Are you using the Pinephone as your daily driver?

[Old_Mil]

1. Do you use the Pinephone as your daily driver?
   

That was my intent, but after playing with it for 24 hours I see that it simply isn't up to the task.

1. If yes: What distribution do you use?
   

1. Which desktop environment/interface do you use?
   

Manjaro, plasma

1. Does the interface offer the basic functionality you need or is something missing?
   

It offers basic functionality; it's the reliability of the basic functionality that is at issue.  For instance, I installed Geary to check my email.  I was able to add my account, view, and delete my mail.  However when I pressed on the "menu" icon to pull up the accounts/preferences menu the menu popped up but I couldn't activate any of the menu items.  Out of the box, the modem loses connection to the carrier intermittently.

1. Have you been able to add the missing functionality through third party applications or customisations?
   
2. Which customisations did you apply to make the pinephone meet your expectations towards a daily driver?
   

No, and frankly I'm not going to try.  I emailed the pinestore today for refund instructions.  Although this is sold as a beta device, it's not.  Beta to me means that device mostly works and may need a low to moderate amount of baby sitting.  For a phone that means that out of the box, at a minimum, that incoming and outgoing voice calls, sms, and mms messages and contacts work flawlessly and are 100% reliable.

Background: I've used sailfish as my daily driver for three years, intermittently played with a lineage install, and used an Ubuntu touch phone five years ago for a couple of months before abandoning it because of frequency incompatibilities of the hardware.  Linux is my daily driver on my two laptops and desktops. We need a Linux phone but sadly this isn't it.

[dante404]

1. Yes

2. Mobian

3. Phosh

4. ...reliable alarm

Yeah, forgot about the alarm, also doesn't work on my daily driver Mobian here - Would be nice if it would!
(Using my old Fx0 with FirefoxOS without SIM and in FlyMode as an 'alarm clock' at home at the moment...

It's not a smartphone for those who still want to use WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, ... yes, it's for me The road is long, I hope that the end user experience will go on being improved but I don't want some compromises to be done to please those users, they do whatever they want with their stuff but I use the Pinephone because privacy is important for me, I use it for political reasons and I'm still happy to have GNU Linux inside my pocket instead of something designed by corporations that try to escape taxes.

Couldn't have said it better - Signed!

[d0n601]

1. Do you use the Pinephone as your daily driver?
    Kinda. I have for the past week, and I do on and off every month or two to see how it's progressing as one. Otherwise I'm on  UBports Nexus 5's.

2. If yes: What distribution do you use?
    Manjaro. I've tried UBports and Postmark, but I've stuck with Manjaro now the past 6 months.

3. Which desktop environment/interface do you use?
    Posh

4. Does the interface offer the basic functionality you need or is something missing?
     Yes, but buggy.
    * I've noticed many apps seem to struggle with copy/pasting text.
    * We really need an app to replace Geary, or Geary's UI to improve, it's unusable. I'd love to see Thunderbird made adaptive.
   * MMS please, I do miss group text and pictures from people. I never even know when they've tried.
   * Camera is pretty bad, it works for things like taking pictures of notes and book covers you don't want to forget, but it's not really something you'd use as an actual camera.

5. Have you been able to add the missing functionality through third party applications or customization?
   * Alarm Clock: Birdie (since the native alarm won't wake up from deep sleep).
   * See question 6 for the rest.


6. Which customization did you apply to make the pinephone meet your expectations towards a daily driver?
    * A cronjob running every minute to test and reconnect the modem if it's been lost. As found here. This has been a big one.
    * Building ProtonMail bridge in no-gui mode (Geary is holding back my email a lot though).

---

No, and frankly I'm not going to try.  I emailed the pinestore today for refund instructions.  Although this is sold as a beta device, it's not.  Beta to me means that device mostly works and may need a low to moderate amount of baby sitting.  For a phone that means that out of the box, at a minimum, that incoming and outgoing voice calls, sms, and mms messages and contacts work flawlessly and are 100% reliable.

The phone is for people that want to support the development of Linux phones. If you'd have read up on the status of what is and isn't functioning on various operating systems you'd have known what you were getting yourself into. I don't think "Beta" ever means "flawless and 100% reliable" in any way at all. It's a shame to see Pine64 getting returns when in my opinion they've been pretty up front about the device they're selling.

[Old_Mil]

The phone is for people that want to support the development of Linux phones. If you'd have read up on the status of what is and isn't functioning on various operating systems you'd have known what you were getting yourself into. I don't think "Beta" ever means "flawless and 100% reliable" in any way at all. It's a shame to see Pine64 getting returns when in my opinion they've been pretty up front about the device they're selling.

Beta doesn't mean flawless and 100% reliable.  I never said that it does.  However, if you're going to ship a smartPHONE, it had best be able to send and receive calls and texts at a bare minimum and store contacts.  At least that functionality should be better than a BQ running Ubuntu Touch in 2017. But this works worse.

A Beta version is "an early release of the offering that’s almost ready but might have bugs that can only be found when a wide user base tries it out."

The GUI update manager failed for broken dependencies out of the box. Fine, I fired up the terminal and updated it from the command line. No worries. It's slow - fine, I wasn't expecting a flagship. But the cellular modem's connection isn't something I can babysit throughout the course of my day.

[d0n601]

The phone is for people that want to support the development of Linux phones. If you'd have read up on the status of what is and isn't functioning on various operating systems you'd have known what you were getting yourself into. I don't think "Beta" ever means "flawless and 100% reliable" in any way at all. It's a shame to see Pine64 getting returns when in my opinion they've been pretty up front about the device they're selling.

