05-10-2021, 02:33 AM
(05-09-2021, 03:00 PM)jro Wrote: I have been owning a pinephone now for almost a year, but it still is something that lies around most of the time, while for any real world use, I regularly catch myself falling back to my android (LineageOS) device. I wonder how much is can be blamed on the current state of the software and how much on the quite modest hardware, the pinephone is equipped with. For instance: When I tap the geary icon, it takes around 30 seconds (estimated) for the window to show up and several minutes for it to finish checking the various IMAP accounts. K-9 on Android comples the same tasks in seconds, but also Geary on the desktop is much much faster. I suspect that on the Librem5 it also will be faster than on the Pinephone.
But maybe I simply haven't found the right setup yet to get an enjoyable experience out of the pinephone, so I thought I should do a mini survey among those who do use it as a real phone:
So these would be my questions, any answers and comment would be hugely appreciated:
- Do you use the Pinephone as your daily driver?
- If yes: What distribution do you use?
- Which desktop environment/interface do you use?
- Does the interface offer the basic functionality you need or is something missing?
- Have you been able to add the missing functionality through third party applications or customisations?
- Which customisations did you apply to make the pinephone meet your expectations towards a daily driver?
1: mostly yes, i have lineageos (phone) as a spare without googoo corporation's closed source stuff. in android world, it's difficult to find cleaned android with recent security updates.
2: mostly mobian, but i have started to think that manjaro is better.
3: phosh. i have tested some others for fun.
4: yes. but apps may be desktop apps, meaning, mouse interface could be better.
5: some/many things are missing. however if basic calls and texts work, then i could throw that goodroid somewhere which is nastier than blackhole. i call it a victory. i do not trust goodroid anymore. even though technically speaking basis of goodroid is open source, it is too much locked to goo services like goo play services. development of goodroid is too closed as well.
6: technically speaking none. i don't use suspend/sleep. pinephone is battery power waster. no automatic updates though, that requires some tweaks.
before pinephone, i had a plan to go totally off from android and ios devices. basically taking technical basic phone. if those even exist because in technical basic phone, i mean only calls and text wtthout packet data. kaios is not basic phone os and for others similar argument. usability may be basic but the os may be not.
although, because dismantling of umts networks, lte-voice is practically required in the future. relying on gsm networks sound like a bad plan. and i have bad feeling that even gsm networks will be out quite soon. i was surprised that volte works in pinephone which is a serious advantage.