Support my content! Get Merch! - shop.thelinuxcast.org 0:00 Intro 0:43 First Look and Lowering Expectations 1:47 The Hardware 3:58 Battery Life 6:20 The Software 8:58 Customizing the Home Screen...Yikes! Bugs! 10:46 Crashes 11:17 Overall Usage of the Software 12:06 Problems with the Camera 12:50 Is it Good as a Phone? 13:09 More Crashes...This time LIVE! 14:03 Back to the Phone as a Phone 15:30 Time for some Optomism 16:19 Manjaro as a Phone OS? 19:22 A Matter of Expectations 21:40 The Next Steps 22:23 Goodbyes
12:18 Even if that's the case, the expected behavior should be: the app loads completely, detects the camera is disabled, warns the user that the camera switch is off. At least that's what I'd expect as good app behavior, instead of just endless loading.
@@softwarelivre2389 I had an Ubuntu phone a few years ago, it was a nice device and very usable (after I learnt that `apt-get update && apt-get upgrade ` is a bad idea). Convergence didn't work though, but "probably next year" or so. The fact that it still doesn't work and that this phone seems a step back makes me think that Linux on phones is not feasible.
Linux on mobile has a promising future. But again it needs years and years of development at this point. Just like Android had a million bugs in the gingerbread era, Linux mobile will have the same. I just hope that developers don't abandon this project all together.
@@biomorphicthey share a kernel but that's about it, Android is pretty much a whole set apart as far as user-space it goes so it is only fair to not consider it just another linux distribution
it's a neat idea, but it lacks incentive to build an actual ecosystem imho.. for enthusiasts it is definitely a viable platform, I just don't see how this will ever reach regular users
@@biomorphicAndroid shares very little with standard desktop distros. Sure, it shares a kernel, albeit modified. Locks you out of superuser permissions, has an entirely different userspace, including the graphics stack and libc. Android is so different that developing for desktop Linux is closer to BSD than it is Android development. Hell, if you have a statically linked X11 app, FreeBSD will be able to run the same binary as desktop Linux but Android wouldn't, even if the CPU were the same architecture.
I have a Pine Phone, running it with Ubuntu Touch. I use it for basics, phone calls, texting, Email, and load up a map, when needed. I find It works better and uses less Battery with Ubuntu Touch.
can you tell us if the camera is any good? im thinking about getting one but i need a really good camera, like at least like iphone or pixel camera quality.
@@ISCARI0Tno its not very good, not even close to iphone and Pixel. I use a quality Canon Camera for taking photo's, no phone camera can even come close to this quality. You are paying for crap anyways.
@@sanderhaskins2740 yeah I'm not. I'm just developing random stuff. Megapixels 2.0 not only runs on the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro but also the Librem 5 and a handful of random phones I have around here.
I hope you get it, i really like the pinephone concept and want it to be a good alternative to apple and android. But why not just make your own fork of android tho? The best part imo is the physical hardware switches, your own version of android could have all the privacy respecting features you could possibly want tho. Why does it have to be linux?
Don't see as much coverage anymore of the PinePhone lately, this was a helpful update for it, thanks! Did a good job with the phone shot, but if you want to make it easier on yourself, could mount your camera/phone your filming with on a tripod. For phones, you can usually take the top off a cheap selfie stick, most I've found use a normal tripod thread, then just toss on a tripod.
Bad power management during suspend is basically always the fault of the drivers. When they don't properly put all the hardware to sleep, that internal hardware will draw current unnecessarily and deplete your battery. There's one other mechanism that might be a problem, and that is wake-up interrupts (e.g. from the modem). If the OS doesn't quickly put the device back to sleep (after handling whatever has happened), it will needlessly stay up wasting battery for prolonged periods of time. Windows laptops have a similar problem. You can sometimes find out that the device has woken up by itself to do an update (or worse yet: start indexing files, do Windows Defender stuff, etc.) and used up all of its battery. And Windows _does set_ timer interrupts to regularly wake up in contrast to most Linux OSes AFAIK.
The problem with the battery most likely stems from the fact that there's no proper support for it in the kernel for this SOC. This SOC is a modified version of one on Pinebook Pro (laptop) from the same company and there was downstream and old modified kernel that supports deep sleep, but the patch was not merged in all those years to upstream. In case of the mobile device the problem is worse, because you have 2 SOC inside basically - one for the whole device and one for the modem (which contains a separate Android installation by default, which is funny) and power management becomes even harder to do. There is a project to de-blob and open source the modem software, but it's a legal and technical minefield
Also it may be the case that you have outdated system on the device and I advise to read before trying to update it, otherwise you will risk bricking it. You can recover from that in the end, but it may be more painful than having the knowledge of how to proceed ahead of time. Updating the bootloader firmware may be required, also there's a modem firmware that's apparently good. The megapixels app may not work at all because the author dropped his focus and support of pine products. There was a string of controversies about their decision making Manjaro the default.
