinephone, using phosh for now
No further text
I am waiting for the Pine Phone with Ubuntu Touch to be more or less complete. My intention is to use it as a daily driver, but it is not quite there yet. I am not a heavy user, so fine waiting. My DD is a Nexus 5 with Ubuntu Touch.
I would say try other DE’s/OS’s. UT has sadly made very little progress since I got my UT community edition phone back in Maybe/June 2020. Though Phosh has made a ton of progress and I use it as my daily driver these days and have for about 4 months now. So maybe try Manjaro/Arch/Mobian/PmOS with Phosh. Also, Plasma Mobile has recently gotten much better and is worth a test. It isn’t as stable as UT but it more responsive and better developed for the Pine Phone.
You guys are doing gods work, thank you!
hello
I just want say thanks for the pine-world!!
Thankyouall
The keyboard case has taken a ridiculously long time and it’s still not here yet. The PINEBOOK Pro and Pine Tab have been out of stock for months, but it doesn’t stop Pine from announcing new products. I really think you need to get your stock and logistics sorted out before you start promising new products you won’t be able to deliver for months to a year.
I agree. I think they probably should focus more on the existing products for a bit before announcing more products. I am a big fan of the idea of a Pine phone pro but also, there have been issues with getting the Pine Tab for a very long time and same goes for a few other products. Take the first few months of 2022 and focus on existing products before spitting out new ones.
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The keyboard case has taken a ridiculously long time and it’s still not here yet. The PINEBOOK Pro and Pine Tab have been out of stock for months, but it doesn’t stop Pine from announcing new products. I really think you need to get your stock and logistics sorted out before you start promising new products you won’t be able to deliver for months to a year.
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There is a global components shortage going on right now, power shortages at chineese factories, and shipping problems globally. Nothing is a given, and PINE64 has done their best to ensure that they can deliver what they promise on time, and for the most part have. They’ve also stated numerous times now that the dates they are giving are not set in stone right now, because outside factors could change things at any time.
I understand your line of thinking, but this isn’t how things work. For starters, the reason why we halted production of the Pinebook Pro and the PineTab, is specifically due to very high cost and low availability of laptop LCD/Tablet panels. We’ve been up-front about it – I think I’ve written about this at least 4 times this year (most recently in this month’s update). We have the chassis, the mainboards, the batteries and everything else … and once LCD prices come down to a suitable price-point we’ll restart production. While we, and you, wait for production of the PBP and PT to resume, we can use resources at our disposal to produce the PineTime, PinePhone, PinePhone Pro, Quartz64, RockPro64, PineNote, etc., – all of which are in stock. Halting everything else and not planning ahead simply because we can’t source high quality insured LCDs for laptops makes no sense.
I made it very clear at the beginning of the year, being aware of the component shortage crisis deepening, how we’ll operate this year (see housekeeping pt1): https://www.pine64.org/2021/03/15/march-update/
I bought my pinephone at (what felt like) the peak of the global chip shortage. Microcontrollers weren’t available, desktop CPU/GPU/etc parts were non existent, and everyone from medical supply companies to car manufacturers couldn’t source chips. The fact pine got any units out the door still amazes me. Also, they’ve mentioned a few times they wanted to get the pinephone keyboard right the first time, which I think anyone should appreciate. 🙂 Everything I’ve seen is pine trying their best to get what they can, which given the circumstances, is all you can really ask of them.
I agree, with the current global shortages I think pine64 has done a helliva job.
I say keep it up pine64 you’re killing it.
I have yet to buy a pinephone, l am waiting for the pro to come out.
Really wanted it to be my daily driver. My primary use cases are Youtube, Telegram and email. It is not easy to get them working well at the moment. However, I do recognize that there are some major speed and usability improvements that happened in the last 6 months. Maybe in a few more months..
Got one because my husband is very into Linux and wanted to see if it could replace my 6 year old Samsung but I can kind of live with the slowness but the battery level is so unreliable and drains quickly.
Really hoping that software updates will improve this and the battery readings, and that it can automatically unlock the screen when I typed the right password! 🙂
Oh and web browsing isn’t really working, it’s too slow to google something which is kind of a necessity for future newbie linux phone users like me haha
The screen unlock thing sounds fairly trivial. Have you tried asking the developers of the UI you’re using if they would be willing to add such a feature?
The erratic battery life is the biggest problem here, I can live with the most of the other issues. I have been waiting for the keyboard case to come out as it has its own (larger) battery which I hope will solve the power usage problems as well as making the PinePhone into a “modern day” EEEPC replacement. 🙂
A bit slow for a daily use but I’m patient to see the ecosystem to grow! Good job guys!
I do wish for the survey that I could show that I am an avid fan of FOSS and have made a few FOSS projects in the past but none were for Linux as I’m still relatively new to Linux. Regardless, I’m happy to add to this poll to help bring some light to your device userbase. Absolutely love the PinePhone and am beyond excited for the Pro line. Please keep up all of your hard work!
Ironic but actually great side effect of using the pinephone as my daily driver : I learned to stop using so many apps, and now I’m more focus, with way fewer distractions.
On the other hand, the amount of hacks I did back with termux on android went parabollic on the pinephone. Everything interesting my phone does (like receiving a sms, a call, having low battery or being fully charged, etc) will send me an email and reach my laptop, with the superior filtering capabilities of a mail system compared to a phone notification system. I’m a happy man.
I’ve not bought my PinePhone Pro yet, but it’s a definite once I’m comfortable it’s close enough to replace SailfishOS on my Sony Xperia XA2+ as my daily driver.
Since there is no “other” option to leave a comment on how do you use your phone.
I put rarely or not at all because I’m waiting for MMS to be mainlined for Mobian or else I’d try using it as secondary or primary phone, but can’t use it until that feature works.
MMS works if you currently build chatty from source which has a step by step process on the Mobian wiki and it quite fast and easy. It was one of the first things I ever built from source and it was super easy.
I’d really like this to be my daily driver but don’t feel the available OS are ready for that yet. I’m not a coder so I can’t contribute in that manner.
Thanks for the hard work pine64 team.
I really like what youre doing!
I was using the pinephone as a daily driver, and was even using XFCE/PMOS as my os for a while. Then went to Manjaro and just recently (4 days ago) bought a new Android (Motorola G Power 2021) specifically because of the battery life.
I am still very interested in the device and probably wouldn’t have even went back to an Android, had the keyboard and huge battery became available sooner.
It got old really fast not being able to have my phone make it through the day without charging multiple times. Yes, I was using it quite a bit during that time, but it is not ideal.
The last question of getting the PPP I filled in ASAP, because I’m actually missing the option (already have the developer edition)
External speak needs to be mounted high, if the pro fixed that I haven’t heard yet, very interested to know, if not I’ll pass on buying it for now
I have 3 pound phones (soon to be 4 with the pro) the pine time the pinebook pro and I bought a pine tab for my friend pine64 Is the greatest company in the world.
I have always hated Apple android is decent but it is more google than Linux so I also don’t like it.
Finally an actual linux phone I have been daily driving mine for two years and continue forever with new Additions
I got the phone only for porting a non-unix OS to it. That’s the reason why I have the standard manjaro that came preinstalled, and I didn’t do many things with it.
Have not bought yet… waiting for the Pro, and hoping for the best
I put down that I’m getting the PinePhone Pro as soon as it comes out as that was the closest to the truth, but I already have one 🙂
Really wish I could have chosen multiple UI options.
I’m very interested in the SWMO concept, but am most comfortable with phone.
The underlying os doesn’t really matter as much as the UI in terms of how the UX is, whoever has the most touch capable apps and the most up to date kernel and the fewest bugs. Very agnostic there, but the fundamental UI concept is really more interesting and where attention should be spent, IMHO.
Cheers!
Merry Christmas and keep up the good work!
(Soldering the pinephone main board to make the emmc faster gives you a baby pinephone pro. For anyone who doesn’t know, see DDR52)
I need a working GPS in pinephone. I cant use pinephone as daily driver without GPS.
I actually own two pinephones. I bought them to support the foss phone ecosystem.
I plan on getting it when the basic features (phone, text, gps) are stable.
I didn’t like that the Brave Heart had bugs, it would be better if the sd card could be removed without removing the back cover,
I’m using at the moment Posh, because Plasma is unusable at the moment.
Will switch when it’s better again.
Developer at Midstall Software, I use the PinePhone as a testbed for ExpidusOS.
I love what you do! If you made a lapdock (similar to Nexdock or Leef), I would buy that as accessory to the PinePhone Pro.
The PinePhone is a bit slow but I don’t think I will upgrade to the PinePhone pro yet.
I will probably wait for a hypothetical “PinePhone 2” that I hope will have a 5G modem. I don’t really care about 5G personally but just having future proof tech gives me peace of mind.
The two things I am looking forward too the most in a future phone is gorilla glass and 5G, so I’m quite happy to see that the Pinephone Pro has gorilla glass, it certainly makes it tempting to purchase.
I am concerned that a 5G modem will be a power hog compared to 4G.
Mobian and Pinephone have changed my life !!
Keep ot up, we really need a linux phone with a reasonable price.
Of all that there is, I like Phosh the most, but I am thinking about writing my own, more customizable wayland compositor (after I understand the protocol well).
Looking forward to getting pinephone pro, thanks a lot!
I am counting the microseconds waiting for the PinePhonePro Explorer to finally be available for purchase. 😉
groovy
I mostly use my pinephone for listening to music and watching videos sometimes I listen to music while working out
In my opinion plasma mobile is better then phosh cause it is more mobile friendly even if it it has some bugs
I love to buy your products but for some reason you don’t have delivery option(payment is not the problem) to my country(Iran). Although I never had a hands on experience with your products, I think they are really cool( from reviews that YouTubers publish).
Want to buy a new phone, get away from google. looking to move away completely from the eco system
please consider adding trisquel for future support. Open and freeness drives innovation.
If battery life, charging reliability, GPS, and wireless data stability improved, I would try to use it daily. As is it is just not reliable for taking out of the house. It is fun to play with though.
I love the concept of the PinePhone, but needs more stability and higher specs, especially battery life before I can consider making it a daily driver. PinePhone Pro is almost there, but that battery is way too low. Need something that can last all day with normal use. I’m on the fence on purchasing it.
