Pinephone Pro had a very small developer community and thus quite undeveloped software. It was discontinued for this reason. Librem 5 is being developed by both a community and a company, so it's much more usable.
Agreed. Despite endless assertions from someone that Pine and Purism are where we should place our hope for better mobile devices, I can't put my trust in either company. Their track records are too hard to overlook.
I don't think the feelings are so much towards the companies themselves. They've just been the only ones to ship Linux phones that don't depend on anything Android nor significant closed source code at all. I for one just want to see the same distro diversity with the same amount of open-source OS control over HW on phones and other devices that I do see on desktops/laptops. Linux phones in general are kind of a miracle to exist, given how long we went without them. However, given the low demand for this specifically (a lot are satisfied with termux or hybris-based OSes), they're kind of a miracle within a miracle.
They deliver beyond that too, with support for Alt-DP over USB-C for instance, open schematics, parts obtainable from independent distributors of electronic components, available detailed datasheets, and external batteries that can be hot-swappable (at least on PPP, haven't checked the others).
> I don't think the feelings are so much towards the companies themselves.
I respectfully disagree. Pine's MO was basically "create hardware and hope people create software for it". A bit tongue in cheek, but that's it. Which is fine as long as they're up front about it, which they are.
But in order for this to work, a community needs to form around the device. Pine doesn't have to be the ones to manage it, and some would say it's better if they don't, but they're surely a big part of it if for no other reason than they're the makers of the hardware. The infant PP community was doing quite fine until they announced the PPP and confused the hell out of everything. Couple that with some seriously brain dead choices (IMHO) around booting and charging, led to them not only torpedoing the pro but sinking the original PP as well. Probably in no small part because they split what little community had formed.
The pro was obviously rushed. I personally think they saw an easy way to grab some quick cash and took it.
By my statement, I meant that it isn't blind fanaticism towards the brands. Yeah, they fucked up by what I read and I haven't interacted with them directly, maybe they're unpleasant (Customer support definitely wasn't. They're very nice.), but both Pine and Purism have delivered more than anyone on this puny market. They net positive.
The strategy, "create hardware and hope people create software for it," is valid too.
I think both sides maybe overestimate the other. People state the above like a complaint that they don't make themselves responsible for the code, but maybe that's their limit of what they can do. People tend to think of companies like things that can do anything with unlimited resources, but just like people they can have limits. In general, the posture, "I don't like this company for X reason, so I'll find another," is valid and good, but when you only have 2 suppliers... maybe a little more tolerance is needed to get your goal, the product.
They may have overestimated the abilities of the market too. It's tiny and part of the appeal is being able to treat your phone the same as your computer. A good part of the market is likely going to be people whose programming experience may be limited to computers with a BIOS, native compiles, etc. I took a bit to understand the boot process in detail (how it differs from a computer). Crucial details are spread across websites and blogs. There are unique tedious challenges too like needing a virtual keyboard in initramfs. Needing to cross-compile can involve a lot of details. On and off, I was/is looking at the battery driver to add hot-swapping support. That also involves learning a lot of things on multiple levels. You want to pull people that can quickly write camera drivers from this. Also not many people have all that much free time outside of work. A lot of patience is needed here, too.
Megous was talking about there being no lack of hand-holding. I'm sure everyone appreciates it (I appreciate it), but the gap can be wide.
A lot of momentum was being lost before LLMs even came into the picture, improved, and gained momentum for coding agents, etc. If the PPP had been released e.g. this year, things would likely be different.
> The pro was obviously rushed. I personally think they saw an easy way to grab some quick cash and took it.
Yeah, I've noticed details on the PPP. In their defense, it's supposed to be the explorer edition, not the final product. Also, as I understand, the PP and PPP are subsidized by Pine64, so I wouldn't see it as greediness, but rather desperation.
That's surprising. They burned through a ton of goodwill by holding many people's money for many years, while being non-responsive to depositors, refusing refunds if they did respond, and so on. A lot of ink and footage has been spilled over it. Their laptop effort seems to have evolved into something almost reasonably non-scummy, but the Librem 5 put a lot of people off.
Current complaints, from what is (by all appearances) a tiny user base, about the state of the device and its lack of usefulness are also common enough, e.g.:
The more-viable alternatives are not without their own tradeoffs, but they are at least actually viable for normal people. I can't see putting family members on a Librem 5 or a PinePhone (much less a PinePhone Pro) without it being an absolute train wreck of a time for anyone but the most extremely basic and patient user.
