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Are you using the Pinephone as your daily driver? - Printable Version

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+--- Thread: Are you using the Pinephone as your daily driver? (/showthread.php?tid=13861)

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RE: Are you using the Pinephone as your daily driver? - Zebulon Walton - 09-16-2021

It's possible the modem would have reconnected without manual intervention, next time it happens I'll wait and see if it does that on its own.


RE: Are you using the Pinephone as your daily driver? - user641 - 09-17-2021

(09-16-2021, 06:59 AM)Zebulon Walton Wrote: It's possible the modem would have reconnected without manual intervention, next time it happens I'll wait and see if it does that on its own.

it is like that for me on variois mobian install....I see the modem off then I say to myself "oh no" then a few seconds later, sometimes almost a minute and it's back with no actions..


RE: Are you using the Pinephone as your daily driver? - zetabeta - 10-13-2021

i have been using manjaro/phosh for little while and it feels manjaro is better than mobian at the moment.

this is rather preliminary. manjaro makes mobile data disconnects less than mobian. however, manjaro has done those mobile data disconnects also. manjaro heats less than mobian. when i used mobian from memory card, it was unreliable, crashed within about 30 minutes, probably root mount point was gone.

for me, those disconnects are just annoying. so if those are gone, i can use it as daily driver.


RE: Are you using the Pinephone as your daily driver? - user641 - 10-13-2021

(10-13-2021, 08:28 AM)zetabeta Wrote: i have been using manjaro/phosh for little while and it feels manjaro is better than mobian at the moment.

this is rather preliminary. manjaro makes mobile data disconnects less than mobian. however, manjaro has done those mobile data disconnects also. manjaro heats less than mobian. when i used mobian from memory card, it was unreliable, crashed within about 30 minutes, probably root mount point was gone.

for me, those disconnects are just annoying. so if those are gone, i can use it as daily driver.

Interesting feedback as I was using manjaro for the last 2 months and the experience got a lot better than before and I confirm what you wrote, however I got bored of slow updates and switched to arch...it is amazing on arch, I was using it around july it was terrible, now it's quite stable and we get the latest updates asap with much more stability than manjaro unstable


RE: Are you using the Pinephone as your daily driver? - ryo - 10-14-2021

I personally got tired of Plasma as a whole.
Both the PC and mobile ones are heavy and buggy, and they come with unreadable source code too.
So on my Plamo phone I gave SXMO a try, and I have to say, I really don't like Alpine's package manager.
Seems like there's no input manager included at all (there's iBus and Anthy, but Anthy doesn't seem to work).

So I went ahead and installed Gajim, except there's no package for that.
So I went ahead and downloaded the Tarball, except it requires pip to install from source.
So I went ahead and installed pip, except there's no package for that.

So I'd say SXMO is only daily driver ready if you don't speak any CJK language.
And since I'm the J part, it's not daily driver ready for me.


RE: Are you using the Pinephone as your daily driver? - nelstomlinson - 10-17-2021

(05-09-2021, 03:00 PM)jro Wrote:
  1. Do you use the Pinephone as your daily driver?
  2. If yes: What distribution do you use?
  3. Which desktop environment/interface do you use?
  4. Does the interface offer the basic functionality you need or is something missing?
  5. Have you been able to add the missing functionality through third party applications or customisations?
  6. Which customisations did you apply to make the pinephone meet your expectations towards a daily driver?
1. Yes.
2. Mobian Bookworm with 
3. Phosh
4. It's probably as good as a touchscreen will get, but touchscreen is a lousy way to control a linux computer.
5. Not having MMS is a pain. I'm waiting for mmsd-tng support in chatty, then it will be 100% for phone functions for me. My main non-phone uses are a little web browsing and a bible reader.  Firefox is OK, though the interface is a little flaky still. Xiphos is not usable on a small screen, and that is by design. Too bad, because it's an amazing program. BibleTime sort of works now, but scrolling and navigation is very unsatisfactory and it just doesn't handle the small screen well.
6. I'm trying to NOT customize, I want to be able to keep it current with nothing more than sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade.


RE: Are you using the Pinephone as your daily driver? - Athansor - 10-18-2021

(05-09-2021, 03:00 PM)jro Wrote:
  1. Do you use the Pinephone as your daily driver?
  2. If yes: What distribution do you use?
  3. Which desktop environment/interface do you use?
  4. Does the interface offer the basic functionality you need or is something missing?
  5. Have you been able to add the missing functionality through third party applications or customisations?
  6. Which customisations did you apply to make the pinephone meet your expectations towards a daily driver?

1. Yes. There have been...hiccups along the way, but these days the reliability seems to be very good.
2. UBports. I started with that, and have tried mobian phosh, manjaro phosh, manjaro plasma mobile, postmarketos. I prefer UBports by a large margin. They were first out of the gate, fell behind the others for a while, but when I returned to it a month ago, I found it had matured considerably. Phosh seems capable, but it is slow -- even when installed on the emmc -- and I don't like it's aesthetics. Manjaro/Plasma is very nice, but still a little unpolished. I used it for several months as well, before returning to UBports and being surprised how smooth it has gotten.
3. UBports/lomiri honestly, I wasn't a Unity guy on the desktop, but this interface is perfect for the smartphone.
4. basic functionality -- GPS isn't always accurate.
5. None.


RE: Are you using the Pinephone as your daily driver? - SocialNetworkingWasAMistake - 10-18-2021

Yup, it's the only phone I use aside from the brick phone I keep around as a morning alarm. I run Mobian, but I do have to lug a battery pack around with me wherever I go because the battery gets hammered with like any sort of use, especially since I can't use deep sleep due to damaging the ribbon cable for the side buttons which stopped the power button working. It would be great if I could make deep sleep respond to the volume buttons somehow.


RE: Are you using the Pinephone as your daily driver? - Barugon - 10-19-2021


  1. Do you use the Pinephone as your daily driver?  Yes.
  2. If yes: What distribution do you use?  Mobian (Bookworm).
  3. Which desktop environment/interface do you use?  Phosh.
  4. Does the interface offer the basic functionality you need or is something missing?  Mostly. Some way to silence the ringer and an alarm clock that actually wakes up the phone and alarms would be nice.
  5. Have you been able to add the missing functionality through third party applications or customisations?  Not that I know of.
  6. Which customisations did you apply to make the pinephone meet your expectations towards a daily driver?  Just change to dark theme and install a couple of needed apps.

[edit] It would also be great if the notification light wouldn't blink when the phone is entering low power mode.


RE: Are you using the Pinephone as your daily driver? - Smeegle - 12-08-2021

The application's that Pinephone runs on prevent it from working as a daily driver.  Anbox (android wrapper) has problems.  On the base model, I DO think that there is enough memory to run a single application in anbox, while I do have to try a few times to start anbox up, eventually it will start and the application running inside of anbox will run smoothly.  The problem is that anbox doesn't work well.  Currently the keyboard that anbox uses is just a black area on the screen with invisible keys, to be able to type, you need to guess where keys are located in this area, setup like a standard keyboard, but if you need to use special characters, it gets exponentially more difficult to the point of being unusable.  

TLDR; anbox keyboard is unusable so it is not possible to run android applications on the pinephone, which makes pinephone unusable as a daily driver.  If this is resolved I think it can be a daily driver (within reason)