I really like the PinePhone 1.0. I have two of the convergence package phones. One runs Manjaro Phosh and the other runs Mobian Phosh. They are very usable as privacy phones. I have both of them set up to use OpenVPN with Firefox, Firejail, and XMPP chat with Dino. It’ll be nice when Signal is available for encrypted calls and MMS. Both are setup to swap data with an external flash drive. I’ve also accessed them with SSH. That’s basically all I need. I’m looking forward to using a PinePhone Pro as a desktop computer once it is available. I’ve used my PPs in convergence format with a cooling fan to dissipate the heat when a monitor is connected. I’m hoping the Pro as promised will be safer to use. The extra spped will be appreciated too. Keep up the good work. I enjoy your products.
I’m pretty sure you could make it work with a Matrix-Signal bridge. There might also exist some XMPP-based solution out there
Please keep up the great work Pine Team!
It is outstanding to finally have a viable alternative to devices that spy/track you.
Daily driver for some months now and completely satisfied, I’m looking forward to the Pinetab and Pinebook Pro being back in stock.
I don’t mind losing a little speed for the sake of the privacy it affords (no IME/PSP).
Happy New Year (You guys have earned it) !
If the battery life would improve I’d love to use it as a daily driver but I just don’t see me getting a 12 hour day with it off charger. Plus last time I popped a sim in it(admittedly awhile back now) it didn’t handle receiving calls when screen was off very well. That might have been fixed now that was also the braveheart model I have since upgraded to a newer version so that issue might be solved but the battery still isn’t optimal for a daily driver. But I love the device and look forward to seeing the development continue.
While did want to have one, the Pinephone is the Pine64 device of least interest to me. Actually the Pinebook Pro has much more appeal being a real computer for general use than any phone could ever be.
But the one single Pine64 device that interests me most is the PineNote. I can hardly wait for an updated hardware version also featuring a bootable SD card slot.
I can’t wait for nemomobile and glacier to keep getting better and better! Soon it will possible to daily drive it and it looks amazing!
The biggest blocker to actually using the Pinephone for me has been buggy hardware and incomplete drivers (or drivers that must work around buggy hardware). Particularly the USB-C support for video-out and power negotiation. If USB-C, sound, display, wifi, & bluetooth were all hardware with reliable, upstream kernel support then the Pinephone would be immediately usable for me for many daily tasks and a fun playground to experiment with. Unfortunately both Pinephone models that I’ve purchased have hardware issues and have been largely shelved — they don’t work as a phone (which is expected) nor do they work as a tiny Linux computer (which is not expected and disappointing).
I love the community-centric approach Pine64 is taking with these devices, but there’s a lot of work to do and I don’t want us to fight on three fronts at the same time. It’s a big job to get basic modem & phone functionality working on an OSS platform. It’s a big job to write or retool software to work on a mobile form-factor. I wish we didn’t also need to fight trying to port Linux to an unsupported/untested/unreliable hardware platform.
I’m hoping the Pinephone Pro hardware has better existing upstream support and (many) fewer unknowns or defects.
Your experience seems very similar to mine – a lot of potential, but rather “half-baked”. Will keep checking back in on distro progress, but not holding my breath.
Same with me. Fun to tinker with in retirement from IT work for 40+ years (no need to bother with punched card support ;-} ). AT&T won’t allow “unapproved” phones on their network, and I depend on certain Android apps that are “ready-for-prime-time”, although I hope the keyboard does make my Brave Heart at least a useful PDA that is isolated from Google.
The PP and manjaro’s work has literally changed my life. I wish plamo would be a bit more better tho as it is not as good a phosh at least not now.
Please, ship this device to Brazil!!!!!!!
They have already explained they keep losing the phones in customers.
Corrupt postal service?
Would have been nice to have a question on what addons would you like to see in the future. Personally, the main thing preventing me from daily driving my Pinephone is the battery life. Having a extended battery as an backcover addon would be the perfect solution. The keyboard addon does exactly that but isn’t convinient if you primarily use to phone to receive phone calls. However, the advantage is the work done on it could easily be adapted to create a battery only addon and I’m sure lots of other users would be interested in that too especially with the upcoming Pinephone Pro!
Even though I was able to get my Pine Phone Community Edition up and running, I abandoned any notion of using it regularly due to reports from callers who reported hearing very distorted and poor sound when I used this device. It seems that problem is because the mic and speaker are located too close to each other. About the only function that is usable on this phone without the benefit of a SIM card is accessing the Internet or an app like Telegram using the Ethernet / USB adapter.
Tried to use pinephone as main phone for a week ~1year ago, but the OSs I tried were not ready for my needs yet (calls, telegram, email, web). Will keep trying from time to time in hope it will eventually be.
First of all, no disrespect intended to the folks doing a lot of hard work to the current state. Even in its current state of development and existing quirks, I’d be hard pressed to return to android or (gasp) go to iphone for my daily driver. Pine has done an amazing job as have each of the distributions. These are my opinions, your mileage may vary.
I currently use mobian+phosh, but would prefer mobian+gdm3. Unfortunately gdm3 is still seems pretty rough around the edges (most notably the default on-screen keyboard). I am hopeful that it will mature over time or that a better, more full-featured keyboard is out there making it possible to switch to gdm3 full time and adjust to the more traditional way gnome works on the phone form factor. I find phosh pretty usable and reliable, but the interface generally feels a bit awkward and clunky. I started with ubuntu touch which has a fairly elegant interface, but doesn’t run mainline debian/ubuntu apps (at least at the time I last tried it). For my needs, function and access to mainline apps is more important than an elegant interface. I gave KDE plasma a try, but at the time I tested it, it was broken and unusable. At the end of the day, and I prefer the debian branch over the other branches.
The Mobian teams have quietly and consistently been working to fix issues along the way, and its access to key applications has made it my go-to distribution on my pinephone and pinetab.
As soon as PineTabs are available again, I know I’ll be purchasing at least one or two more; it is a great device, especially while running mobian.
You guys are amazing! Keep on the good work!
Unfortunately, I am too entrenched in proprietary technology to switch to a Pinephone as my main phone. Basic SMS is still dodgy, I still need to figure out a way to get Signal working on it, there is no way to check in for contact tracing with a Linux operating system (except Anbox, which would be complex and take far too long), and the only way to access some of the things I need to access, such as some cryptocurrency platforms, is through an iOS or Android-only app.
Some of these I have a choice with; most of them I don’t, really. If I can get Signal working and contact tracing goes away, that’s most of my problems gone. The battery also sucks, though I’m not a big user.
But if a phone that can do most of what I want it to do and doesn’t require me to sign up for Google or Apple account just to get basic functionality out of it exists…that’s enough motivation for me. I just wish more of the things I needed were accessible via a browser instead of an app.
It would be my daily driver but for two obstacles: 1) it doesn’t support WiFi calling and 2) a number of Flatpak app’s I require for daily use don’t work
I would love to ditch my Android primary and hopefully I will be able to soon. I can get around the WiFi calling issue in the next month with a new ISP and VOIP and call forwarding, but the I still have to solve the app issues (Flatpak or native…one of the two has to work correctly in each instance).
Have not found an OS that works satisfactorily, especially regarding phone networks, and UI issues, up through early this year. Then AT&T started blocking any phone they did not “certify”, and about then it seemed to malfunction with the multi-boot package from one of your big name contributors, which always locked up at boot up, so I gave up on it.
Would like to get back into it, IF any of your contributors have a package that will work reliably on T-Mobile’s network (got a cheap Mint MVNO account/number to experiment with). If it will not cover most of the main, basic phone functions, I will have to give up on it long term (maybe look at Purism?). Linux on PC’s keeps me busy enough.
a few days after I got my pinephone, I stopped using it too much, because I was focused on other projects(pinetime). About two moths after having not used it at all, I dropped my android phone and it broke, and was unusable. I decided to just try out the pinephone and fix the screen the next day, bt surprisingly, the software was more than good enough for me to daily drive.
PPP is too expensive ! and uses a old soc.
The PinePhone Pro features the same SoC as the Pinebook Pro which is a full-fledged laptop at half the price.
Enjoyed working with the PinePhone and looking forward to getting the PinePhone Pron.
I’m using XFCE4 on Arch, along with gnome-calls (for SIP), chats, telegram-desktop, geary, gnome-calendar, gnome-clocks, gnome-contacts, firefox, leafpad, and lollypop.
I got my PinePhone in November 2021 (ordered right before the announcement of the PinePhone Pro). I tried the included KDE Plasma first. I found it unresponsive so I next tried SXMO on Arch. That was a buggy mess, so I switched to Phosh, which was only slightly more responsive than KDE. I noticed that Phosh uses around 100% of the cpu and a large chunk of memory just sitting displaying icons, so I decided that I needed something lighter. I then put Arch barebones on my PinePhone and installed xfce4. This uses hardly any system resources when idle and is very responsive. Now I just need to configure it to work on a touchscreen as it’s not meant to be a mobile DE. So far, I’ve been happy with this setup. I just wish there were more development in this direction.
You probably know that, but postmarketOS did some stuff to customize Xfce for mobile: They have a subproject [1] and a seemingly comprehensive Wiki-Page [2].
But the efforts on this seem to have been mostly stalled since mobile-first UIs have been coming out. But, maybe you’ll be able to package it and contribute your configs there.
One tip, if you want to hide the cursor on touch input, unclutter-xfixes [3] has an option for that (so you may get even convergence working somewhat!). SXMO uses it.
[1] https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/xfce4-phone
[2] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Xfce4
[3] https://github.com/Airblader/unclutter-xfixes
It’s not mature enough to use as a daily driver. A swipe keyboard might be enough to get me to give it another try.
I do use it as my primary, but my old pixel 2 gets a lot of use as a secondary for banking apps, discord, good camera and when I just need something to happen fast. Works out fine as battery drain is spread out across two devices with kinda terrible battery life.
Really wish UT was further along, currently using Manjaro Phosh.
This is great!
Pine64 is doing a great job pushing Linux for phone, laptop and watch and others with custom made hardware. The sad part is that I could not lay hands on any of them due to no shipping provision to India.