Hi! I had the unfortunate scenario of needing to daily drive the OG pinephone for a few months a few years ago! I still, so *very* badly, want to believe. I'm actually returning to school for a CS degree, hoping strongly I can contribute to projects like this at some point. I strongly believe that the linux mobile future IS out there. I did a lot of distro-hopping while I had it. Of all the distros I used, manjaro had the most issues. I have *no idea* why pine64 decided to go with Manjaro as their default OS, but here we are. My advice here is a few years out of date by now, but I had the best experience with Mobian - Debian's answer to linux mobile. I would recommend checking that out! Really happy somebody is taking a deep dive into the linux mobile-verse. Do you plan on making more mobile linux videos? Dropping a subscribe regardless. Thank you for the video!
As a mild Linux Phone tinkerer myself, I'd advise Phosh as a DE for stability and functionality. Gnome-Mobile for a peak into the future of what Linux mobile may be like soon, but expect the odd few more bugs (Though certainly not as many bugs as Plasma mobile). Good luck, I'd be interested to see a few reviews on the progress of different projects on Linux mobile (i.e. more recent GTK/QT adaptations, DE adaptations, etc).
What distro would you recommend? I had postmarkedOS, but alpine has so few arm packages that I think I’d be better of with another distro Maybe I go for arch next
@@foxonboard1 Much of the Linux mobile space is in its infancy, so regarding distro's with optimisations, you're kind of limited. I would say it depends on your favourite choice of package manager amongst other things. But most rely on the progress of PMOS to get their distro's to work on mobile.
I’ve seen several reviews of these devices, and you are the first one that actually talks about using it as an actual phone - and in the U.S. definitely good to know about the SIM card situation. Who did you use, btw? Thanks, looking forward to more of this.
Great Video! Thanks so much. I love how you explain this phone and dont go into weird Linux topics yet. You just look at it from a normal users perspective which is great.
Funny and curious... I was recommended by RU-vid to watch a video of the "brand new" postmarketOS running in a Pinephone... And you are releasing this video. Linux on mobile phones needs a lot of work and massive improvements. But I have faith about it. Someday it will be real. I hope to be alive to see that.
Agree, as someone who used to advocate for Android cuz of how bogged down iOS is, I'm really not seeing much of a difference anymore. Even considered giving Harmony OS a shot just to not have Android anymore, like I'm getting annoyed now with ads in my music player of all places 🤷♂️ so far Rhino OS has been giving me a "close to Linux" experience on pinephone, but it's still new and not "there yet" either, and I feel like pinephone's processing power is still sub-par, but they also made sure you know that it's a development effort, not a polished product. Unfortunately the operating systems for it isn't where it could be, but it's at least a step into the right direction, and I really do hope that we'll see some major developments over the next couple of years to make it as viable as we'd like for it to be
I think one of the main features of Pine phone is the physical switch to turn off the mic and the camera. As a privacy matter, those features are a highlight and probably the main reason a lot of people would even consider making the switch to this kind of hardware/os combo. After watching this, it occurs to me a Raspberry Pi with a text app, voip, small screen and wifi as data connection could perform a similar function. But once a battery is added this proposed device would be quite thick and bulky and not slim like a phone. It could certainly perform as a desktop replacement, however, if that is important.
I like your honesty, I like the revieww,, I like the coverage even going to details of implementation and distros, and your hypothesis. In a nutshell: you did a good job, and I will check other videos from you. Keep up the good work, at your pace.
I'm not so sure about a rolling release distro on a phone, especially Manjaro with KDE. The combo can be a handful, even on desktop. Maybe something based on Ubuntu LTS with a stripped down version of GNOME would be a better option. After all, GNOME's 40 series design already looks like it's being primarily developed for mobile and touch screen devices.
I tried mobian, but found I preferred Ubuntu touch on my device. Ubuntu touch has worse app availability (although you can still install general desktop apps with libertine) but otherwise feels much smoother on underpowered hardware and overall felt much more polished to me. The images are being actively developed by the maintainer for the Pine64 devices, better support for the hardware should be available very soon.
