Are PinePhones Becoming More Usable On Each Release . . .

[NobodyNew1]

Arch OS  October 24 release shows promise...

I am using the hot spot on my PMOS Convergence phone running Arch on sd card, to write this post.

Talk & text is working both incoming and outgoing, wifi, and data.

It was not so good last time I tried it,  but this release does look pretty good.

        

I just received my phone, so I'll be going through OS's on a SD Card.  Is the the latest Arch release you're using ?

[bcnaz]

It was the most recent at that time, I have not checked in the last few days.

[aritual]

My thoughts on the latest Mobian nightly are that it's fast, stable, and reasonably complete. In general the included applications did what they were supposed to. I was able to install privacy badger into firefox. Etc.  

I did not bother testing mobile data or calling, as they're not currently on my radar.

Main issue is the alarm on the clocks app doesn't fire on time (you had one job etc etc.) Didn't test yet with the phone set to prevent sleeping (whatever power management is being implemented by the toggle in settings) but it may be as simple as that.

Baobab is small but functional in landscape mode.

Battery life is surprisingly good, watching the processes via htop over ssh while using the phone, you see things nicely fall back to a quiet idle state (a lot of stuff running simultaneously but getting out of the way) when you load apps, switch apps, and exit apps. 

I recently enabled 'metered connection' on my wifi to reduce extraneous processing / traffic and disabled 'suspend after idle for x time' to permit continuous access via ssh, and am working on getting the hardware to be as quiet and idle as possible with the screen off...

---

EDIT: the following is mostly an aside of how much CPU / battery is wasted trying to emulate an android or apple mobile user environment

I found a bash script here on the forums for the pinebook, here's what I'm using  (wedged in what I found in the python "powersupply" program for the correct file locations) to remotely monitor battery voltage, load, cpu etc (in addition to htop, if using instead of htop then "$ watch -n 2 ./status.sh" helps):

                                                                                               

Code:

#!/bin/bash


a53=$(cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq | awk '{print $1 / 1000000}')
#a72=$(cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu4/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq | awk '{print $1 / 1000000}')
cpu=$(cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp)
load=$(cat /proc/loadavg | awk '{print $1}')
read -a load < /proc/loadavg
load_avg=${load[@]:0:3}

#gpuf=$(cat /sys/devices/platform/ff9a0000.gpu/devfreq/ff9a0000.gpu/cur_freq | awk '{print $1 / 1000000}')
#gpu=$(cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone1/temp)

batt=$(cat /sys/class/power_supply/axp20x-battery/voltage_now)
dis=$(cat /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio\:device0/in_current2_raw)
power=$(($batt * $dis))
i0=$((1000000000))
watt=$(echo $power $i0 | awk '{printf "%4.3f\n",$1/$2}')
i1=$((1000000))
battery=$(echo $batt $i1 | awk '{printf "%4.3f\n",$1/$2}')



#echo Load Average '>' ${load}
echo Load Average '>' ${load_avg}
echo CPU temperature '>' ${cpu::2}C
#echo GPU temperature '>' ${gpu::2}C
echo A53 Little frequency '>' ${a53}Ghz
#echo A72 Big frequency '>' ${a72}Ghz
#echo GPU frequency '>' ${gpuf}Mhz
echo Battery Voltage '>' ${battery}VDC
echo Watt discharge '>' ${watt}W
echo ""
top 1 -bn1 | head -10

                                                                                                 

Personally I'm not digging how much is preinstalled by default with no clear way to choose alternatives (ie none is a valid user choice / acceptable alternative), manage currently installed apps (the software center hides many installed aspects as "OS" which makes me want to smash my hardware with a hammer), control startup and scheduled tasks, etc (every distro is different, but I'm looking forward to starting with debian minimal in the near future) in an attempt to give the appearance of a usable phone so I've been experimenting with terminating, disabling, and uninstalling unnecessary things (automatic updates being the very first thing brutally slaughtered with no remorse...)  My main use case is a tiny tablet, might stand the modem up some day.

ModemManager and pinephone-modem-setup.sh need to chill tf out considering I have the hardware switch set to off, thankfully systemctl was able to tame them and masking both doesn't seem to cause any issues with phosh / debian. Also disabled gnome-software, fwupd, update timers for those two, bluetooth, and a pile of other stuff I'll never use.

Looks with those unoptimized services disabled, the battery draw is a miminum with a little intentional handling of the hardware: the load average is basically nil (<0.02) so phosh and debian are certainly staying quiet nicely! Hope to see an appropriate increase in standby (ssh connection active but idle) time out of the battery. It seems most apps just assume a pretty aggressive "I'm always in the foreground" situation, based on watching htop while the phone sleeps. The mobian wiki has a great page linked describing accessing the modem, I imagine the modem will be an endless source of "power consumption sadness" without some kind of strict rationing and clear UI control of mobile data access and usage.

Don't forget to close apps when you're done using them, I guess is the moral of that story.

The mobian wiki has a nicely researched page on power management issues going forward, but it doesn't have much about how mobian/debian/phosh are currently starting / monitoring tasks: https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php...management