Great Work! Really appreciate the passion from Pine and the community!
As soon as power usage gets under control and it can last me a full day the Pinephone will definitely be my daily driver instead of a backup; I will have even more incentive to invest time into working on it.
I really want the charging case as I have chargers throughout my home work and autos. I would adore NFC as well, as I use NFC tags almost everywhere for automations.
I was near the front of the line when sales opened for the Brave Heart Edition phone.
Back then I did have to “Distro-hop” a lot just to be able to keep my phone ‘working’.
Ubuntu Touch was a leader back then, it was the first operating system I got to work on my Brave Heart phone.
But then the updates eventually broke it. (?) UBPorts never seemed to recover from that ?
* I just tried the latest stable release, the only thing that seems to work is the sms text…? “Out of the Box”
These days I have 5 Pinephones of the various Pine64 releases.
My Pinephone Daily Driver is running Mobian/Bookworm/Phosh, this is pretty dependable just “Out of the Box” … Calls, sms text, data work very well, with the proper input in the “Settings”…
I probably share 50 – 100 sms texts with friends and family everyday, So the “Working text App”. is very important to me.!
While a working GPS App. will be a great addition someday, if it requires ‘checking-in’ with Google and sharing with Google my location..? Then I DO NOT need that ! (BOGUS !)
>> There are Mobile GPS units that will even give you voice turn by turn directions in receive mode with no connection to the internet or Google. Most are under $100. USD… <<
In my recent tests of the operating systems I have been testing for "Out of the Box Useability" (Just fill-in the blanks in the settings, but no special 'tweaking' required.)
1) Mobian/Phosh
2) PMOS/Phosh
3) Arch/Phosh/Dreamurs
These 3 have worked pretty well for me, without the need to modify them to use the basic phone functions.
** Though I do think that Mobian is by far the Most GUI friendly for those of us who fall short of being 'Linux Developers', (Phosh is more intuitive than most others)
While if you happen to be a true Linux Developer, you could probably tweak most of the Distro's into being usable ….
BCnAZ
I currently have Mobian installed on my pine64 pinephone.
Just waiting for the mobile os distros to be slightly more complete, functional, and polished and then I am all in.
Hello Pine64 team,
I don’t own a PinePhone yet, but my answers to the poll reflect the use that I will make of my PinePhone Pro when I get the chance to buy one.
I’m really looking forward to that.
Best regards,
Jerome
Great job! Look forward to more of this. Would love to see Tor browser (and DuckDuckGo browser and Brave browser) and Proton VPN working more easily on Pine Phone.
I’m mostly waiting for software to mature. (More basic features and faster UI)
Keep up the good work!
I couldn’t get Japanese input to work and have been too busy recently to figure that out, otherwise it would be my daily driver. Everything else I need worked as of a couple months ago. I don’t need GPS or serious speed.
I love the option of opensource and being big 5 independent. I still have a sailfish OS phone, and own a PineBookPro, and pinetime etc.
I grew up with linux (< 1.0) and using debian 1.2 as an alternative on which we developed multi platform software in the 90s. I still have linux as dual boot or in VM available.
I buy pine64 products to make you succeed and hope to start programming again on linux this xmas holiday.
I hope the pinetime can replace my fitbit soon (by also recording teh steps and sleep in a independent app).
Not using as my driver and probably will never do (btw PineTime is perfect daily driver for me, but it is very simple device compared to phone). Main issues are critical low battery life (I think it is bug in SW, since it stayed longer before), not receiving non-GSM notifications when the phone is in sleep mode (like jabber, whatsapp etc – because the wifi is disconnected) and also the GSM SW support is not perfect – sometimes I miss a call or sms. Also the camera quality is very low (this one point could by suitable with Pro version).
On the other hand I am very happy with Waydroid for Android apps, the phone itself is not that slow for me as other says, I like the i2c on the back and serial port via jack. So I use it more as a pocket PC than the phone.
For the DE, I like Unity (or how is it called now), but it is not much working on regular Linux distros. And I love Plasma Mobile, but using Phosh at the moment – I test Plasma every month, install it and switch back to Phosh because of the unstability.
I really think that Ubuntu Touch with Lomiri is the way to go in the future, unfortunately its not the most feature complete or stable.
How is UT with Lomori the way to go if they haven’t been making much progress on it? Don’t get me wrong, Lomori is a nice DE but also, I think UT just doesn’t have nearly enough hands to support the PP or else we would have seen a lot of progress from it already. I got the community edition for it back in May of 2020 and was excited by how far along it was compared to other OS’s and go back every few months to update it but it is now worse than both Phosh and Plasma Mobile for the PP and they started out way behind. I just feel like UT will never have great support for the PP but hopefully someone can port Lomori to a different OS and get it running well there.
Thank you for making a truly privacy oriented phone. It can only get better with time!.
Please make the PinePhone Pro less expensive.
Many of the community members are computer science students that cannot afford such an expensive device, but would still like to contribute to Linux phone development.
If you want a cheaper PPPro to contribute to mobile linux development then get the PP. $400 is expensive but also, there is no point in making a $300 PPPro where it is marginally better than the PP.
I also think that more than double the price of the original PinePhone is too much for the PinePhone Pro.
Since this is a community platform, it would be nice to get some insight into the actual manufacturing costs.
I do not want PINE64 to go down the same path as Google did when they went from Nexus to Pixel devices.
Waiting for news on the phones keyboard and the Pinephone Pro ! ? I have been impressed so much progress has been made since I got my first Brave Heart phone. It has been a “Fun” ride so far, Looking forward to the Pro. BCnAZ
What’s missibg for a daily driver is less bugs aroubd phone calls… I’m usibg Phosh but I suspect the same with other interfaces : microphone not working on receiving calls, too slow, I cannot pick up the call in time in time, notifications shouls be categorized because I cannot see missed calls aroundvthe thousands Telegram notifs, and new SMS are not highlighted. My husband convinced me to stop using it as a daily driver for now…
I knew that pinephone is for enthusiasts, I thought that there would be problems with different applications.
I thought I could live with a browser (etc) with several bugs which will be solved.
But I did not realize that there were severe shortcomings using it as a phone.
And it was not clear for me that developing Ubuntu Touch for pinephone had a different branch… (I do not understand clearly the cause of it even now.) I think it may be because of the lack of android, but I thought the developers would have an easier task so.
So I am a bit disappointed, thought it might be my fault…
The Pine64 developers and the community need to put more focus onto making the PinePhone perform the most basic of mobile phone tasks, Like making and receiving phone calls, using headphone earpieces, receiving and sending SMS, phonebook. The basic essential stuff required for someone to just buy this pinephone and use it to replace a cheap android phone. Focusing on apps and UI and all that stuff means nothing if the average idiot cant use this phone out of the box!
Keep up the good work!
I have two Pinephones, the UT and the later pmOS. The first has been collecting dust due to my laziness to change the mainboard. The second runs SailfishOS 4.2. Recent update on that one broke something as no apps will launch. Was told I have to upgrade to 4.3.
Either way, there’s always something that keeps me from using the phone regularly. All I need is for the basics to work in any particular OS (browsing, email, dialer, SMS/MMS, multimedia, etc.) or not find myself with an unbootable device due to an OS update.
The phone itself is fine, just problems with what runs on it. Stuff to play with but nothing to rely on yet.
I waited since the first release of Pinephone and finally, I got it on 27th December, I tried almost every OS but I like mobian among others.
Currently, learning about p-boot and working on porting Kali Linux to Pinephone.
Love the device and looking forward to the keyboard case (and some more development on Ubuntu touch, but that’s a bit irrelevant here), Will be upgrading to the Pro at some point.
Waiting for email and nextcloud apps…
I’m currently running Mobian with Phosh, and have been happy with it this far.
I plan on getting a second, newer phone as soon as I move this month (mine has the usb hardware bug), at which point I will experiment with my current phone more.
I really want to put XFCE on it to make my phone experience as much like my desktop experience as possible (I currently have my desktop environment set up to simulate an SGI Irix workstation from the 90s). Eventually I hope to get a pro, but the price right now is prohibitive for me. Maybe if I get a nice tax refund…
No question for “Why is it that you barely use your Pine-Phone”, but if there was I’d have said “Coz last time I checked Signal still didn’t work, so it can’t be my main phone”
Axolotl works just fine.
Planning to try out pinephone soon
Nice to see how things are developing!
Hopefully Pine64 will (soon) handle import duties to EU so it would be little bit easier to order more stuff.. Would be nice to know total prise when order due EU import duties.. 🙁
I actually don’t have a PinePhone, but I did the poll anyway… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I have a Jolla phone with Sailfish OS on it, which is nearly a decade old now and still works like that rock solid Nokia 3310 phone, so the price I paid for my Jolla phone was every penny worth it. 🙂
Hopefully I will have the same experience with my future PinePhone, which I am waiting for to come out of its beta phase (I have checked reviews and every one of them says it is not ready yet for daily practical use), since I am getting the sense my old Jolla phone is getting really out of date now… it is no longer supported for over a year now. :-/
If Jolla , Fairphonw and now PinePhonw was a ‘must have’ to me. Connecting a temperature sensor was a relief to me 3 times for each phone. I know that they cannot reach same mass production numbers. However I never wanted to be part of the mass user crowd.
Excellent work this year, thank your. Please continue 2022.
Good job, so far. O hope you put efforts on battery life in the PP and PPP, so I could be daily driver.
Going well so far. I really wish I could turn off the accelerometer with a dip switch though that would really be great, I want privacy, I don’t want my every movement recorded, not even for my own benefit, not if the benefits would add a year to my life. Privacy above all else. I’ve spent the last six months learning about linux just so I could use this phone and dammit if I can’t turn off the accelerometer. How about physically removing the accelerometer, would the phone still work as a phone without an accelerometer?
The pain I read in your words compelled me to reply. You are even making effort to learn Linux, which is more than can be said about most who are whinging here.
I would think there is some way (in software) to turn that off. Sorry if I can’t tell you how offhand. Maybe make a forum post?
