Are you using the Pinephone as your daily driver?

[linmob]

i mostly likely have to shy away from daily driver (temporarily, i wish), reason what i call flipping frames bug. practically all o.s.'s and u.i.'s are affected. i don't know about pinephone pro, which also uses mali gpu chip. pp pro lima driver may have same bug but it's still slightly different gpu.
 
if device just randomly crashes within a day, it is just intolerable to me.

https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/issues/805
https://gitlab.com/mobian1/issues/-/issues/460

That one surely is annoying, and I have run into it on postmarketOS 22.06 (which I currently daily drive), too - but fortunately not to often (at most twice a week, but I've also gone through weeks without running into this bug) and only in active use, meaning I could then act and did not run into the really bad "the phone is non-operational, but I don't know about it" situation.

Please note: While I don't recommend daily-driving the PinePhone Pro at this point (short battery life, still early state of hardware enablement), it definitely won't be affected by bugs in the lima driver (and. While it also uses ARM Mali graphics, the PinePhone Pro's GPU is supported by the panfrost driver, so it's definitely not affected by this.

[drh]

I was using the original Pinephone (with Mobian) for daily use. I am forced to stop because of an update (about a week ago) resulted inability to make calls or texts. I have a Pinephone Pro but that did not work either. So, I am using a dumb phone as my daily driver, which I like a lot, and the pinephone as a media player and internet device. I hope to return to using Pinephone as a daily driver someday.

[user641]

I was using the original Pinephone (with Mobian) for daily use. I am forced to stop because of an update (about a week ago) resulted inability to make calls or texts. I have a Pinephone Pro but that did not work either. So, I am using a dumb phone as my daily driver, which I like a lot, and the pinephone as a media player and internet device. I hope to return to using Pinephone as a daily driver someday.

I had similar problems with mobian, now on arch everyhthing is working and much more stable

[zetabeta]

i put it here instead of separate thread.

i mostly likely have to shy away from daily driver (temporarily, i wish), reason what i call flipping frames bug. practically all o.s.'s and u.i.'s are affected. i don't know about pinephone pro, which also uses mali gpu chip. pp pro lima driver may have same bug but it's still slightly different gpu.
 
if device just randomly crashes within a day, it is just intolerable to me.

https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/issues/805
https://gitlab.com/mobian1/issues/-/issues/460

edit: typos

saying as intermediary point, definitely not final.

this bug can be avoided with 95% certainty with following.

Code:

## this could be a battery waster!

## one time
$ echo -1 >/sys/devices/platform/soc/1c40000.gpu/power/autosuspend_delay_ms
## as a udev file, like "/lib/udev/rules.d/98-flipbug.rules"
KERNEL=="1c40000.gpu", SUBSYSTEM=="platform", DRIVER=="lima", ATTR{power/autosuspend_delay_ms}="-1"
## you could try this if concerned about battery life
KERNEL=="1c40000.gpu", SUBSYSTEM=="platform", DRIVER=="lima", ATTR{power/autosuspend_delay_ms}="5000"

however, i think some fishy is going on because this bug has happened with above. definately makes bug more rare. so, i will give more informaton when i find out. one theory is frequency change, as a addition to sleep, frequency change may jam the gpu. suggestion: fix gpu frequency to 120000000, 3120000000 or 432000000.

[Rob_F]

I was using the original Pinephone (with Mobian) for daily use. I am forced to stop because of an update (about a week ago) resulted inability to make calls or texts. I have a Pinephone Pro but that did not work either. So, I am using a dumb phone as my daily driver, which I like a lot, and the pinephone as a media player and internet device. I hope to return to using Pinephone as a daily driver someday.

I'm in the same situation. Just a friendly tip - if you use the image released in September and do a few extra steps the phone works fine. You have to patch glib to resolve some crashes and I personally built chatty and gnome-calls from the latest source code. Obviously, updating afterward will break this; so if the very latest patches are a must for you this advice won't help much.

What I am using now has all major features working and reliably receives and sends calls. It seems the secret is to build those two core apps from the latest source code.