Beta doesn't mean flawless and 100% reliable.  I never said that it does.  However, if you're going to ship a smartPHONE, it had best be able to send and receive calls and texts at a bare minimum and store contacts.  At least that functionality should be better than a BQ running Ubuntu Touch in 2017. But this works worse.

A Beta version is "an early release of the offering that’s almost ready but might have bugs that can only be found when a wide user base tries it out."

The GUI update manager failed for broken dependencies out of the box.  Fine, I fired up the terminal and updated it from the command line.  No worries.  It's slow - fine, I wasn't expecting a flagship.  But the cellular modem's connection isn't something I can babysit throughout the course of my day.

Taking an ideal sounding definition of "beta" from somewhere else on the internet is obviously going to leave you disappointed. Pine64 states the following on their store's page for the Pinephone.

Beta Limited 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.

Users with "extensive Linux experience" means that doing the following to fix the issue with the modem should be no big deal. 


source

Code:

#!/bin/bash
FILE=/dev/ttyUSB2

if ! test -c "$FILE"; then
  systemctl restart eg25-manager
fi

Then in order to check this regularly I suggest using `cron` jobs as root:

Code:

sudo crontab -e

and set the following rule that executes every minute

Code:

* * * * * /home/mobian/bin/test-and-connect-modem.sh

[Old_Mil]

d0n601



Users with "extensive Linux experience" means that doing the following to fix the issue with the modem should be no big deal. 

source

Code:

#!/bin/bash
FILE=/dev/ttyUSB2

if ! test -c "$FILE"; then
  systemctl restart eg25-manager
fi

Then in order to check this regularly I suggest using `cron` jobs as root:

Code:

sudo crontab -e

and set the following rule that executes every minute

Code:

* * * * * /home/mobian/bin/test-and-connect-modem.sh

I've downloaded jumpdrive and am going to give it a try with Mobian before I draw any final conclusions.  Probably won't end up returning it.

[zetabeta]

there is debate about what beta is or not. but in the end it does not matter is pinephone's o.s. alpha, beta or stable software, because pine organization guarantees only hardware and not software. essentially, software is up to the community.

btw, i understand beta as software basis is there and there is not going to be huge changes, but still it is not guaranteed to work.

DISCLAIMER

A small numbers of stuck or dead pixels (1-3) can be a characteristic of LCD screens. While rare, this should not be considered a defect. If you think that a minor dissatisfaction, such as a dead pixel will prompt you to file a PayPal dispute, DO NOT purchase the PinePhone. When fulfilling your purchase, please bear in mind that we are offering the PinePhone at this price as a community service to PINE64 community. Thank you.

even though is not clearly said on the red area. but it does refer to the community.

[Old_Mil]

I just flashed Mobian on it this evening and it's behavior has improved greatly since then.

[swiley]

1. Do you use the Pinephone as your daily driver?

Yes, my iphone died a month after I got it last fall and I've worked around the missing functionality using shell scripting, open source and community maintained services, or just going without.

2. If yes: What distribution do you use?

PostMarket OS which was what it shipped with, I'm playing with using kexec to do upgrades from a ramdisk. IMO there's little reason to change the distro unless what you're running is exceptionally bad.

3. Which desktop environment/interface do you use?

FVWM. It's the same desktop environment I've used since my first laptop when I was 10 so I already have a nice fvwm2rc.

5. Have you been able to add the missing functionality through third party applications or customization?
4. Does the interface offer the basic functionality you need or is something missing?
6. Which customization did you apply to make the pinephone meet your expectations towards a daily driver?

Yes. I had to disable pointer style focus since that doesn't work well on touch screens. It looks like it would be hard to use but all of the window management commands (close, move, resize etc.) are in the root menu so you never have to be precise. I use Mate's theme manager to enable the older gtk2 theme that had thicker scrollbars.

I wrote a short shell script for alarm clocks
I already use emacs for calendaring
I use jmp.chat for mms and connect to my xmpp service via dino. I would recommend everyone do that as it gives you a lot more freedom with your OS. Especially if you live somewhere with bad cell coverage since it means all your messages go over the internet.
I have a separate OpenRC runlevel that inherits from default and adds a service that runs rtcwake in a while loop. This way I can get text message, email, and alarm clock notifications while the phone is locked without significantly compromising the battery life. This is toggled on and off using a short shell script called by acpid when I press the lock button on the side of the phone.

[jfenn2199]

[*]1. Do you use the Pinephone as your daily driver?
     Yes

[*]2. If yes: What distribution do you use?
     Mobian (unstable)

[*]3. Which desktop environment/interface do you use?
     Phosh

[*]4. Does the interface offer the basic functionality you need or is something missing?    
[*]    Most basic functionality is present, calls work (though bluetooth doesn't automatically route haven't attempted customizations), sms works out of the box, on unstable mmsd-tng is available in the repositories to patch in MMS support (though the version of chatty with baked in mms support (not in repositories must be compiled) still needs work in regards to sending MMS (group messages are received as MMS but send individually)).

[*]5. Have you been able to add the missing functionality through third party applications or customisations?
     Yes.  What I haven't seen mentioned in other responses is that Mobian has an excellent Wiki with instructions and tips to add customization to a standard install.

[*]6. Which customisations did you apply to make the pinephone meet your expectations towards a daily driver?
     In addition to MMS support, I've installed Axolotl for signal messaging, and due to some people in my life who only have facebook as a means of consistent communication I've used the steps in the Mobian wiki to create a web app launcher with the Epiphany Browser and change the Exec line of the launcher to launch Firefox in Kiosk mode, and set up a second Firefox profile to strip the Android user agent line so Messenger desktop site will load.  It doesn't send notifications but when I absolutely have to communicate with someone through FB it works enough.