Even if the accelerometer is working though, I really don’t think that data is leaving the phone. And this is biggest difference to existing smartphones.
right now i only use my PP for mobile calls.
i use phosh for the moment and don’t like it.
i really wanted to use sxmo but the high investment of coding on the user side to implement basic features (like a phone ringer) made me leave.
(also Alpine lacks many things i’m used to.)
KDE was too instable and i have not tried anything else, because i’m lazy.
when i finally have the keyboard, i’m going to try to replace my current daily driver (a convertible laptop) with the pine phone and use a custom desktop environemt.
I like a Pinephone project al lot, it’s a pity that the Pinephone will be replaced so soon.
The pinephone is a super important project
pinephone daily driver. I have VoLTE and GPS working. Im Mobian user
It’s been a pleasure to see the pinephone grow. I’m looking forward to the day i can use a pinephone as a convergent daily driver for browsing and calls. That way i can use my more powerful machines only for work (programming)
Thank you Pine64 for the low cost entry point that enabled many folks to get their hands into developing Linux mainline based mobile.
I think the the performance of the PP is good considering the hardware for the price. The physical arrangement of the devices is well thought out.
Further, the PP hardware exposes all (most) of the possible devices used by mobile, and so enables development to begin.
I find it very nice to have a computer in my pocket that is running Open Source, and that it has a Cell Mobile modem in it. Having the modem is awesome for connectivity and its capabilities.
I daily drive it to know its drawbacks and because I very much like the customization that I can do to it. Nice mobile computer with Linux. I wish for a battery bank cover for extra capacity/run time.
I realized that most application software will carry over to a new platform pretty well, after kernel space work for the new platform is ironed out.
With the increased processing power of the PPP, I hope for its ability to process pictures and even video faster. Otherwise, I expect the user applications to be the same, only running faster (which is nice).
In about 1.5 years time from now, I will have much more time to spend on software. The full-time job has me very busy until then.
https://plasma-mobile.org/
Not sure why this wasn’t in the selectable UI section.
Oh wait. I’m blind. Skimmed past it.
Hi!
Sorry for my poor English.
I want help your work on my improvement ideas (mostly for PinePhone):
Do not forget the time on battery remove:
– Sim/SD card swap
– Battery swap
It is fixable:
– little condensator (store enough power for clock for ~30-60secound)
– cr2016 battery (but disadvantage: bigger size, and more difficulty make full powercut if need)
Longer standby (and usage) time:
– Normal standby mode (in network)
– In airplane (nonetwork) mode, when Phone only turned on, but don’t under any usage
– Standby mode, with clock on screen (I don’t know, has any OS, what can it do, this is also an improvement idea), so:
. Phone turned on
. Phone under lock screen
. On Phone screen the time is visible (center), (with black background for less power usage)
. Screen no turn off
Megapixels improvement:
– Video recording (including sound if possible)
– BarCode/QRCode scanner option (if has app for this, sorry)
Multiboot bootloader improvement:
– Show the time without boot (if possible).
– A tutorial (with some picture) about make own multi boot (without high linux experience), example:
. 64gb SD card (or Internal 32gb emmc)
. Some MB for Jumpdrive, ~16GB first OS, ~16GB second OS, (and if SD card 32 GB for other OSes, or own data what can read both OS easy)
. Of course option for boot from emmc in menu (on sd card version)
. Auto-turn off option (if it is not default)
. Both OS possible make full update on own partition, independ applications
Advantage: If any app or OS update fail, or an app work better on other OS, then user can boot to secondary OS, and use the phone.
PinePower Desktop improvement:
– PinePower Desktop for new USB type-C standard for support higher power. Currently maybe not important but maybe in future will demand.
. Name: PinePower Desktop Pro or v2.0 or any other.
Missing from shop:
– Original PinePhone battery (since 1.5year out of stock) (I bought J7 battery, an user comment this in several months ago, and found also on wiki, thanks).
– PineCube Chase
– PineCil tips (including Hammerhead)
And expand this community pool (feedback in my side):
This is my 1st Smartphone, I am still using a 10+year old Nokia (and original Nokia battery still work 1.5-2week long one charge).
I don’t addiction on SmartPhones, I don’t feel ever I need one anyway, but nowadays good if man has one. I like alternatives. I like linux, but no many experience.
Tested multiple OS on multi-image.
Currently pmOS (Phosh) installed, I want try (deeper than multi-image) Mobian.
I waiting for PinePhone Keyboard. I think, Phone will more useable for me with Keyboard, and I will use more.
Next Future Plan: Get PinePhone Keyboard
Shorter Future Plan (in next few month): Get PineCil (has no many soldering experience, but has friend who has some)
Longer Future Plan (in next year maybe): Get PineCube, once will be useable for enough easy for my (low) experience. I was happy in last Community Update has news about it.
I like this community, and my sad: I can’t help more (than these idea, what I written), but maybe one day in the future…
Thanks for all Who works on this Pine Project 🙂
And sorry again for my english.
Yesterday I already made a small comment, but now I would like to clarify a little more on what set-up I use.
As I voted in the poll, I’m using the PinePhone as my daily driver at the moment.
To get a littlebit more battery life I undervolted the SoC as much as I could without it getting unstable.
I run 2 OS’es next to eachother, namely Manjaro ARM Phosh (SD) and Manjaro ARM Plasma-Mobile (eMMC).
The Manjaro ARM Phosh is set-up as my daily driver as in my opinion Phosh is much further along in stability and feature parity to current mobile phones.
Because I hate to open up the back to get to the SD-card, I do not use the standard u-boot bootloater but Ondrej Jirman’s (Megi) p-boot bootloader to be able to choose which OS to boot without having to touch the SD-card.
Plasma Mobile I update once in a while and try to do some debugging for the Manjaro ARM Plasma Mobile maintainers, but is in my opiniion not stable enough yet to daily drive.
To get around having to switch to a Android phone for some crucial apps, like banking/whatsapp & signal (to keep in touch with some people not willing to switch) and some airline apps I use for convenience (I travel a lot due to the nature of my profession), i make use of Waydroid.
On Waydroid I installed F-Droid, Aurora Store, full microG to make Google Services Framework apps work properly and to be able to easily install the apps from app store.
Then in my home directory .local/share/Applications, I set the parameter “NoDisplay” to false, to let the “Waydroid apps” appear in my Phosh launcher like any other native linux app.
Works perfectly, I haven’t switched back to any android device since this set-up.
Very helpful comment (I added them to my personal notes)!
Have you considered adding them to one (or more?) of the existing wikis, to make them more discoverable?
I love my Pinephone. I don’t really use it as a phone but I update the OS (postmarketOS with Phosh) often. Looking forward to what the future brings.
Q5 – should allow multiple choices e.g. as I dual boot Arch & Mobian (and there is arguably someone running the megi multi OS disk?)
Q7 – I use Phosh as it is the least worst of the bunch. But I hate it and would swap in a heartbeat, except all the others are worse (or on a worse base that isn’t as reliable, IMHO, as Arch or Mobian)!
I’ve had my PP for almost 2 years…software has matured to the point of feeling confident daily driving it, but the terrible battery life keeps me using my android until I can get the battery case and a new internal battery…then, it’s on!
I have had my Pinephone since Oct (2021) and am impressed how quickly many of the problems have been fixed. Using Manjaro Phosh right now and if it were not for the issue of bluetooth handsfree unit connectivity I’d be using it as my daily device. However, since I drive taxi it is imperative that the hands-free setup just works. Secondly, I find that if the external speaker is turned on during phone calls, the other party complains of “echo” at their end. This is no doubt due to the physical location of the speaker immediately behind the microphone at the bottom of the phone. Solving the aforementioned bluetooth headset issue would solve both problems simultaneously (since the speaker’s location cannot be altered).
I am still very happy to be able to use a hand-held fully linux-capable mini-computer with phone capabilities. Many thanks to the people responsible for this device, and those who are actively working on the code base.
My son bought the mobian pine phone and our carrier (US cellular won’t activate it. We just recently escaped, ahem, moved from NY and have not tried a work around yet. His brother has the older one and it was working on Verizon with a Sim from an old phone I had. When he got off my plan and got his own service they refused to allow him to transfer his phone over. So until we can get service we are at a standstill.
Sorry,
cant chose the very 2 Questions.
No Reaction on Click
Ciao
Walter
Forget my first Comment. I was wrong with the Information Flow on this Poll 🙁
You should remove this first 2 “Fake” Options in the Header of this Page because I clicked it like Hell 🙂
As an User Interface I really hate this Icon and Avatar Stuff. To crowded and “Don’t make me think” ;-).
OpenMoko’s Freerunner had a nice User Interface (middelware) from Italy called “Armeniacum”
Ciao
Walter
I’m using Phosh, not because I think it’s the best DE, but rather because I think it’s the least bad DE.
Love the concept of a truly personal phone. Now waiting for LineageOS/CalyxOs to run it.
Congratulations to sailfish Os who works like a charm on it. Would it be provacy/Open-source I’ll already use my PP as a daily driver
LineageOS have been doing yeoman’s work for years making Android usable. But ultimately it’s a losing battle IMO, as Google still controls the platform. For example they will not be supporting VoLTE, among many other (much smaller) issues.
A /real/ GNU/Linux phone on the other hand, allows us to truly leave the plantation. Which is why so many people (including myself) are so excited about it, even in its current rough state.
I use the pinephone as a phone for my 9-year old kid. It’s great because I can keep him off attention-sucking pits like YouTube (which nowadays is even on basic flip-phones!), but he can still text me and take pictures and listen to music off the SD card.
I’m a software developer and long time Linux user, so I’m comfortable using the terminal on the phone to disable apps like the web browser.
The main thing I want from a distro is updates that are as automatic as possible.
As a developer, it would be much easier to contribute if there was an emulator I can reproduce bugs in.
JingOS & Maui shell looks promising.
Personally I think “interesting” might be a better adjective, given their higher end hardware choices?
However the fact their first device is based on some ancient Linux kernel (which appears much better supported in Android) makes me think it is likely never to be mainlined, and thus does not bode well for longevity. Which is why “promising” is not the adjective which comes to my mind. 😉
Devices which run mainline Linux (like those from PINE64, or the Librem 5, or many Armbian “Supported” ones) have much more “promise” going forward, in my mind.