[Chief]

i put it here instead of separate thread.

i mostly likely have to shy away from daily driver (temporarily, i wish), reason what i call flipping frames bug. practically all o.s.'s and u.i.'s are affected. i don't know about pinephone pro, which also uses mali gpu chip. pp pro lima driver may have same bug but it's still slightly different gpu.
 
if device just randomly crashes within a day, it is just intolerable to me.

https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/issues/805
https://gitlab.com/mobian1/issues/-/issues/460

edit: typos

The daily driver routine for me as well is off. I have noted several problems including Evolution crash in Arch Phosh. My observations at this point are that Postmarket Plasma still work well except the typical Plasma HDMI issues from time to time. Also I'm testing Postmarket Phosh and so far it appears OK. Since the Plasma shell appears to be unaffected I'm guessin' that it's a Phosh related issue. Perhaps Phosh that deals with PureOS has made some changes?

[zetabeta]

for that earlier post about flipping frames bug. i found workaround and also some new issues.

example of this flipping frames bug.
https://barrelmem.s3.eu-north-1.amazonaw...232537.mp4

i have reach some kind of conclusion for this flipping frames bug.

bug is in at least two parts, practically all pinephone regular distributions and user interfaces are affected if kernel is recent enough.

recently i tested mobian with 6.1 kernel.

for powersaving part, which can be avoided by the following:

Code:

# udev rule, could be a battery waster
KERNEL=="1c40000.gpu", SUBSYSTEM=="platform", DRIVER=="lima", ATTR{power/autosuspend_delay_ms}="-1"
KERNEL=="1c40000.gpu", SUBSYSTEM=="platform", DRIVER=="lima", ATTR{power/control}="on"

for frequency part, i found near perfect replication and it affects only 1.2a hardware, it can be avoided by following:

Code:

# udev rule
KERNEL=="1c40000.gpu", SUBSYSTEM=="devfreq", ATTR{min_freq}="432000000"
KERNEL=="1c40000.gpu", SUBSYSTEM=="devfreq", ATTR{max_freq}="432000000"

hardware version 1.2b is not affected by frequency part of flipping frames bug. so, i suspect that my (other) pinephone is faulty or 1.2a hardware version has flaws.

https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmaports...1222213132

most likely same bug:
https://salsa.debian.org/Mobian-team/dev.../issues/65

finally my question, is there hardware flaws in 1.2a version in gpu frequency change? is there gpu frequency flaws in newer phones, practically 1.2b.

[britelite]

1. No. I kind of knew this might be an issue going in, as the camera quality is only so good, but I thought maybe a camera module hardware upgrade might have become available (I don't think this was ever promised but I perhaps thought it seemed like a natural thing that might be possible), but that never happened, so I always expected just for "quality" pictures I would need something else.

But instead it has been other deal breakers that have seemed to make it have less usability:

initially poor battery (seems to have improved a bit?) in spite of having a lot more capacity than android phones which last a long time in suspend (I have considered fixing this by attaching yet another bulky power bank to it, but kind of just gave up)

the inability to transfer files besides an awkward workaround of pulling out a microsd card (I couldn't figure out proposed SSH or syncthing or other solutions, although they apparently work for others - I think this is solvable but I saw even a recent post where someone was struggling with it and I couldn't follow along with their solution. This was a major use case functionality failure, as I wanted to type things up and transfer them over off the Pinephone and was unable to do so - I had expected I could just plug the device in to a computer or a usb stick to transfer files back and forth);

and HDMI out didn't work for convergence so using the device as a desktop didn't work either (this might be fixable or depend on distro, but it seemed complicated if not otherwise).

Recently I have looked in to trying to install waydroid or remote desktop in to the device with more problems presenting themselves (waydroid may have had bugs and may work now; remote desktop might work too but I followed instructions I found and it did not work).

I guess I did expect hurdles, but some of these seemed excessive and I think maybe software development momentum dropped off more than expected? There are also multiple Pine64 hardware projects going on at the same time, so I don't know if that has diluted progress? I didn't really want to use it as a "phone" even, but more like an underpowered mini laptop.

2. (skip) 3. (skip) 4. Didn't figure out grayscale display yet but I think it probably is doable.

5. Another issue is persistently keeping the on screen keyboard away, I think there is a workaround available.

6. I saw someone made a backlight for the keyboard which I think is a good idea. A nub or trackball or some kind of mouse is also desired for my use case, but I haven't made it yet. A second edition of keyboard with these features and even more battery maybe might be nice; I wonder if a Pinephone 2 has been considered, but probably not yet given the Pinephone Pro not being as functional yet?

