Pinephone Rant

cliffcoggin

Given how few the core team at UB Ports are in number it will be impossible to develop every phone to everybody's satisfaction, so our expectations must be reduced accordingly. The only way to change that would be for more technically minded individuals to get involved in development. For those us incapable of that, the best we can do is cough up some money and be grateful for what we have.

wgarcia

As far as I know no distribution for the Pinephone is still ready for a daily usable phone, and there are a lot of people involved in developing them. The hope for UT was also to get more spillovers from the other distributions, and even if some spillovers have been received and given, no distribution has arrived to the status of usability of hallium and original UT phones.

Some distributions in the Pinephone offer a Linux pocket PC with a tiny screen and keyboard and some hope of exporting them to a larger screen and normal keyboard, but that is not a cell phone in my opinion.

I for one bought a UBports Edition Pinephone with no hopes of getting a usable phone, but to support a great project and be able to follow it directly.

mardy

@joelandsonja said in Pinephone Rant:

I can't tell you how frustrating it is to see more than 50 other phones on the 'supported devices list' that are leagues ahead of the Pinephone, especially when you consider the fact that the Pinephone was made specifically to support the Linux community and it feels like it's being ignored by the developers.

The problem is that the PinePhone is very different from the other devices we support, so even though it is in many ways the best device we could work on, in practice we have much more experience working on Android-based devices, whereas for the PP we have to redo many things from scratch.

I don't mean to sound so rude, but how long are we expected to wait to see some progress?

Speaking for myself, I can tell you that in the next OTA, if everything goes as planned, two PP-specific bugs will be fixed:

It's a drop in the ocean, I know, but this is just to let you know that we haven't forgotten about it - and I don't even have a PP myself.

Lt. Dillinger

I see the latest version available to buy is the Pine Phone Beta. Does this mean they are getting closer to a daily driver release? Also, is there any difference between that model and my UBPorts or Mobian edition?

poVoq

@lt-dillinger The currently sold Pinephones run Plasma Mobile, not UT by default, but you can install UT on them if you want.

There are some minor hardware fixes compared to the original UBports edition AFAIK.

negations

@lt-dillinger The original UB Ports release, I think, had motherboard v1.1 which was 2GB RAM and 16GB storage. The Beta version and Mobian is v1.2 with 3GB RAM and 32GB storage. There are a few other minor hardware fixes too I think.

Keneda

@negations
No, that's the "convergence package" that has a PInephone with 3/32, the Pinephone alone, without the dock that comes with this package, is 2/16.

The Braveheart edition/uTouch edition (that are same as braveheart) are Pinephones that came with a hardware issue, that you can fix by hardware de/soldering components (and can be fixed in some places for you), or, you can buy a motherboard replacement with a discout price if you have this faulty hardware and don't have skill to fix or don't have place to fix it for you near.

You can even replace a 2/16 PP motherboard with a 3/32 one.
https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-2gb-16gb-mainboard/?v=0446c16e2e66
https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-community-edition-3gb-32gb-mainboard/?v=0446c16e2e66

If you previously owns BraveHeart or UBPort Community Edition PinePhone, please check out the specials offer posting.

OhneZ

I can fully understand the frustration. I felt the same way at times.
As many here have already written, the Pinephone will still take time and you should rather be happy about every improvement.
For me, I have solved this by having a Nexus 5 as a daily driver. Since I unfortunately have no programming skills, I just donate money and watch the development on the Pinephone.
Even if this takes longer from time to time.
Since I am dependent on SMS, it can unfortunately not yet be used as a daily driver.
with all other "bugs" I could live.
So it remains to be seen whether the open source firmware of the modem will prevail.

joelandsonja

I appreciate all the responses. Many of them were helpful to understand what's happening behind the scenes, so I appreciate the information. I should emphasize the fact that I am not a developer, but rather a consumer. I realize that it's easy to complain about something when you're not contributing to the development, but there's a reason for that. I'm 38 years old and I've never owned a smartphone in my entire life. I've never actually trusted a company to handle my private information, but when I saw the PinePhone hit the market (UBPorts edition), It was a dream come true. I honestly don't mean to take it out on the devs, because I know you're all working hard, but this was literally the first phone I've ever purchased and I can't even use it. That being said, I hope we'll get to see some progress before the years finished.

C0n57an71n

@flohack Couldn't we start a crowdfunding campaign like the one for the Anbox?

flohack

@c0n57an71n Sure but we also need someone with time and knowledge to work on it Thats maybe better to look for someone first, than to collect money and then noone is there to take it

Equareo

It's a bit weird that the best and most stable ubport experience is hidden away on the kernel upgrade channel. I am very happy with that version, but most people are running "stable" and many are experiencing phone blanking after the power button is pressed (fixed in kernel upgrade). source 1 source 2 source 3

It's also quicker and the modem is more stable.

TotalRando

@equareo why not just declare that one the stable version and work off that one then? Honest question- not really a coder

Equareo

@totalrando yeah, that was my point I'm just a total rando though

Fuseteam

@totalrando the reason that hasn't been done is, regressions it still has regressions compared to the stable channel so untill those bugs are figured out, it'll be "hidden" away

unrealb2

Lol 38 common ur a baby i started learning code at 48.

Help out the mobian or arch community with pinephone. If you put in a little effort everyday eventually youll be able to copy other peoples software and put it on ur OS of choice for everyone to enjoy.

I personally think UT is too polished(bloated) for an underpowered device like pinephone. I like UT and use as a daily driver, but just on a quicker device like my nexus 6p.

Equareo

@flohack

One suggestion:

Create a forum post on the ubports subforum on pine64 and ask for help: Here and get it stickied.

Say what you are working on, and that you are looking for people to help out. Add a link to ubports forum for further communication.

I know you guys made a newspost with pine64 earlier, but not everyone reads that, and it's only "valid" for a month.

flohack

@equareo I would love if you can do this for us, because that is what community is all about

Equareo

Sure, i can do that. I just thought that it coming from a developer would carry more weight.

dobey

@unrealb2 said in Pinephone Rant:

I personally think UT is too polished(bloated) for an underpowered device like pinephone

On the contrary, UT is pretty spot on for what the pinephone hardware is. And if you find some odd things there, it's more than likely an actual bug with graphics or power management stack, than "bloat" in UT.

There's also a lot of room for performance improvement in the stack of software which makes up Lomiri, as much of it was written around Qt 5.2, and hasn't been kept up to par with improvements in upstream Qt. Many things in lomiri-ui-toolkit for example, just didn't exist back then in QtQuick, and I'm sure there's still plenty of funky assumptions throughout the code based on behavior in Qt 8 years ago.