My pinephone was one of the braveheart models, and therefore is not very usable due to several battery issues: have to keep it almost always plugged in, or keep the battery out (when turned off), else it will run dry and won’t charge or turn back on without external battery charger.
I will likely buy a pinephone pro and keyboard case, however am waiting on f(x)tec pro1x: if that ships then i will likely stick with it, running either ubuntu touch or an upstream linux+sxmo, or maybe sailfish.
Looking forward to the results!
First, Pine64 is doing amazing work! I hope the pinephone pro becomes well supported (hardware feature complete). The pinephone has so much potential, but no OS supports it quite well enough yet (I also have UT on OnePlus One, which works like a dream, except I don’t care much for UT’s interface). Also, my cell provider is dropping 3g support, which effectively limits my tinkering devices to the latest VoLTE 4g/5g devices. If something is going to become my next daily driver, it needs to be modern tech that can be well developed for. I truly hope this is the case for the pinephone pro!
I ordered the PostmarketOS Community Edition in Summer 2020, to replace my old 2G phone (forced into obsolescence by our ungreen government and telecom companies). I have been using it ever since, enjoying all the “openness” and software improvements. Soon I ordered another PinePhone, for my girlfriend: it was Manjaro Community Edition, which I replaced with PostmarketOS. Being able to use the Linux command line on a phone (among all the other advantages) has been priceless. We expect to use these devices for many years, so thanks to everybody for making this possible.
I will buy the PinePhone Pro when I can text and call reliably. Bonus if I can take pics and send the pic via texts (high image quality isn’t great) and install and use Libre Office with a good UI and no issues. I daily drive Pop!_OS on my computer but I wouldn’t call me an expert with Linux. I simply switched because I was done with $soft and their tyranny and I never considered Apples tyranny. I’m probably going to go with Apples tyranny for a phone as the PinePhone Pro is to far away to hold out for and I can’t stand the privacy issues of Android any more.
The second SIM slot is required and only missing feature from using Pinephone Pro daily. Today smartphome with only one SIM slot sounds like it was first iPhone, limited only to 2G GSM.
Please more battery time on Mobian.
The keyboard you created is too small. I got a larger on Amazon but it does not do well the Bluetooth, Bluetooth has always been a problem without being able to connect two devices. It’s important to have a keyboard on the go to use the prompt… it should be larger but foldable and usbc… and we must always carry a powerbank unfortunately.
First of all,thanks for not using any third-party proprietary crap for doing the survey.
I was really surprised that a company of this size still does it all on own infrastructure and that’s the reason I took part.
—
I ordered the PinePhone PostmarketOS community edition with the plan to use it as daily driver,but wasn’t that happy with it.
I absolutely wanted a phone on which I could run all my favorite desktop programs…until I finally had one and saw that it was a bad idea to use the same app on both desktop and phone,making the UI worse for both worlds because of compromises.
The PinePhone didn’t make it for a daily driver mainly because of the battery which doesn’t even last for a full work day.
I bought a cheap Emporia TouchSmart with Google-free Android while waiting for the PinePhone situation to improve.
With the keyboard and its additional battery I hope I can finally use my PinePhone more.
As OS I first tried postmarketOS with Phosh (preinstalled) but it didn’t feel good,Phosh on the phone is nearly as terrible as GNOME on the desktop and postmarketOS wanted me to flash the whole OS again for a bigger update,requiring me to install all apps and do all settings once again.Big dislike.
Then I tried Manjaro KDE,because I use this on my Raspi400 as well and it was way better,but the whole thing still felt more like a desktop OS than a phone,it just didn’t feel that right.
Now I’m using Maemo Leste,because it’s a real mobile operating system,written for phones in the first place,without any convergence but just focused 100% on phones,and it comes without systemd which is another major advantage 😀
It still lacks quite a lot features so I’m not sure if it will be usable as daily driver yet,but its developing in the direction I want my Linux phone to go so I’ll stay and see what happens.
For the PinePhone Pro: I won’t buy it.It’s great hardware and all and I’m sure the high-quality components are absolutely worth the price,but for me a phone isn’t so important that I’d pay about 400 dollars for it because I use desktop computers and laptops for most stuff anyway.
“I was really surprised that a company of this size still does it all on own infrastructure and that’s the reason I took part.”
– Let me blow your mind, all our services: this site, Wiki, forum, etc., are not only self-hosted, but also hosted on our own hardware 🙂
We’ve been hosting on our own cluster for well over a year now, here’s a link: https://www.pine64.org/2020/06/05/rockpro64-cluster-move-june-5-10/
I use my pinephone on manjaro mobile plasma mobile because I like KDE on computer
I use my pinephone now only to call and SMS because I dislike to flash my pinephone Everytime
And because the flash of my pinephone with fedora is difficult and because I use my pinephone to call and SMS i stay with manjaro mobile plasma who I like
J’utilise mon pinephone pour téléphoner et envoyer des SMS maintenant j’ai essayé de l’utiliser complétement mais trop de packet installer de manjaro le pinephone ne gère pas en plus le pinephone ne gère pas l environnement complet de manjaro vivement le pinephone pro on aura déjà plus de place
J’espère que un jour on pourra se passer de flasher souvent son pinephone
Hi, I have had the phone for over a year but have never felt confident using it as a daily driver.
The development of the phone seems to have moved from improving the actual phone
communication technologies to improving desktop and server functionaity. I appreciate
that this is a turn-on for hackers and developers. However, I want a Linux secure
phone that can save my life in a crisis. Trouble free phone and gps funtionality that I can rely on.
Using manjoro as the default interface provides a flood of icons that are mostly irrelevant.
I have moved from pinephone to a Pixel phone running UBports. Unfortunately UBports still has
plenty of issues on Pinephone. I am hoping for enhanced hardware in a future entry level pinephone.
Regards, Mike
Pine64 team rocks! Keep building and relasing whatever materializes out of your imagination!
As regards UIs I use Phosh as it works and comes preinstalled with Mobian. However, I would really prefer the XFCE desktop as I find all mobile UIs extremely limiting. Compare Symbian on a PSION Netbook with XFCE om an EEEPC 701 the latter works much better for me.
Anyway, keep up the good work, my PinePhone makes me smile (most of the time). Looking forward to the arrival of my keyboard case.
3GB PPhone eMMC – DanctNix with Enlightenment
2GB PPhone eMMC – DanctNIX FDE barebones with Enlightenment
uSD cards:
1 – JumpDrive
2 – Manjaro with PlasMo
3 – pmOS with Phosh
4 – SailfishOS
I’m mega happy that the PPhone exists. When I have the $$$ to get the Pro, I will. Have the KB on order, just waiting for the boat to set off.
I am a free software enthusiast but my level is basic to very bad.
I had a friend who was a Linux expert.
I bought the PinePhone Ubuntu touch and then the Pinephone Manjaro. Neither of them work for me. I have no technical ability to fix the problems and my colleague committed suicide. In the SNAP of ubuntu touch there is no pinephone… I finally bought a sony xperia with ubuntu touch.
I will wait until the PinePhone has an optimal operating system to try to get it running on my two Pinephones that are now taking dust…
Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
I am very sorry to hear about your friend. From a practical standpoint however, there is a worldwide community of GNU/Linux enthusiasts who are likely willing to help you. There is a wonderful online community here around PINE64, which is only a small part of the greater online GNU/Linux community. If you prefer working in person instead of online, there may be a LUG (Linux User Group) near you already, or maybe you could start one.
Phosh I think is considered by many to be the most usable and stable interface at this time. Maybe give Mobian a try if you are more of a Debian guy (like me). Otherwise there are also some other distros using Phosh (Arch based and others).
Cheers and good luck!
Please hire a kernel developer for the PinePhone, especially the original A64. The community seems unable to reach the required level of stability.
I have no idea what sort of profits PINE64 make, but something like this would go a long way toward garnering even more (seriously needed) development support.
Maybe they have this already in the back of their mind with the increase in price on PinePhone Pro? As development is where the real costs are!
People like to criticize Purism (and a lot of it is deserved) but they have been paying a number of developers for years now to work on Phosh and other things, in large part making PinePhone itself possible in the first place.
Pinephone is heading in the right direction and I am able to use it when I’m home all day, the main things holding me back from using it as my daily driver when I’m out and about are 1. Speed (possibly will be helped by the pro) 2. Lack of apps that I am required to use for work and some other tasks 3.battery life
I wish for a low level hello phone with sms, and text. I use my laptop, tablet, or desktop for business activities. I yearn for a striped hello phone without the burden of computer software.
FWIW such things do exist (if I’m understanding you right). The Sonim XP5 served me well this way. It did SMS and phone, did email awkwardly with custom k9 patch, and served as hotspot for my laptop for anything more. The mudita phone also should work great this way.
But I don’t know what you mean by “a striped hello phone”. Can you clarify?
Beginning I worked from a half screen produced by Apple. So happy the screens grew to handle a heavy work load multiple open screen affair. I don’t wish to function on a lesser screen than a tablet, much prefer laptop or desktop. All my vehicles are equipped with gps, don’t need to duplicate that. Therefore I seek a telephone, telephone, not a tiny screen overloaded computer. I look forward to exploring your suggestions. With great gratitude I thank you for your response.
Keep up the good work!
Was proud of my PinePhone, I like the idea oft using Linux in an OpenHardware Computer but after a time it proofed to need much more time to be useable as a daily driver.
It is admireable what the guys (in my case mobian) do
but the development seems to be caotic without definite priorities.
So I will see and wait
Why do you guys insist on calling it a “Linux” phone as if that is the special part. Android is a Linux phone, what you mean is a GNU Phone.
Amen!
> Allow me to interject…
😀
I joke, but you are exactly right!
> Android is a Linux phone, what you mean is a GNU Phone.
No. What we mean is “a phone running upstream Linux kernel”. So that in 5 years, 10 years, we can pick up latest kernel and use it with whatever distro we want, that is uptodate with all security fixes. GNU does deserve far more credit for its role in making that possible than it gets, but being GNU simply is not the defining characteristic we’re looking for.
Love LoRa on Pinephone
Android and iOS are not options for me. My first smartphone, and it works well enough. It was a lot of fun getting Element to run. Amazing work is being done here.
