Anyone use one of those Linux phones like pine phone or librem.
I was looking at a few months ago but settled on a deggooled phone. Are there user friendly distros for them?
They are not ready for regular use yet. Performance is poor and battery life is bad. It’s fun to play with my Pinephone and watch the software slowly improve, but there is no way I could use it as my primary phone.
The only real issue holding it back for me is the battery life. I update the danctnix distro regularly to check progress, but the battery life is not production ready.
You could buy the Pine keyboard to extend the battery life.
True, I have considered it but
- They don’t come cheap
- They make it less a phone and more a mini laptop by having to open it up to use
- Increases thickness
Sure, there are drawbacks, but I think it worth it. It not only fixes the battery life, but also provides hardware typing which is important because we don’t have swipe-typing.
I wish they made a slider keyboard…
The big sticking point for me is the camera. It seems like they all have bad (or even non-functioning) cameras. I don’t own a camera. My phone is my camera. I can’t switch to a phone that can’t be my camera.
I have been daily driving a PinePhone/Pro but I keep my old Galaxy Note 8 close by if I’m going anywhere I want a camera.
Ubuntu Touch on an Android phone might provide some middle ground. I have an old Nexus 6P with Ubuntu Touch on it, the camera is performing surprisingly well - better than some popular open source camera apps I have tried on Android. :)
Well with all the models that use lineage os you could probably find a good camera
LineageOS is Android. I think it was implied the user meant GNU/Linux distros on phones like Mobian or PostmarketOS which run on things like the Pine Phone since if we were talking about using Android, we could just keep our current phones, so that’s what I was referring to when I said they had bad cameras
PostmarketOS installed on a Oneplus 6/6T using the UBPorts installer works pretty flawlessly for me. Some animations are not 100% silky smooth, but most are. Honestly a pretty good experience, it just needs a lot of polish around the corners
How is the camera performance?
Doesn’t work right now. I think you could get it to work with droidian though, but I didnt try
Define user-friendly…
PostmarketOS or Mobian
I’m using a Librem 5 for about two months now very happily, but I admit its not yet for everyone.
Have the PinePhone and PP Pro. Partial to SailfishOS on both. It has the most smartphone feel if you will. Like with most the camera is pretty much a no go but I rarely use them anyway.
Do you use the PinePhone as a daily driver, or just for tinkering?
Just for tinkering so far. I have a habit of tossing the devices aside for long periods of time when an OS breaks badly. 😁
Technically SailfishOS handles most of the requirements to make the device a daily-driver-in-training. All but one of my Android devices are VoIP now. Getting away from carrier-based stuff (and saving money). At the moment there isn’t really anything usable on the mobile linux side (SIP, calls via XMPP - I have
JMP.chatnumbers) that I am aware of. On SFOS that is. Though I can use movim via browser.Guess it is time I took the devices seriously and try to use them more regularly.
I have a librem 5, i use it to make/receive calls and it seems to work fine, though for anything else it is too anemic. Also eats through the battery like crazy, even shut down, it slowly drains.