I’ve always been a KDE Plasma fan, and I can’t wait to see Plasma (and the underlying mobile Linux flavors) fully mature. Truly, Linux is the ultimate open source success story. Mobile is pretty much the final arena in terms of devices Linux distros support.
I like the idea of physical kill switches for the connectivity and location services, but those should be accessible without having to take the back case off. It's good to see progress being made on a Linux phone, but this shows that there is some distance yet to go. For now, I'll stick to a deGoogled Android.
Have you worked with Linux on ARM much? Not every Linux app can just run on ARM. Some apps have a something extra in the name for their ARM versions so installing through the terminal you would have to use the ARM name. Neofetch I believe works on ARM with the normal name so I’m not sure what issue you had.
IPhone and Android batch schedule access to the radios during sleep to increase battery life. This extends life by reducing the amount of time the radios are powered on during sleep.
Good to see a video with a phone that uses something other than Android. However, I have to use a phone on Android with CDMA and 4gLTE or 5g speed data.
You may give Movian a try, but I don't know, if it's very complete. If not - maybe something else will be better. I was hoping to see you explore some of the available apps - Calendar, ring alarm, battery and other system menus, maybe some messenger(s)...
I think Gnome on mobile could be somewhat successful, especially if a way to run Android apps in a sandbox can be made to work. A main case for this is for banking apps, etc. The reason for Gnome is that the interface of Gnome desktop/mobile from what I can see is similar enough to stock Android.
Google will try NOT to make this happen. They already trying to kill custom roms 'which are android' by encouraging to implement safety net,play integrity' into apps. Imagine what they would do for a different OS than Android...
2003?!? If I'm not mistaken, my very first Linux laptop was manufactured in 2003 (I got it in 2011 I think). That thing would only run Linux and Windows XP! Good times!! Lol
Interesting that you couldn't get Megapixels to run. It does on mine but the image is so bad you can barely recognize it. I'll be looking out for your future videos on this. Thanks and all the best for the rest of 2024!
Mobian was working pretty well for me with sometimes a few app scaling bugs but overall things worked(like the camera/calling/etc) but unfortunately the Mobian team stopped supporting the original Pinephone so now I'm trying to figure out where to start to switch to Ubuntu Touch or something.
I honestly like SXMO much more than manjaro. Daily drive the old OG pinephone for years (and have the keyboard addon). Having no other phone so its primary use daily without backup. Very productive tool for a programmer like me, but the keyboard addon is big selling point!
5:08 yeah, familiar, happened to me on my Linux laptop, I thought I've hibernated it and it should be ok, but apparently not... the battery was dead the next time I've tried to use it :)))
would you be interested in reviewing this device again with something like BlendOS or postmarketOS which run Gnome? I wonder about the UI compatibility of gtk apps. they're meant to be adjustable to mobile by default.
While i am very interested in the future of this project. In the world of termuxs on Android and phones that can dual boot windows 11 with Android, every day i feel there is less and less of a point for these kind of devices...
Why KDE can't just name camera application "Camera", why megapixel!? The naming issue might be toralable on Desktop to differentiate applications, but on a phone I doubt you would replace your camera app
Really good and popular Linux Mobile already exists, It's called Rooted Android Android runs on a Linux kernel, however with Normal Android phones, due to security reasons, they are locked, You don't have sudo access etc. , However with Rooted Android, you basically have a full on great Android Mobile Device with full access, so if you know what you are doing it is basically Linux
But TizenOS (from the Linux Foundation), like SailfishOS, are systems based in part on Fedora (and therefore use RPM), being quasi-natively compatible with Android applications. Why use ARM versions of distributions that are further behind in compatibility with smartphones? (I would understand if they at least worked with RISC-V.)
I'm actually daily using a Pixel3a on Droidian Phosh without waydroid. I'v begin on UbuntuTouch and was pretty good on Pixel3 but you need Waydroid a lot to do basic stuff. Will probably change for PostmarketOS Phosh if GPS and Camera are now suported. I'm pretty happy using Droidian those last months. The reason of change is that UBtouch and Droidian are not really completly android less so not really fully «Linux Phone» imo
Or early adapters device, Plasma Mobile is lovely it looks almost like Android, I like it more than Phosh. Mobian is one of the most stable releases then you could install plasma GUI via terminal. I have a spare keyboard it needs a small repair resoldering I think the seller said they replaced the USB c connector. Another crazy one is SXMO.
