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With this news, how much of a lead do they have over Intel now? When is Intel realistically going to ship their next node? Or is it all still perpetually delayed with no end in sight?


My favorite part is

> If you add some obscure code such as below, to this or any other app, even if it has only the teeniest chance of being less blindingly obvious to someone else than it is to you at the time of writing, please please please add a fing comment.

This rings as true now as it did then and its my favorite comment so far out of this whole leak. I've reached a point where my comments are there to remind myself why I did a thing, because more often than not I'm the poor bastard who's stuck fixing what past me did, and past me was either a sadistic asshole or a blithering idiot.


I watched Adam13531 on Twitch a lot, and the way he comments is very extensive, but complete. Ever since I started doing the same. Quite helpful to yourself.


Huh, this is interesting. It's not directly related but I'm still thankful you commented.

Is this written in Delphi (as per your HN profile)?


Yes, I use Delphi for all my software :) Delphi rocks and unfortunately it's mismanaged :(


My god, reading this makes me wish there was an alternative to Calibre. I already just tolerate it because it's the only ebook manager I know and there are a lot of things about the UI and how it works that bother me.


It's like OpenSSL. Everyone acted like they did a terrible job in the end, but either you had alternatives and you could have linked to gnutls or you decided that you didn't have alternatives and OpenSSL was irreplaceable. Either way, the product was just way too good.


No, it just means it was acceptable. Doesn't mean it doesn't have its flaws that need to be addressed.

Making an ebook manager is a lot of effort for little reward, so I'm not surprised Calibre is the only one out there. I'm not sure why I'm not allowed to be unhappy with it regardless.

Man, the people here are unbelievable. Calibre isn't this unassailable icon where expressing displeasure about it is heresy. What was that post about people accepting that technology sucks? Calibre sucks. But people put up with it. But somehow I'm the asshole for expressing my dislike.


What features do you use the most? I'm looking to extend a personal project for searching epubs to be more featureful when compared to calibre.


I mostly use the tags feature (though I wish this was better too), because I mainly use Calibre to organize my ebooks library.


My god, somebody did UI I don't like. Its barely tolerable, but I still use it because this world owes me and I can't sunken cost my precious time.


This comment breaks the site guidelines and is a big step in exactly the opposite direction of what we want here. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit closer to heart? Note that they include:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


[flagged]


Your comment upthread already crossed into that. The other commenter shouldn't have broken the site guidelines worse. And you shouldn't have escalated like this.

We're looking for curious, thoughtful conversation on this site. Calling other users "an insufferable prick" is so extremely far from that (regardless of how unfair or provocative someone else was) that I'm going to ban you again. You've also posted quite good comments, so obviously I don't want to ban you, but the container here is fragile and comments like this one and some of your others are just too destructive.

If you decide you want to use HN as intended, starting with "Be kind. Don't be snarky" and including the rest of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, you're welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll be happy to unban you.


I assume he first used it when it was called Gaim, so he has stronger memories associated with that name than with Pidgin.


I primarily care about how terrible the new settings window is and that it's a step back from the Control Panel in too many ways to ignore. What's with all the wasteful white space? What's with the inability to multi-task settings?


Agree with the non-availability of multiwindow Settings, but the UI of Settings seems to mimic iOS and Android settings, which in my opinion, modern, simple, and familiar. The Control Panel UI seems so complex nowadays.


I don't think having a similar UI as mobile is very good for the user since the input mode is very different.

I think macOS does way better here with a minimal use of white space because I can easily have a browser open on the side to look up what I'm trying to change - though some things do appear a bit old school (e.g. networking).


The Settings app in Windows works very well with mouse and the wasted whitespace only appears when it's maximized, the app was made to be responsive with several windows sizes.


Seems like you've never used it with a non-FHD screen. Or as a window. Because it absolutely wastes a ton of space. The sidebar on the right will disappear to the bottom, which is unnecessarily cut off because of the crazy large margins around everything. I don't understand why every page needs to be scrolled when the Control panel fit twice as much functionality into half or even a quarter of the space.


Hate it as well. The obvious reason is the effort to have a unified interface that will support both pointer-based and touch-based devices.


Looking at the AMD and nVidia software, I see it surfacing a lot of hardware-/vendor-specific options and I don't see how it could be done any differently. Then there's Realtek, where I've never seen their software add anything useful that doesn't already exist in system settings. But then again, there are drivers like those for the Xonar DX or other soundcards where a bunch of useful features and configuration options are surfaced.

I think there are pros and cons. PulseAudio could possibly be half the incomprehensible monstrosity that it is if it didn't have to take over the responsibilities of every audio driver out there. On the other hand, Realtek will arbitrarily disable/hide features with no way (that I've found) to do anything about as a user.


Realtek stuff installs Nahimic 3D virtual positioning and a different denoiser and beamformer, which are controllable from their driver.

Technically, they could make these features separate and configurable from Windows sound effects options for the recording or playback device...


So what's the current state of the Pinephone? Is it viable as a daily driver? Half a year ago I was still hearing about broken suspend, power issues, broken call/SMS, etc.