Keep it up. I can’t wait to kill off my android
Please keep price down until it can be used as daily driver. I can’t use maps, answer calls or get coverage on most of US. Interestingly, I could run Machine Learning algorithms on it.
Pinephone is my daily driver. LoRa is a much appreciated feature among the pogo pin cases. NFC would be nice to see in future.
Smaller screen version please. No cell modem version please.
Too many distributions slows the development and adoption. Discourage yet another half finished distro that will never be daily driver ready before 2030. We need a good reliable Signal, web browser, maps with offline maps and turn by turn driving support, and camera experience. Master these four things and the community will thrive. No one gives a shit about a barely functioning gentoo or Luna except those two guys over there. We want a signal Messenger, offline maps and camera experience though. But don’t listen to the masses. Instead of a good Signal client, on next months blog announce the joy that Plasma Mobile now barely runs on OpenBSD on the pinephone, and those two guys over there are thrilled. Yay. Go pine.
my first cell phone was the palm pre, a tiny linux box i could do almost anything with. i have grudgingly made do with android since then, but the pinephone finally makes me smile again. a diverse ecosystem, easy distro-hopping, and true hardware and software freedom at last. i still pine for a slide-out portrait keyboard, but otherwise i couldn’t be happier with the ways the pinephone is growing!
Love the work! Basic user here. When functionality like properly sized app screens by default arrives I will try to go daily driver.
I would really like the software on the pinephone to work as it does on the desktop; allow you to choose the operating system at boot, and then choose your preferred window manager, plasma mobile, phosh, etc.
And that the hardware could have a gps receiver like the pocofone 1 for example (fast and accurate).
Mobian-pinephone-phosh, for me the best OS for my Pinephone.
But I miss a screen unlock by touching the screen.
One note: I want Pinephone Pro but I couldn’t find a shipment to my country of origin (Brazil).
I got my Pinephone from the Ebay website
I use Phosh on Manjaro because it looks very promising and for the neat GTK integration, but my favorite is probably still the Ubuntu Touch UI. Love the phone, even if it’s a little slower than my backup android phone.
The smartphone that has fit me the best was the Nokia N900 running Maemo, because it ran Linux, a system I am very comfortable and prefer using, and ran the same software as my desktop. I have been wanting a successor to the N900 for a long time (about a decade). There were a few options since the N900, like the Firefox phone that was an okay (very basic) but not great experience. It wasn’t until the PinePhone that seemed like a successor to the N900 that would garner my interest. Although the Pinephone is inexpensive, I waited to purchase one until the software matured to a state that I thought it could be a daily driver. In Q2 2021, I finally purchased a Pinephone. In the beginning, the user experience wasn’t enough to be a daily driver; however, after several months with continued updates to the software, it matured to a usable daily driver state for me (calls, texts, contacts, web browsing, podcasts, news reader, clock, email, terminal, weather, calculator, maps, and more). I really appreciate that the Pinephone is not locked down and users can install other operating systems to suite their preferred user experience. Because of the positive experience with the PinePhone, I ordered the PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition yesterday (early adopter). I am eager to test the PinePhone Pro and experience how the software develops over the coming months/years. Keep up the great work! The very affordable, Linux-based, community developed, and privacy-respecting products are just awesome.
I did distro-/ui-hop for a bit but settled on PostmarketOS+Phosh and installed Waydroid with a couple of apps that I really need when away. It’s a bit slow but I use it as my daily driver since two days and am very happy with it. Just two downsides: GPS is crap somehow (need to sort that out) and notifications from messaging apps inside Waydroid aren’t picked up by the host OS, so I need to foreground one of them before the screen goes to black or I’ll miss messages.
Love the work, keep it up, but I really need a Qi charging + fingerprint reading back case. Any plans for that?
I used my Pinephone as daily driver for few months. I think this killed my battery 😛
I’ll buy e new replacement battery, but honestly it’s still not fully ready for everyday use. It was an awesome experience anyway and if hardware reliability will be improved and new software will come, then our dreams can come true and we can live without commercial OS.
Next PinePhone with eSIM and NFC would be awesome!
Several people have mentioned the n900, and one person wished for a smaller screen and no cell modem. I think it’d be awesome if instead of built in cell modem, there were a pluggable module like the Hanspring Visor had. Today we could plug in 5G, in a few years the next thing. Those wanting lora could plug that in, or those wanting wifi-only could plug in nothing.
(First of all, love this project, love what you are doing for the world)
What happened with the plans for an N900 keyboard experience?
https://www.pine64.org/2020/07/29/invitation-to-play-along/
The current keyboard looks like something I will have to rest on a desk first in order to use. Is that so, or is it similar to the N900 UX?
Guess I expected more progress on Ubuntu Touch. The camera stopped working a year ago (for me) ! On their site I notice the progress on different handsets – even One Plus – and so many are around 90% whereas the PinePhone ? 46 %. It just gives the impression that no one there is bothering, rightly or wrongly that once the Community Edition was delivered, not a whole lot is happening. Disappointing. Ubuntu Touch is just not ready to be used as a daily driver.
In my early distro trials with my pinephone, Ubuntu Touch never made the list because according to my notes “Direct download of the ubuntutouch xz image repeatedly failed. Gave up.”
I would suggest you give some of the other OS’s a try, in particular the ManjaroPhosh beta19 (or later). I have that running smoothly (flashed onto the eMMC drive) and it is _almost_ daily driver material. I’d say it’s an 80-90% score, definitely not as low as 46%. And since the new revisions on Manjaro are coming out regularly, it’s clear they haven’t given up on it.
Lol:
> My first word was sudo.
In my case, that’s almost literally true:
I was (nearly) born in an IBM mainframe.
My mother used to work as a computer scientist while she was pregnant, and the mainframe’s room was the only one with good temperature and perfect for a quick nap between coding sessions.
(Pro tip: apparently piles of discarded old tractor feed printer paper can make a very comfy nest for said naps).
thank you . i will never use a phone without linux!
flaming garbage
I have been supporting this project since the Manjaro community edition was released and sold.
The first few releases of Manjaro with Phosh were not the best, to say the least.. but with every new release, a lot of things were getting better, the last few releases brought it to a piece of software that can brings the PinePhone to an almost daily-driver status, I am sure that all we need is a few more releases to make this a reality.
Also, with the much improved hardware that will come with the PinePhone Pro, I can say that in terms of hardware, the PinePhone is no longer “inferior” even in compare to recent apple and google devices.. so we are at a stage where the software is in the right direction, the hardware is for now more than enough – we just have to improve the software, make it more mobile friendly, optimize the kernel for the hardware (this is how the big companies get their “performance”, they spend time optimizing the kernel of their OSs to the hardware of the device)
The reason I said I would not be getting the PinePhone Pro is because I already own the original PinePhone that came with PostmarketOS. I do not expect nor see good indicators that the battery life will improve with this newer model so it doesn’t justify the price hike for me. I think it’s a very cool thing to have for those who can actually contribute to the relevant projects to make the phone even more usable but battery life basically kills any potential with these things. If I can’t keep the phone on long enough to use it, it becomes a brick. I do not recommend this for ordinary users who cannot assist with the different projects relevant to this. It just doesn’t really help in any way for them to buy it, find out they can’t use it, and then open up a forum thread asking people to buy the phone from them. The whole point is to make available a phone that mostly any end user can use on the daily. It’s a long road ahead but the one’s owning these phones should mostly be devs.
the Pinephone could be faster, but the real show stopper is the OS. While I love Linux, Linux mobile(s) simply is not ready for serious use. I’m tempted to buy the Pro however…
I unboxed my pinephone, powered it up, connected to my wifi, sshed in from my laptop, grabbed youtube-dl to get some music and went for a walk.
I couldn’t be happier. This is exactly what I wanted. Been using it as my main phone for a few months now and it’s fine for that too.
SXMO is a really good fit and the switch to Sway is awesome. It runs slick even on the non-pro.
It’s truly been a delight to benefit from the tremendous labour that has gone in to this project! I’m specifically looking forward to see what the future of Plasma mobile holds, as it in my opinion seems like the most promising Android replacement. Although in my experience Phosh has so far been the most reliable of the two, I hope the release of the Pinephone Pro will be a big leap towards making also Plasma suitable as a daily driver.
I love the idea of the pinephone, and there’s been some great progress since the initial batch. The only thing making me feel let down at the moment is after purchasing the newer pinephone and convergence kit. I haven’t once been able to get the dock to work with any display or device, on any current distro.
I have an upgraded Braveheart pinephone (upgraded motherboard due to failure). This is my only phone and daily driver. I will upgrade to PinePro after my Librem 5 arrives and I have onsold it (been waiting nearly 4 years so I hope it arrives in time for my 70th birthday) Being on the old age pension means I must curb my enthusiam for all these wonderful toys so the Pinephone Pro may have to wait as my greatest need is to replave my clunky old tablet.
I must say it so reasuring to see a tech company that is transparent and honest in it dealings with its customer base. Anyone who has had dealings with that other lot will understand why I feel the need to repeat what others are saying here … THANK YOU, PINE64.
Great Job !!! Thanks
To be honest, I am really disenchanted with the phone. It does not have the basic ability of displaying anything. The display quickly disappears into power management and the gui screen settings have nothing for managing the screen brightness. Instead there is a .config file called powermanagementprofilerc whose contents are to say the least unintelligible with parameters which have no units. I mean when a time is set to 300000, what units are we in ? Microseconds, milliseconds ? It is bad enough if the settings were limited to 2 or 3 – one could deal with the permutations, but there are > 10 and it is totally unclear what their interactions are. There is no documentation about this OS that I can find where it refers to these settings. After installing an SD card, I can’t see it mounted on my Mac through the USB port. Could be a cable issue, I supposed, but why would the phone that was delivered not have a data USB cable and just a charging cable. There is NO place that helps people get started beyond the installation of an OS. Which I sure as heck am not going to do until I have some basic understanding of this device.
Using Manjaro and KDE (the latest)….There are some things which are fundamental to a phone which dont work. For example, if I call an unavailable number, I get the tone that goes on for over 1.5 minutes that indicates number unavailable, There is no way to hang up the call. Really ?? I get why I might not have Firefox work as expected (window is not shrunk to the screen and sometimes, half of the screen shows up.