Esims sound awful. Why would I want to use a system that doesn't allow me to easily transfer it to a new phone or doesn't stay around if I do a factory reset...
i don't think there ready and its got along ways to go, but i love this idea of a phone and i hope that it ends up being worth it even if i gotta wait a few years,
I'm pessimistic as h*ck about this; I don't think Arch, let alone Manjaro, is ever going to be stable enough to deliver the stability required for a smartphone.
@@sergeykish Yeah but the Deck is an x86 device and doesn't sink or swim based on its touch controls and its ability to be on 24/7. Not to mention SteamOS having years of development and a lot of money behind it.
@@Seeker_of_F1r3 Its still Arch and nobody says that x86 mobile devices are forbidden. And honestly: Linux developer should start developing also for mobile devices and not just create the hundredth copy of a text editor, keyboard based tiling window manager or even complete distro with just preinstalled other things.
I hear you wanting to like it but everything you point out is either a dealbreaker or underwhelming. It doesn’t even sound like you had fun tinkering with it. It’s interesting and I hope it succeeds but it’s hard to see this as a good choice even as a tinkerer for now.
I have two PPP Camera apps. Megapixels never launches. The other camera app reliably loads, but only works for the selfie-camera. I've been using the phone for over a year and never seen the main camera run.
Would it be possible to install a regular linux distro on, say, a steam deck and then using programs to simulate calling, texting etc? I mean, all I really need is email to send my work time report and discord, cus my friends use that instead of sms..... idky. And I hate voice calling, so that'd be nice to get rid of.
There is no need to boycott something you have zero intention ever using. I am sure there will always be at the very least some niche carriers that offer regular physical SIM card because of demand and supply.
I had the same experience with Ubuntu Touch on an older pixel phone. I don’t think it is ready for a daily driver for me, but I would like to use it when I go kayaking (when I need a phone but don’t want to lose my iPhone in the lake). I use Mint Mobile and am able to swap out my sim. I did have to request a physical sim for my main phone.
To build a Linux Phone, you need at least one simple joe member in it who does not use his phone for development and certainly not a linux user, who would be the representative of general masses. I have seen every single Linux phone fail, because they are trying to emulate Linux on their phone, AND NOT a linux phone. there is a huge difference between the two terms. Linux on phone is to expect your phone to run full fledged Linux on your phone and having it terminal centric. A linux phone on the other hand is a phone that has its heart as Linux. But it works like any other normal phone but without all the garbage in it.
Plasma Mobile has been wildly unpredictable for a while now (thanks QT!) That is more true for Arch based system - ALARM has it's teething issues there. pmOS is a great alternative as is Mobian. When it comes to the design of the device - Pixel 4a is more cheap-feeling than the PinePhone. What I do like the most - UART! 😄 I know it's silly but just having the visibility of what the device is doing while booting or just being able to use plain ssh is ridiculously good. We need more things like this 😁
I wonder if performance and battery life would be better with a more minimal distro, window manager, and desktop on it. There's a strong tendency nowadays to spend resources making it pretty in many expensive ways. Maybe an OS without systemd, a bare-bones window manager, and a desktop that doesn't demand the utmost in graphics hardware? I use devuan on a five-year-old laptop with so-called intel integrated graphics at home. I keep looking for less heavy software to use on it, not because of performance but because of a desire for simplicity. I'd be very interested in knowing whether such software is available and viable on this phone, or whether all development efforts are in a different and incompatible direction. -- hendrik boom 3
I understand that the whole point of a Pine is to run Linux distros. However, I was hoping that you'd at least attempt to put a secure phone OS on it. Something like Graphene on Pine would be interesting to see.
I am using Sailfish, Ubunto Touch, PureOS(expensive), I really like the privacy concept, but sacrifice too much on the convenience side. Too much configurations, not really suitable for majority none tech savvy people. Just my opinion
Thanks for the review, I am getting one soon as I am quite tired of Android ! I also used Gnome on desktop, KDE is bit heavy and too much of eye candies especially for low power devices.
Yes, I do expect Linux phone to last whole day. I have had 3 Nokia N900. All lasted longer then a working day. If any phone today does not last whole day, then something is very very wrong (Samsung Galaxy S10 plus).
iPhone 15 and Galaxy S24 last about 10 hours of screen-on time. With normal usage, that's more than a day. The average screen-on time is about 4 hours and 30 minutes per day.
Matt I wouldn't bother with a phone based on expectations! You will be better off by getting a pixel phone, rooting it and installing a custom ROM on it. It's just my opinion though...