I'm currently using Arch Linux ARM (Alarm), but most/all of these things should (or should soon) be working on Mobian (Debian Port), PostmarketOS (PmOS), UBPorts (Ubuntu Touch):

- Calls/SMS are working and fairly reliable, although I haven't used them a huge amount

- There is some suspend/power saving stuff implemented, and while I haven't had to take it on the go with me for very long (due to quarantine), I think the battery should at least last a full day now, but I think there's definitely room for improvement

- Camera should be working on all distros, and there's recently been developments to get 1080p photos, and a 30 FPS "preview" (viewfinder?). These improvements should be on all the distros soon, but IIRC they're only on PmOS and UBPorts right now

- Firefox is working pretty well for web browsing. PmOS has a mobile configuration for it [0] (that's also shipped with Alarm now), that fixes/improves some of the UI, adds pinch zoom support, etc. Aside from the occasional crash, I've found it to be pretty fast and reliable (at least compared to when I last tried Gnome Web). The downside is that it's still not fully optimized for touch/mobile compared to other options. Will be interested to see if Mozilla/someone else add some kind of mobile interface to desktop Firefox.

- Tested yesterday and bluetooth headphones are working pretty well. Had some issues pairing in the UI, so I had to use SSH and bluetoothctl, but after that everything was pretty smooth. pavucontrol also seems to be working ok if you need something that's missing from the Phosh settings app.

- Fractal and Nheko work pretty well for Matrix, but I'm going to try compiling Mirage [1] soon, it's been pretty great on desktop, and apparently the UI supports mobile.

This is a rough and very incomplete list, but feel free to ask if there's anything specific I missed.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/mobile-config-firefox

[1]: https://github.com/mirukana/mirage


Maybe it's worth making clear for grandparent that "working" definitely does not mean "as good as Android/iOS" - but indeed, just "being usable" (and I'm pretty sure many people will decide it's "not usable" given how much it's not "as good"). You have to make sacrifices to use it as your main phone (it won't be as great an experience; on the other hand, your phone won't spy on you).

Regarding battery, I found the suspend gains to not be that useful for me. I don't know if it's just me, but you give me a GNU/linux phone and I go wild on what I do with it.

It runs webservices, so my data is accessible to all my devices without needing to use a "cloud" service (that is, it's accessible without leaving my local network and I own my data). And the phone is also my modem and router for all those devices. A consequence of that is that I definitely don't want it to go to suspend 5 minutes after I stop using its keyboard :)

Maybe I'm a outlier there, but if users want their GNU/linux phone to do anything more than simply answering to inputs, suspend won't help. We need to make softwares that consume less power, which I would think never was really a consideration of GNU/linux desktop GUI apps, so there's some work we have to do there (and many cool challenges!). I would also argue that whatever the reason is, we need to make software that consume less power anyway.


I have Mobian installed, and I don't have a spare SIM card to try calling and SMS. (I have tried postmarketOS and kde neon, and neither was good enough)

Functionally, everything else works: WIFI, apps, suspend, camera, music, etc.

I wouldn't use this as my primary phone, though, as it still crashed on me a few times. Many programs cannot adapt to the screen size effectively; buttons, menus are sometimes not possible to see.

It's not unusable, but not ideal if you want a robust primary phone.

Another drawback (if used as a main phone) is that it's really slow. In fact, it's possibly the slowest device --- with regard to user interaction --- that I have used in years, which is okay for a pinephone, as it is intended as a testing device.


I agree on the slowness of the device. The Pinephone has been a huge disappointment for me in that regard. But I think that says more about the bloatedness of software in 2020 than the Allwinner A64 CPU in the Pinephone. Why does the old Nokia N900, with less RAM and a 2009-era processor, feel so snappy and responsive while still providing an interface that still seems modern today, but Phosh on the Pinephone has ragged scrolling and opening any new window takes forever?


I wonder what it would take to install Maemo/Meego or even matchbox and gpe. I never had a Nokia tablet, but I had a Zaurus SL5500 and it ran gpe usably. Matchbox also does a good job resizing apps to the full screen.

I have run Mobian and Phosh on Pinephone and while clean it was slow, clumsy to switch apps, and did not size most apps properly.


RE: slow

Did you try an X11 DE without compositing? Wayland based stuff (like phosh) is almost unusably slow for me, but on mate and fluxbox everything is very fast (firefox scrolls at ~15FPS instead of ~2 for example.)


That’s a good idea. Thanks! I’ll give it a try.


I would say that Ubtunu Touch and Sailfish are the best distros right now, probably on par with very early Android in terms of usability. There are still major issues such as mms being broken, extremely poor battery life in some distros, an embarrassingly bad camera. On top of this, the performance just isn't there yet in most distros, sailfish is the only one with acceptable performance IMO. I wouldn't rely on it for a daily.


Since the Pinephone interests mainly a Free Software and open hardware audience, it is worth noting that Sailfish is not libre – the UI is closed source.


I was an early Firefox phone user and for six months happily put up with these types of annoyances with the hope that they would improve. I only stopped using it once it became clear things had stagnated.

If this achieves sufficient penetration to get past the stagnation valley of doom, I'll jump on the bandwagon again with the same hopes. Unfortunately I don't have work as much time as I used to back then though :(


I still have mine. I fully intend to have it in my pocket next time I travel to the US. "Sure, you can see my phone. Here, I'll unlock it for you. Go for it! <watches security goon's head assplode>"


I’d swap to a pine phone in an instant, once it is a viable alternative, at least for the bare bones stuff. I appreciate it’s a chicken-and-egg problem! But until I can use it, reliably, all day long, to check messages, call etc I would need a closed-source phone with me anyway... which sort of defies the purpose of having a pine phone too.


I ordered mine, and it hasn't arrived yet.

I am not sure if I will use it as my main phone, just because it doesn't support 5G Wifi.

At home it would be the only non iot/smart device that would need 2.4G Wifi and I blocked those from direct internet access.


If you have the newer cicruit board, you should be able to use a nano wifi with usb-c adapter.


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