Even their most prolific and downright stubborn true believer of a booster on HN admits he has to disable JS to load a number of web pages, given how anemic the SoC is. As others have pointed out it would have been a midrange Android chipset well over a decade ago. How exactly that works when one needs to use a site requiring JS to function has me feeling like I'm daily driving Nokia N-series tablets in the late 2000s again, except Nokia tablets were somehow a more polished experience two decades ago than one gets today out of either the Librem 5 of PinePhone due to the lack of real manufacturer and community support.
We need a viable Linux slab with a radio, and I want one to exist. It'd be nice if it was fully free of proprietary device blobs and was reasonably power efficient, but that's currently a fantasy completely out of touch with the state of available radios. I would carry my Linux ThinkPad with a built-in cellular radio or an external hotspot everywhere before it would make sense for me to try to pretend the PinePhone or Librem 5 meet even a basline level of utility value.
For someone who wants to check simple IMAP email, send and receive SMS messages and load basic websites, and are satisfied with poor camera performance, size, weight, battery life, and durability, while feeling good about the hardware they run (even if its hardware and software security is poor), then they may be quite happy with it.
> We need a viable Linux slab with a radio. It'd be nice if it was fully free of proprietary device blobs but that's currently a fantasy totally out of touch with the state of available radios. I would genuinely carry my Linux ThinkPad with a cellular radio everywhere before it would make sense for me to try to pretend the PinePhone or Librem 5 meet even a baseline of utility value.
The PinePhone (Pro) is there. They work as a laptop replacement. Their problem is more on working as a phone. There's even a repo out there to turn the touchscreen into a touchpad. With a bluetooth keyboard, it's basically a laptop.
> Even their most prolific and downright stubborn true believer of a booster on HN admits he has to disable JS to load a number of web pages
YouTube works on the PPP. If YouTube works, likely any JS works. Google Maps on Firefox also works.
You: We're there. It's a bad phone. This thing works as a laptop replacement. You'll even be able to use it as a trackpad some day!
This reads like satire. You guys are so out of touch with consumer expectations that you can't even string together a coherent argument in favor of these devices you so love.
Even if it was a viable phone, are we really calling mid-tier 2016 performance, from a device which was discontinued due to being under-supported by its manufacturer and dev community, as being "there"?
We are most certainly not "there".
On the JS, a strident supporter is saying he has to disable JS. Convince him his experience isn't real, not me.
Of course I knew that the Librem5 existed, but at the time I was thrown off by the price and the smell of "impending shitstorm" the device reeked of. Afterwards, I was too deep into the Pine side of things to pay attention to what was going on over at the Librem side.
It's sad that these two devices have derailed open phones so much. Obviously there's a ton of things to figure out, radio chief among them. But I fear that the corporations have learned from what happened during the "PC compatible" era of computing and openness will be a thing of the past.
> It's sad that these two devices have derailed open phones so much.
Agreed. Those two have made such a mess of things that I think if something interesting does sprout up, it'll come from somewhere else.
I think one issue is that the hard-liners who are willing to make the compromises necessary to daily drive one of these things as an actual phone aren't interested in any solution unless it's fully open, and certified as such. Which I get, but desktop Linux more or less evolved on hardware containing significant proprietary blobs and closed code, and at many levels. It wasn't perfect, but the OS had room to mature on genuinely good and useful hardware.
Instead, these two companies are trying to push molasses up a sandy hill. Virtuous though it may be, it seems kind of doomed to failure, and this doesn't feel like one of those situations where the glory is in the trying.
Eschewing genuinely excellent hardware because it's imperfect, all while running a hot mess of an operating system, also strikes me as a losing strategy.
Give me a modern SoC with modern radios, strong contemporary security features, all running a well-supported distro, and I'd be there in a heartbeat, despite whatever misgivings I held about the non-FSF-approved nature of the hardware, because that's exactly my current desktop, laptop, and server computing situation (modern security features aside). If I saw a viable open phone hardware project happening I would be happy to support it, but for some people there's a real "you are either with us, or against us" mentality about it, and if someone's going to make me choose...
> I fear that the corporations have learned from what happened during the "PC compatible" era of computing and openness will be a thing of the past.
We both hope you're wrong, but some things certainly seem to be trending that way, and quickly.
