Are you using the Pinephone as your daily driver?

[zetabeta]

@zetabeta : Thank you very much for your tipps and hints!

...but sadly my backup phone (the one with the boot problem) now ALSO starts freezing (I used it while tried to figure out how I could make console output visible on screen while booting), so I'm afraid working on the boot problem would be another waste of time.  

My primary phone (which worked so well over the last year) now freezes about every 5-10 minutes if really used. That's of course no longer bearable.
I hate to say that as an former fanboy, but I think the PinePhone hardware is sadly just... really bad. Quality-wise. Or it's some kind of lottery if you get something that works or garbage. I don't see any other explanation for this fast sudden downward trend in stability on BOTH of my devices except low quality hardware.

Perhaps I could get a Librem 5 for a few hundred bucks on ebay (paying 1299$ AND wait 52 weeks for a new one is errrr... )... -> Does anybody know how stable and usable the Librem 5 is today?
Or does one know a good online review which is maximum a few months old? (All the old 'launch reviews' I find online are of course not relevant in 2023 for a device like the Librem 5). I would be grateful for every hint/link about this...
These days I really need a smartphone which overall/most of the time really works (as my PP did last year) and is usable (and I don't want to enter the invasive Google/Apple world which I managed to avoid for my whole life so far).

5-10 minutes! sound awfully same than this, but for modem chip. these make me wonder.
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=17833

btw this is my first pinephone, where touchscreen got broken. someone reported something similar on matrix channel. however, i think it was heating in that time when using mobian.
https://barrelmem.s3.eu-north-1.amazonaw...164904.jpg

i comment more later, but for google account. i have owned 5 androids and when my first android  started asking google account or creating one, i became suspicious. of course i created separate account with fake info, but that was the moment which didn't feel that fun anymore. shortly, those five android lead to the pinephone.

[dante404]

5-10 minutes! sound awfully same than this, but for modem chip. these make me wonder.
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=17833

btw this is my first pinephone, where touchscreen got broken. someone reported something similar on matrix channel. however, i think it was heating in that time when using mobian.
https://barrelmem.s3.eu-north-1.amazonaw...164904.jpg

i comment more later, but for google account. i have owned 5 androids and when my first android  started asking google account or creating one, i became suspicious. of course i created separate account with fake info, but that was the moment which didn't feel that fun anymore. shortly, those five android lead to the pinephone.

Uh... that display damage looks really wierd!

The modem on my main phone also wents offline very very often (since a few weeks), but since it comes back online about 30(?) seconds later - and all the other current problems mentioned in my last posts are waaaaay more critical - I just lived with it so far. Bizarre how the usability of this little thing changed in only a few weeks, from "It may not be perfect but I still love it!" to "I just want to smash it with a hammer...".
Ironic: My first PinePhone was a useless toy when I get it (but I didn't really expect much at this point/time), then the software matured and it became usable and then better and better... and now it has reached the state 'useless' again (which I personally blame the hardware for, NOT the software provided by the community!!!). Circle of life lol.

Android is not an option for me too. If there really is no usable Linux smartphone currently on the market, I'd rather get a new dumb/feature phone (or just use my years old LG Fx0 with FirefoxOS - it still works as a phone, camera and alarm clock without problems) and another portable Linux device for Internet (subnotebook or something like that) than an Android device.

[zetabeta]

My primary phone (which worked so well over the last year) now freezes about every 5-10 minutes if really used. That's of course no longer bearable.
I hate to say that as an former fanboy, but I think the PinePhone hardware is sadly just... really bad. Quality-wise. Or it's some kind of lottery if you get something that works or garbage. I don't see any other explanation for this fast sudden downward trend in stability on BOTH of my devices except low quality hardware.

Perhaps I could get a Librem 5 for a few hundred bucks on ebay (paying 1299$ AND wait 52 weeks for a new one is errrr... )... -> Does anybody know how stable and usable the Librem 5 is today?
Or does one know a good online review which is maximum a few months old? (All the old 'launch reviews' I find online are of course not relevant in 2023 for a device like the Librem 5). I would be grateful for every hint/link about this...
These days I really need a smartphone which overall/most of the time really works (as my PP did last year) and is usable (and I don't want to enter the invasive Google/Apple world which I managed to avoid for my whole life so far).

of course, i haven't bought, tested or own a librem 5. so my comment is what it is.

i learned in the i.t. world that what is more expensive is not necessarily better. librem 5 might be one of those. it's not necessarily better quality, let alone the software. although i like some design decisions in librem 5. at this point i would not recommend librem 5.

this reminds me of netgear m2. which i nicknamed as "buffooner". it is supposed to be router, but it buffoons with users all time, like crashing and jamming the touchscreen. point being that m2 was pricey and end up to be worse than m1 router.

i don't know how tight budget you have. but i might go for third pinephone (regular), it is still relatively cheap and other options aren't easy either. sadly, you cannot use your previous pinephones as spare parts because malfunctions most likely occurs in mainboards.

possible explanation for those jams in 10 minutes. pinephone has bad habit to overheat and that tears down solderings in a mainboard. sooner or later some connections start to be unreliable and causes issues. those issues could be in a way that when cold, it works. when hot it does not. this is just one theory.

[dante404]

i don't know how tight budget you have. but i might go for third pinephone (regular), it is still relatively cheap and other options aren't easy either. sadly, you cannot use your previous pinephones as spare parts because malfunctions most likely occurs in mainboards.

possible explanation for those jams in 10 minutes. pinephone has bad habit to overheat and that tears down solderings in a mainboard. sooner or later some connections start to be unreliable and causes issues. those issues could be in a way that when cold, it works. when hot it does not. this is just one theory.

