08-14-2022, 05:39 PM
Pine and the distro makers have unfortunately "jumped the shark"
by trying to offer phones that might someday be competitive with Android/iOS i.e.
fast, responsive, good for gaming, amazing camera etc.
But this is not really what a Linux user wants. A Linux user wants different things from
the majority of users.
He wants:
1. to tinker first and foremost, configuring the phone in novel ways, starting with a functional phone not one with broken software;
2. to achieve privacy, and feel assured his data won't be exfiltrated to "the cloud", and use apps like Signal for Internet calling;
3. to write code for the phone, maybe write code on the phone itself.
But to gain adoption by Linux users the phone has to be able to
1. make calls reliably,
2. do SMS reliabily
3. and charge normally.
These 3 things should have been the top priority of Pine and the distro makers, but seem to have not been.
The distro makers apparently want to provide a nearly identical
experience and feature set to mainstream phone OSes (why?), and they have
loaded their GUIs down with bloated/slow software, rather than writing lean and fast
code using the bare bones approach e.g. with Xlib alone.
It is no big surprise that phones feel slow when they are using
KDE plasma or Python apps.
Pine for its part has failed to provide the basic hardware setup of a phone that:
A. charges normally without having to ever take out the battery;
B. has an EEPROM to store calibration data. They don't perform camera calibration at the factory
like ever other phone maker does, which means the camera
will never be calibrated because that can't be done at home.
In short, the Pine phones are a misfire, not conceived with the customers' needs in mind,
with bad distros brought by organizations not committed to the task and instead
committed to the wrong goals.
by trying to offer phones that might someday be competitive with Android/iOS i.e.
fast, responsive, good for gaming, amazing camera etc.
But this is not really what a Linux user wants. A Linux user wants different things from
the majority of users.
He wants:
1. to tinker first and foremost, configuring the phone in novel ways, starting with a functional phone not one with broken software;
2. to achieve privacy, and feel assured his data won't be exfiltrated to "the cloud", and use apps like Signal for Internet calling;
3. to write code for the phone, maybe write code on the phone itself.
But to gain adoption by Linux users the phone has to be able to
1. make calls reliably,
2. do SMS reliabily
3. and charge normally.
These 3 things should have been the top priority of Pine and the distro makers, but seem to have not been.
The distro makers apparently want to provide a nearly identical
experience and feature set to mainstream phone OSes (why?), and they have
loaded their GUIs down with bloated/slow software, rather than writing lean and fast
code using the bare bones approach e.g. with Xlib alone.
It is no big surprise that phones feel slow when they are using
KDE plasma or Python apps.
Pine for its part has failed to provide the basic hardware setup of a phone that:
A. charges normally without having to ever take out the battery;
B. has an EEPROM to store calibration data. They don't perform camera calibration at the factory
like ever other phone maker does, which means the camera
will never be calibrated because that can't be done at home.
In short, the Pine phones are a misfire, not conceived with the customers' needs in mind,
with bad distros brought by organizations not committed to the task and instead
committed to the wrong goals.
