KDE community edition, first feedback
#1
Hello,

it's my first post on this forum, so let me say hello first and quickly say that I'm a developer, libre software enthusiast, and XMPP developer (I'm working on a multi-frontends XMPP client, not focusing only on instant messaging but also on blogging, events, photo albums, etc, it's named "Libervia", formerly "Salut à Toi").

I've just received my PinePhone KDE edition, and I've started to play with it.

First of all a big congratulation both for the hardware and the software, I'm really impressed by what has been achieved ! I've had in the past on OpenMoko and a Nokia N900, and I can appreciate the achievement. I have not put yet any SIM card, but it's already great as a portable GNU/Linux device.

The pre-installed Plasma-mobile was not usable because it was not possible to quit/change the application (for whatever reason I had not the button on the bottom to do it). Each time I wanted to quit an application which had no quit menu, I had to reboot the device !

I've managed to update with discover, it took some time (I was wondering if it didn't crash, on reboot it stayed a while on the installation message), it would be nice to have some trace to see what's happening.

After the update, the Plasma mobile is really usable, and I can exit or switch apps normally. I'm a long term KDE user, and it's really great to see that on a phone, with the sound I'm used to and all, really neat. In addition it's quite beautiful.

The device works quite OK at this stage of development, it's absolutely usable, the browser is relatively fluid, for my first tests it's great. Again congrats to everybody involved in hardware or software, I'm really impressed !

I've tried the convergence (I took the convergence package), this one did not work as expected: not working with hotplug, and when I boot with it it is detected but I have only a black screen with the mouse pointer on it, I can't do anything. If I don't plug the monitor, the keyboard and mouse are working.

It's great to have the terminal available directly. Is it possible to do a Ctrl key with the virtual keyboard ? I would like at least to be able to to a Ctrl-C when I need to kill an app, and I haven't found how to do so far.

For the record, I've bought this device mainly to port my XMPP client on the various FOSS OSes, if anybody is interested in a XMPP client…
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#2
Thanks on porting XMPP client to PinePhone. Thumbs Up!
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#3
Just got mine.

1. unboxed.
1.5. removed tape from battery, put SIM in carrier, inserted into correct slot.
2. turned on.
3. saw battery was almost dead, plugged in.
4. configured wifi.
5. updated via Discover
6. rebooted at prompting by Discover.
7. Modem did not wake up after update, rebooted again.
8. Tested:
a. outgoing calls: SUCCESS
b. outgoing SMS: SUCCESS

NOT working yet:
i. Mobile data (modem and access point info is populated under cellular networks, even tried using the step to populate the DNS servers via ofono). Angelfish complains about lack of name resolution.
ii. GPS. Touching the "location" item in the pulldown menu does nothing, and the Weather app couldn't geolocate me.


Haven't tested anything else. May eventually put Mobian + phosh on, just to see if it fares any better.

I intend to make this a daily driver, and my use case is very simple: inbound and outbound calls and SMS, and the occasional website access, and possibly playing some music via a bluetooth speaker, probably via the Pandora website.


EDIT: Tested headset for streaming audio from Pandora website. Internal speakers were unjustifiably quiet, and headset was muted. Until I opened the audio settings and tweaked them. Now they're acceptable.
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