The forum search is somewhat limited as yet. Especially for starting up. So here are my recommendations (1) Get a section called – User Experiences { I would set one up, but clearly don’t have the influence as yet} where users can point out how they are using and experiencing the device with which OS (2) Create a setup section where users can understand which widget does what {and please explain why oh why it is impossible to get a stable viewable image that does not power off with my OS} allow users to make those comments and use text mining to analyse what needs to be done. (3) Appoint a usability group focused on … usability. I’m happy to help. Thanks, Parry
That sounds a bit like my first few days of using Manjaro/Plasma. After repeated attempts to boot for the first time I had the screen going dark bug on the first day. I found a fix on the forums and carried on. I experienced too many “WTF!” moments in the first week so started looking round for alternatives.
Before you give up on your PinePhone completely I suggest you try flashing the latest weekly mobian image to an microSD card and pop that in your PinePhone. I found mobian to be a significant improvement in all respects over the default install. The PinePhone should automatically boot from the SD card if it is in place.
The Phosh UI for all its faults and limitations (many of which it shares with all of the smartphone UIs I have tried) is at least useable, stable and, consistent.
Thanks grump_fiddle_reinstall, I appreciate your sympathy and ask whether my expectations were too high. Warranted diatribe follows. How is this project managed if the very first experience out of the box is that the device is unusable because you can’t see anything on it? For God’s sake its packaged with an OS installed …. and no sd card. Just hike the price $8 and put an sd card in, I mean who am I paying my $200+ to and for what ? I certainly did not see a warning that “the device wont work out of the box and we wont provide you with any information that will help. Instead good luck on the fora.” Should I have expected this kind of experience ? Yes it says don’t get this if you don’t know Linux, but I do know Linux somewhat. 2 years of somewhat.
I dont mind doing some work if I can find the information, but there is no data about the various phone config files and the data I received was a config file on a forum from some kind individual that would ostensibly help. But it didn’t and because I really don’t understand what the parameters in the power management config file do, Im a bit lost. Where is the architecture that explains (a)this section of the phone is managed by this software/firmware (b)This is the firmware that manages it and (c)this is where it comes from. (d) Here are the links which provide explanation. Instead this site warns the user https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone that this is the state of the software (which software, the OS that runs the interface to the human or the firmware that runs the phone? Basically you send money and hope that someone will help you when you receive this piece of hardware. Really ? I have to say this is the 1st business model of its kind I have come across. Since you and I have had these problems, why is there no list of problems and how to fix them ? Why ?? This page is helpful since it points to a list of OS’s but after that, nothing. For example, how are the config files set up for which OS and where ? I could go on. I am sure all of this can be fixed, but its clear that whoever is acquiring the funds we are paying is not making any effort to make it easier to use this device. I will try phosh as you suggested, but I surely hope that others who are about to purchase this device, who are running this project and who are thinking of engaging understand what it is you are engaging with. A device that does not work even at a foundational level (a phone has a screen that you should be able to see and a phone should be possible to dial). But my experiences point elsewhere so hey PinePhone leaders, get a grip on this project, beyond the hardware. Diatribe off. Thanks, parryh
I don’t think pine64 has led anyone along. The pinephone page says “Beta Edition PinePhones are aimed solely at early adopters. More specifically, only intend for these units to find their way into the hands of users with extensive Linux experience.” And on the accessories page, they offer an sd card.
There is a huge industry-wide problem right now that very few companies have addressed: the phones you can get today require proprietary drivers, and won’t get updates past at best – if you’re lucky – a few years. After that you can’t run a new open source kernel+distribution with the latest security fixes, because there are secret patches missing. And that’s at $500-$1500/phone. Pinephone is addressing that.
If you feel strongly that better communication is needed for potential users, (and I think you’re right) you could help the next set of potential users (or non-users) by documenting what you’ve found.
Pinephone makes the hardware. They don’t write the OSs. Groups of enthusiasts are writing the software. But they are usually not the best at giving a non-tech user a simple, realistic, overview or status. They’ll blog something when they’ve gotten something to work. Which may make it seem like “that should work for everyone”, but that’s not necessarily the case. So a third group is needed – documenters.
Im serious: You could really make the difference between success and failure. And failure quite possibly means you lose the last chance to control your own phone.
I’ve been following this exchange over the past week, and although it’s tempting to simply address parry’s diatribe complaints with specific suggestions, maybe it would be better to concede the existence of the problem which led to his initial disillusionment: That the OS installed on the shipped pinephone is essentially non-usable. At this point I believe that still refers to some early edition of Manjaro Plasma which I — like parry and many others — struggled with just after unboxing the phone with great anticipation.
Since all the OS’s under development are in a state of flux there would be no point trying to always ship the latest-greatest, not to mention what choice of distro etc. That said however, just beginning with one of the newer (as of 2022) versions of either Mobian or Manjaro would greatly enhance the initial experience of newcomers. It would also perhaps increase the number of potential adopters of the phone and its concept.
As for some of the specifics, maybe a coherent list of the basic procedures necessary for success such as 1. How to flash an image onto a µSD card; 2. How to flash an image onto the emmC storage once booted from SD; 3. How to flash an image onto the emmC drive using ‘JumpDrive’; 4. How to use scp to transfer files from your computer to the phone over a network connection. I know these are all explained in various locations (which is how I learned), but it wouldn’t hurt to include a short list of essentials with the shipped phone. (Perhaps an SD card with JumpDrive installed would be a nice addition.)
A fair comment from Nobody… 😉 If we could create some kind of structure or section about user experiences and provide a taxonomy to it. So for example. (1) [OS]What was the OS on initial boot (2)[UI]What were the challenges with the User Interface (3) [apps]What functions were you looking for and which applications provided them (4) [Communication]Which telecom provider’s SIM did you use ?(5)[Comms Functionality] Were you able to place a telephone call, send a text send MMS (6) [Power] How long did your battery last ? (7) [Other]. My observations area (a) With the Original Manjaro plasma was unreadable (would instantly dim) and the only way I could do anything was to ssh into the device and look at power config files in the ~/.config directory. I updated the OS using the pacman approach and still was unable to see anything (dim screen). I played around with undocumented values in the powermanagementrc file and rebooted. That seemed to bring up the UI, but it was still unstable as far as not dimming the display. I have no idea whatsoever (and this bothers me) but the screen came back and I was able to finally work with the OS. Of the 3 OS versions I have tried this is the only one which allows you to kill applications. This drives me nuts. Manjaro phosh was OK as far as being able to see the screen, but there is no way to stop an application other than killing it through the command line. The Mobian is the same except I cant get back to settings because the window with the one setting I used I can’t close and it wont let me return to the list of settings.
I have not tried to install a SIM because I have to better understand what this phone is capable of
I would like to applaud what Ian and Parry said. I bought a PP, it worked for a while, then it crashed, and I haven’t found the information I need in the forums, probably because I don’t know enough about the system to search the right terms. So it is sitting in a box now. I would like for it to be my daily driver, because I don’t mind slow; even unreliable is sort of okay, since I expect that those bugs will get fixed in the nezt year or so. I have many years of experience on Unix, and even an impractical degree in computer science; but I can’t figure out how to operate this phone. I need clear and unambiguous instructions for the basic steps like what Ian is talking about. For that matter, Ian or anyone else can you walk me through this? I can provide details if someone prompts me for what details are needed. I know that this kind of request, though, will normally get me laughed out of town on most forums, so I feel kind of doomed to bury my PP.
> I can provide details if someone prompts me for what details are needed. I know that this kind of request, though, will normally get me laughed out of town on most forums, so I feel kind of doomed to bury my PP.
As pine64 is explicitly not in the business of doing the software, I think it would be very helpful to have a “distro-generic” forum / mailing list where people could ask questions like this and get answers (instead of getting insulted or “laughed out of town”).
“Manjaro phosh was OK as far as being able to see the screen, but there is no way to stop an application other than killing it through the command line.”
Unless you have a defective install this should not be true. Touching the up-arrow (^) at the bottom of an opened application causes it to minimize to a small window in the upper half of the screen. If more than one app is running they can all be minimized in this way. (That is they will sit side-by-side in the upper screen and can be accessed by scrolling back & forth.) Swiping upward on any one of the minimized apps will close the app. No need to invoke the command line. Also some apps like Firefox still have a “quit” option in their original menus.
Thanks Ian, you are correct. I just did not know you could close the minimized apps with a swipe up. Don’t know if you have the answer, but after the initial installation process, where I could set the screen brightness, I can’t find that instruction anywhere after the install of phosh, plasma or Mobian. Surely one should expect the brightness setting to be in the “screen” settings.
Thanks, Parry
Yes. At the very top of the screen (the black bar with the date, battery level & other indicators) — touch that and it will drop down a black menu area about 1/3 of the screen. The upper part of that contains icons for control of wifi, bluetooth, screen auto-rotate, flashlight etc. Then the bottom part has two swipe-able control bars; one for volume and the other for screen brightness. True you’d think it would be in the Settings app… but this is even easier to access than the Settings app. That said, in the Settings app you might want to open the “Power” section, where you can disable the Automatic Screen Brightness (on/off switch) which is ON by default and will constantly drop your screen brightness to save power. In the same section you can adjust the “Screen Blank” period to give yourself more idle time before the screen goes blank into power saving mode. (That’s kind of important during a command-line full upgrade with Pacman.) It can be as long as 12 minutes if you like.
P.S. Above I am only referring to Phosh gui which is my default now. I think in Plasma there is a similar procedure but you have to have to swipe downward from the top to get that upper menu to display, whereas in Phosh it’s an easy tap motion. You’ll have to ask someone else about Plasma. Good luck.
Re brightness. Plasma has something similar. But the first version I used had a bug such that if you used the slider to set brightness to the minimum it was then not possible using the slider to increase the brightness again.
It occurred to me this morning that one of the problems with all Linux phone UIs is that they all assume that the new user has experience of other mainstream phone UIs.
While waiting for my PinePhone and Cosmo Communicator to arrive I bought a cheap Android phone to gain some experience of smartphones. That was my first smartphone. Phosh uses some of the Android UI metaphors and that combined with a less complex set of swipe gestures made me feel at home with Phosh.