If anyone has any solutions or suggestions I am willing to work to remedy some of these issues and would like to do more in the new year with the Pinephone - I think it is a great experiment and seed planted to reap a better mobile future

My main idiosyncratic unique use case I came up with for the Pinephone, was to use it as a handheld gaming device, but a lot of the emulators were broken so I only got a few games working (but did still get some of them to work), since with the external keyboard it has tactile buttons and the feel of a gaming device

[zetabeta]

1. No. I kind of knew this might be an issue going in, as the camera quality is only so good, but I thought maybe a camera module hardware upgrade might have become available (I don't think this was ever promised but I perhaps thought it seemed like a natural thing that might be possible), but that never happened, so I always expected just for "quality" pictures I would need something else.

camera is bad, i dont't know pinephone pro though. still, it takes raw images, which is good educational thing. hint "rawtherapee".

But instead it has been other deal breakers that have seemed to make it have less usability:

initially poor battery (seems to have improved a bit?) in spite of having a lot more capacity than android phones which last a long time in suspend (I have considered fixing this by attaching yet another bulky power bank to it, but kind of just gave up)

generic android seems to have 5000 mAh battery, and pinephone has ~3000mAh, 5000 tells a hint that battery probably should be bigger in pinephone. although android's power efficiency is better generally speaking.

the inability to transfer files besides an awkward workaround of pulling out a microsd card (I couldn't figure out proposed SSH or syncthing or other solutions, although they apparently work for others - I think this is solvable but I saw even a recent post where someone was struggling with it and I couldn't follow along with their solution. This was a major use case functionality failure, as I wanted to type things up and transfer them over off the Pinephone and was unable to do so - I had expected I could just plug the device in to a computer or a usb stick to transfer files back and forth);

SFTP and SSH work. but may pose some security issues. i use public IP numbers, so it might give access to unwanted attackers if security is lax. however, it sound you want something easier than sftp, maybe MTP protocol as a host. but i don't know any software at the moment.

and HDMI out didn't work for convergence so using the device as a desktop didn't work either (this might be fixable or depend on distro, but it seemed complicated if not otherwise).

usb dongle works for me, although in phosh and not so much in plasma.

Recently I have looked in to trying to install waydroid or remote desktop in to the device with more problems presenting themselves (waydroid may have had bugs and may work now; remote desktop might work too but I followed instructions I found and it did not work).

is "wayvnc" what you are looking for.

I guess I did expect hurdles, but some of these seemed excessive and I think maybe software development momentum dropped off more than expected? There are also multiple Pine64 hardware projects going on at the same time, so I don't know if that has diluted progress? I didn't really want to use it as a "phone" even, but more like an underpowered mini laptop.

2. (skip) 3. (skip) 4. Didn't figure out grayscale display yet but I think it probably is doable.

5. Another issue is persistently keeping the on screen keyboard away, I think there is a workaround available.

6. I saw someone made a backlight for the keyboard which I think is a good idea. A nub or trackball or some kind of mouse is also desired for my use case, but I haven't made it yet. A second edition of keyboard with these features and even more battery maybe might be nice; I wonder if a Pinephone 2 has been considered, but probably not yet given the Pinephone Pro not being as functional yet?

If anyone has any solutions or suggestions I am willing to work to remedy some of these issues and would like to do more in the new year with the Pinephone - I think it is a great experiment and seed planted to reap a better mobile future

My main idiosyncratic unique use case I came up with for the Pinephone, was to use it as a handheld gaming device, but a lot of the emulators were broken so I only got a few games working (but did still get some of them to work), since with the external keyboard it has tactile buttons and the feel of a gaming device

when i went on pinephone train, i expected lot of smaller issues and buggy software. however, this flipping frames bug is a low-level bug and should be more trivial to fix, but behind this bug might be possible hardware issues. if flipping frames bug is in final stable version, i cannot recommend pinephone as a daily driver for anyone, novice and pro users alike.

[alaraajavamma]

Thanks! Your findings are true.
Flipping frame bug is on all OS's but your idea will prevent it in most scenarios.
I did break my installation countless times because upgrade did do "flipping frames" and that did corrupt whole image.
Now I can upgrade and use PP a little more carefree