
Software on Librem 5 and PinePhone Linux Phones Is Progressing Nicely - iamnothere
https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/06/06/software-development-librem-5-pinephone-linux-phones/
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camjohnson26
If these devices are useable it could start a movement away from Apple and
Google’s ecosystems. Smart phones are no longer novel and iPhone releases
don’t have the same excitement they used to. We’re getting to the point where
the technology is cheap and developed enough that 3rd parties can develop
their own, where before Apple and Google were the only projects with enough
information to innovate on what was already out their.

In the same way IBM used to dominate the computer market but now we have
raspberry pi’s with just as much power but available for basically nothing.

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Tepix
Thanks for posting this, I hadn't heard about the PinePhone at all. Very
interesting price point ($149 for the 2GB version)!

I just hope they can get the UI smooth and responsive. All UIs of Linux phones
I've used in the past (Ubuntu Touch, OpenMoko) had a laggy UI which made them
unpleasant to use even if you disregard all the other usability issues. And it
wasn't the hardware's fault. The same phone wasn't slow when using Android
instead of Ubuntu Touch.

I'd rather have a more bland yet snappy UI than a lot of eye candy.

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jonquark
The Wayland based Jolla phones are very responsive in my opinion (uses Android
and Jolla regularly)

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Tepix
Good point, SailfishOS is snappy and smooth from what I remember.

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neilv
A potentially huge difference between the Purism Librem 5 and the Pine64
products is that Purism is emphasizing privacy and security.

Both companies are based in countries believed to compel compromises
sometimes, but my current gut feel is I'd rather have a Librem 5.

I currently have a dumbphone, and a trail of nonworking PostmarketOS,
Replicant, and FirefoxOS devices. If we could get the Librem 5 software
working reasonably well atop PostmarketOS, that would provide a less-secure
"budget" option for getting more people onto the platform, for people who
can't swing several hundred dollars. Even were Purism to later introduce a
budget device, open source and not being locked to their devices would be an
encouraging sign for adopting the platform.

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megous
> A potentially huge difference between the Purism Librem 5 and the Pine64
> products is that Purism is emphasizing privacy and security.

Dunno, PinePhone is said to have physical switches too.

Also all you need for privacy is complete control of the OS, which you will
have on PinePhone (complete mainline Linux support, down to GPU drivers). It
doesn't matter what country the HW vendor is from if the OS/bootloader is
fully controlled by the user.

Main thing that will hold PinePhone back initially is lack of suspend to ram
support. There are some partial solutions (WIP crust firmware), bit it's not
complete, yet. There's still time though.

PinePhone will be the first smartphone I'll buy, regardless of SW support, as
I'd like to play with the HW anyway. I already had plenty of fun with other
mobile Allwinner SoCs in form of a A83T based tablet, and A64 is quite similar
to that and very familiar to me. So all the SW I already wrote for the tablet
will be easily re-targettable for PinePhone.

It will be interesting to see how Pine64 will make it usable for regular
people. But for me as a programmer, it's will be a very nice device that I'll
be able to fully control and experiment with without any limits. Even the
power management co-processor is fully user programmable and has support in
gcc toolchain since gcc 9.1.

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neilv
Hardware backdoors is one real thing (the hardware is mostly closed black
boxes), and that's a concern on both devices. Cutoff switches, baseband
isolation, etc. don't solve everything.

BTW, that's great news about upstreamed kernel and toolchain support. IIUC, an
earlier problem with some of those tablets was that there were hundreds of
variations, and good luck getting a mainline kernel on any of them, or finding
a second tablet if you got the first one booting with all the devices.

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megous
Well not completely black, for example Quectel modem on PinePhone is running
it's own Linux system, which has many parts open sourced, and is at least
pokeable and allows for not so hard reverse engineering. For anyone with
enough time, now that Ghidra is available, it should be fairly straightforward
to see what's hiding in there, even in the proprietary parts. You should be
able to even run shell commands via some AT commands, if not via adb.

[https://osmocom.org/projects/quectel-
modems/wiki/Quectel](https://osmocom.org/projects/quectel-modems/wiki/Quectel)

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jammygit
I think v1 of these phones will be disappointing, but promising. If the
projects survive to launch their v3s, I’ll get excited.

If anyone on their teams is reading, the deal breaker for me is this: I need
Authy, or an equiv, and Anki. Also need a step counter and my password manager
to sync across devices easily. Probably slack too. Phone and texting also, but
honestly the web browser would be secondary. Maps could be optional.

If a new phone could provide that, I think I could safely buy it and be able
to use it as a daily driver.

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danielscrubs
The problem with Linux is that the UX and UI are always lackluster.

How do we make people work on those parts as a hobby? Can we make UX/UI have
their own demo-scene culture?

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solarkraft
I care about UX, but don't know how to influence development.