I discovered today that Plasma appears to be modeled more on iOS. For instance the way of showing all open windows is almost identical to the iOS solution. As, prior to using KDE Plasma I had had no exposure to iOS it seemed very alien to me.
One other thing is that many of us greybeards have used distros on computers that have “conventional” naming systems for apps. So you install software via a “Software boutique” or “Software” or some program with “Software” in the name. Of names for apps that we have grown up with like Firefox, Thunderbird, Mousepad.
To be confronted with something that turns out to be a browser with a non-round icon called “Angelfish” or an app called “Discover” which is not a dating or travel app nor a file search app, but KDEs software centre is disorienting to say the least. I have to admit that under mobian I was confused as there seemed to be no file manager, went as far as installing Thunar before discovering that “Portfolio” was not an image viewer or a showcase for your work but a file manager.
So how much you like and understand Plasma or Phosh or any of the other alternatives depends on a) if you have ANY smartphone experience and b) if you have used iOS or Android (respectively) before c) how conventional the naming system of apps is.
I’m re-posting this as the first one got lost somehow. Note I’m only speaking of Phosh here as it’s my default gui now. You’ll have to ask someone else about Plasma.\n
So yes, there is an easy way to access the screen brightness control bar in Phosh: touch the very upper part of the screen (that black bar with the date, battery indicator etc) and it will drop down into a black menu area about 1/3 of the screen. The upper section has icons for on/off control of wifi, bluetooth, screen auto-rotate etc, while the bottom section contains two control bars: one for volume and the other for screen brightness. This method is actually quicker access than the Settings App would be. \n
And as for the Settings App, you might want to open it and go to the ‘Power’ section to turn off the “Automatic Screen Brightness” control switch. Otherwise it might keep dropping the screen brightness automatically to save power. Good luck.
J T said: ” I need clear and unambiguous instructions for the basic steps like what Ian is talking about. For that matter, Ian or anyone else can you walk me through this?”
The basics I listed were “1. How to flash an image onto a µSD card; 2. How to flash an image onto the emmC storage once booted from SD; 3. How to flash an image onto the emmC drive using ‘JumpDrive’; 4. How to use scp to transfer files from your computer to the phone over a network connection.” Not sure which of those you want details on.
I should point out that this Community Poll page wasn’t supposed to be a forum, and the real forum for these questions is located here:
https://forum.pine64.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=121 (broken down into sections on each of the most popular OS types).
Also in item#4 I mentioned the “JumpDrive” whose URL source I had misplaced but now have relocated: https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Jumpdrive/releases (where you’ll want to download pine64-pinephone-img.xz.)
The JumpDrive, once flashed onto a uSD card and booted from on the pinephone, allows the phone to be “seen” by your host computer as an external drive when connected via the red USB-C cable. This greatly facilitates flashing an OS onto the emmC drive, and also facilitates transferring files from your computer to the pinephone. However let me state that the JumpDrive is NOT necessary for either of those two things. Flashing an OS onto the emmC can be done from a phone booted from SD; and file transfers from your computer can be achieved via scp over a WiFi connection.
Let me just address #1 and #4 because those will help get you running a hopefully more stable system, and allow you to move some files from your computer onto the phone.
Most importantly: Flashing an OS onto a uSD card
1) Choose your OS (highly recommend either latest Manjaro or Mobian). (latest Manjaro: https://github.com/manjaro-pinephone/phosh/releases/tag/beta21; latest Mobian:https://images.mobian-project.org/pinephone/) You need to file ending with img.xz. 2) On your computer, use the “unxz” command (/usr/bin/unxz) to decompress the image to a .img file. 3) In order to flash onto the SD card, if your laptop/computer doesn’t have an SD reader built-in then you need to pick up a USB type of card reader. Once the card is inserted into either the SD slot or the USB-card-reader, run the “lsblk” command to determine which drive letter is assigned to the SD card. On mine, it’s /dev/sdc but that is because I have two hard drives occupying /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. On yours it might be /dev/sdb or other, depending on the complexity of your system. But be CERTAIN you know which one refers to the SD card because when you flash the image onto the card it will over-write the root area of the drive and you don’t want that happening on your main hard drive… Running “lsblk” once without the SD card inserted and again with the SD card inserted will unambiguously identify the proper drive letter. 4) Open a terminal in the location of your downloaded OS image file and run this command as root:
dd if=[your-chosen-OS].img of=/dev/sd[your-SDcard-drive-letter] bs=1M status=progress conv=fsync
Allow plenty of time for the image to be fully written to the card. If you have a conky system monitor wait till all the write activity is finished on the monitor. Then remove the card and insert into your pinephone and boot the phone. It should automatically resize the partitions on first boot. If you’re using the latest stable version of Manjaro it shouldn’t be necessary to run the upgrades via pacman until later.
I will stop here. If you want specifics on scp file transfer please ask.
This looks amazingly helpful. I will try out those suggestions as soon as possible (probably this weekend) and I’m sure will have more questions.
Thanks again Ian. I started working on this yesterday and got as far as needing an SD card reader. I’m taking the slow road but what you have explained is already IMMENSELY HELPFUL. I will try to make more progress next weekend after locating a card reader.
Slow is good. Let me just repeat the importance of correctly identifying the proper drive letter for your uSD card before proceeding to flash the OS image onto it using ‘dd’ command.
Example output on my system from ‘lsblk’ WITH NO SD CARD READER CONNECTED:
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 465.8G 0 disk
|-sda1 8:1 0 46.6G 0 part /
|-sda2 8:2 0 1K 0 part
|-sda5 8:5 0 398.2G 0 part /home
`-sda6 8:6 0 21G 0 part [SWAP]
sdb 8:16 0 465.8G 0 disk
|-sdb1 8:17 0 46.6G 0 part /media/ToshibaRT
|-sdb2 8:18 0 1K 0 part
|-sdb5 8:21 0 398.2G 0 part /media/Toshiba
`-sdb6 8:22 0 21G 0 part
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
This shows my primary hard-drive (/dev/sda), secondary hard-drive (/dev/sdb), and a CDROM drive (sr0).
Now, when I connect a USB card reader with uSD card inserted, the output becomes:
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 465.8G 0 disk
|-sda1 8:1 0 46.6G 0 part /
|-sda2 8:2 0 1K 0 part
|-sda5 8:5 0 398.2G 0 part /home
`-sda6 8:6 0 21G 0 part [SWAP]
sdb 8:16 0 465.8G 0 disk
|-sdb1 8:17 0 46.6G 0 part /media/ToshibaRT
|-sdb2 8:18 0 1K 0 part
|-sdb5 8:21 0 398.2G 0 part /media/Toshiba
`-sdb6 8:22 0 21G 0 part
sdc 8:32 1 28.9G 0 disk
`-sdc1 8:33 1 49M 0 part
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
And you see how /dev/sdc suddenly appears in addition to the others.
Good luck.
I guess maybe we should move this conversation to the forum you suggested? In the meantime here is my latest, which I realize I didn’t post as a reply to your post, so you probably didn’t see it:
My card reader arrived today [Feb 20]. I couldn’t find lsblk in /bin or /sbin on my Mac but I got some advice to use “diskutil list” instead.
When I diffed the output with vs without the microSD card inserted, I see “disk4” and “disk4s1”:
2012-mac:~ jt$ diff output-without output-inserted
27a28,32
> /dev/disk4 (external, physical):
> #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
> 0: FDisk_partition_scheme *7.9 GB disk4
> 1: DOS_FAT_32 NO NAME 7.9 GB disk4s1
>
So I would dd into “disk4s1”? (not “disk4”, right?)
It’s comforting that what you’re saying looks pretty consistent with what’s here:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/522394/is-dd-on-os-x-the-same-as-the-unix-version .
Does it matter whether the blocksize is capitalized as “1M” or is just “1m”?
And do I put JumpDrive on the card before or after the OS? Do I use dd for that?
(I’ll start with Manjaro, but I’ll want to try Mobian later.)
Thank you again.
My card reader arrived today. I couldn’t find lsblk in /bin or /sbin on my Mac but I got some advice to use “diskutil list” instead.
When I diffed the output with vs without the microSD card inserted, I see “disk4” and “disk4s1”:
2012-mac:~ jt$ diff output-without output-inserted
27a28,32
> /dev/disk4 (external, physical):
> #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
> 0: FDisk_partition_scheme *7.9 GB disk4
> 1: DOS_FAT_32 NO NAME 7.9 GB disk4s1
>
So I would dd into “disk4s1”? (not “disk4”, right?)
It’s comforting that what you’re saying looks pretty consistent with what’s here:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/522394/is-dd-on-os-x-the-same-as-the-unix-version .
Does it matter whether the blocksize is capitalized as “1M” or is just “1m”?
And do I put JumpDrive on the card before or after the OS? Do I use dd for that?
(I’ll start with Manjaro, but I’ll want to try Mobian later.)
Thank you again.
Well, PP is more of a toy for me. It’s performance is not acceptable for daily driving my tasks (it is a pain waiting it to refresh apps or do calculations) and I understand it is mostly due to eMMC and SoC.
The ecosystem is mature enough especially Plasma Mobile or Phosh so if PPP will deliver promised performance it will be a kill-switch for my Android device. So I hope to see some real life reviews and then decide if I am going to buy a PPP for myself.
For info: I am running gebian on Planet Computer’s Cosmo Communicator. The PP keyboard add-on made PP almost the same as Cosmo for me.
Braveheart owner. Ubuntu touch as shipped and updated has no working bluetooth and the ubuntu webpage says ‘does not work as phone’ and while its better than it was from shipdate that web page is correct. Tried pureOS and it was a bust and Manjaro was working the best – but that best is … errr … frustrating. Getting voice on an outgoing call is an issue, at one point headsets via the 3.5 mm jack did work and now does not with the volume autoset to 0 and can not be increased. A bluetooth keyboard can sync but the keyboard slider to turn it on for use flips right back to off. Things seem to be improved and then stop working. The UI of fitting to mobile is improving. manjaro seems to have the more active development so I keep hoping.
Thanks