Thank you for your opinion!
It's very hard to find any statement/comment from a Librem 5 user online which is NOT 1-2 years old. Just as simply no one has this thing. Wierd. I guess I should not invest that much money on an experiment without more information.

My budget in this case would be about 500€ maximum (a "normal investment" for a smartphone would be 150-300€ - for me).

If I would KNOW for sure that I would get a good PinePhone (regular) or "win the PinePhone-Lottery" this time, and that it would work for 1,5-2 years minimum, probably I would buy a third one because of missing other options (even if buying the same phone 3 times in less than 2 years really hurts/feels totally stupid AND is not very ecological), but I'm afraid I could get another bad device. And I often read here on the forums that the support of Pine64 was sometimes problematic if you want to return/refund/replace something...    ...or am I wrong on this part?

I would absolutely spend additional 100€ to definitely get a PinePhone with hardware guranteed in really good condition (something like a "selected device" which was in fact really tested in-depth by a skilled Pine64 technician for chip quality, soldering point quality, ... and graded as "A+"? ) ... but we don't have this option of course.

I really love what the PinePhone has started/influenced in the Linux world on the software side (and it's great that the hardware is documented that good, could be disassembled, etc.), but it's sad that we as comsumers don't have an option to run a real Linux distro like Mobian on hardware which has the quality/stability/durability/reliability... (NOT talking about performance here! That's secondary for me) of a regular smartphone from such companies like LG. Personal budget is not even relevant here, as such devices just don't exist on this planet.

PS: Yes, Netgear products are really not what they used to be years ago... I bought Netgear business devices very often in the past without concerns, but I no longer do (without concerns I mean).

[Kevin Kofler]

5-10 minutes! sound awfully same than this, but for modem chip. these make me wonder.
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=17833

I do not think this is related. I am also seeing frequent wholesale crashes now, but I did not when the modem started misbehaving, only the modem was wrong back then. I think the frequent CPU/GPU crashes are a regression from recent software updates, not a hardware issue. I have seen several reports of this, and as I said I am seeing it myself too. It apparently hits several distributions, but they are all using basically the same kernel and userspace and picking up updates frequently. My main suspect would be the kernel/mesa direct rendering (DRI/DRM) stack for the hardware's GPU (SoC IGP), since I have also had individual applications crash at times with the backtrace pointing to sun4i-drm_dri.so, and since the graphics driver can also cause the whole UI to crash or even the kernel to panic.

[dante404]

I think the frequent CPU/GPU crashes are a regression from recent software updates, not a hardware issue. I have seen several reports of this, and as I said I am seeing it myself too.

That's interesting! I was absolutely sure that it is an hardware issue because AFAIK there were no other (actual) reports about an MASSIVE increase in crashes/freezes here on the forum (which I would have expected if an update caused them)!
If it IS really an software issue caused by an update, that would explain why my nearly unused backup phone is also affected. Still not sure though...
Where did you see those reports? Reddit? Other social media platforms?

[zetabeta]

I think the frequent CPU/GPU crashes are a regression from recent software updates, not a hardware issue. I have seen several reports of this, and as I said I am seeing it myself too.

That's interesting! I was absolutely sure that it is an hardware issue because AFAIK there were no other (actual) reports about an MASSIVE increase in crashes/freezes here on the forum (which I would have expected if an update caused them)!
If it IS really an software issue caused by an update, that would explain why my nearly unused backup phone is also affected. Still not sure though...
Where did you see those reports? Reddit? Other social media platforms?

i have managed to avoid total jams, at least mostly (linux kernel is not responding, like ssh). i hope that there is no device differences, i mean other devices have it and others don't. such would raise questions about hardware, even it might be avoidable by software or drivers.

[dante404]

i have managed to avoid total jams, at least mostly

Lucky you!
But I guess this has also something to do with your flipping frames bug workarounds (at least partly)?
( https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=17771 )
I did no such stuff yet, because I never had much crashes (one crash in a few weeks was not a problem for me), and when the crashes/freezes every few minutes suddenly started I didn't really thought about this bug I've read about here in the forum (because AFAIK it's not a new bug but my problem was definitly new for me - so I never saw a real connection between those two things).
(Of course it could be possible in theory that an update changed some behaviour that makes the flipping frames bug happen significantly more often...?  )

[zetabeta]

btw, my back cover! although it's just plastic.

[Kevin Kofler]

That's interesting! I was absolutely sure that it is an hardware issue because AFAIK there were no other (actual) reports about an MASSIVE increase in crashes/freezes here on the forum (which I would have expected if an update caused them)!
If it IS really an software issue caused by an update, that would explain why my nearly unused backup phone is also affected. Still not sure though...
Where did you see those reports? Reddit? Other social media platforms?

The recent crash reports I see on this forum alone:

• crash on wakeup: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=17618&pid=115102#pid115102, https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=17618&pid=115102#pid115102, also seen myself (not every time, but often),
  
• crash during use: your reports, and this just has just come in: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=17879. There may be more that I cannot find right now. But I am also seeing this (though my hardware must be broken to some extent because the modem is not working properly). Note: The linked post also complains about broken battery charging, but at least that is an issue I thankfully cannot reproduce! The crashes, on the other hand, I can.