My PinePhone turned up this week.

It, ummmm, very rough around the edges, software wise.

So far I have only used the default Manjaro distribution it came with. Im both looking forward to, and dreading, working my way through a dozen or so alternative distros to find the least worst collection of brokenness and bugs.

But I 100% knew what I was buying into when I paid for it, and am very happy I have it.

I found the pinephone in my research. It seemed nice but the hardware specifications were really underwhelming. I'm used to buying flagship phones with the best hardware available and using them for years and years.

> It, ummmm, very rough around the edges, software wise.

I can imagine. How's the driver situation? Lots of proprietary blobs?

What about the device itself? Build quality? I see it has hardware switches for RF and sensors, I really like that.

> So far I have only used the default Manjaro distribution it came with.

I wonder why Manjaro and not stock Arch Linux.

It’s got closed source blobs for at least it’s Realtek wifi chipset. Probably more as well. :shrug:

Hardware and build quality wise, I’m quite happily surprised at how good it feels. It’s certainly not at iPhone13 Pro levels of industrial design, but it feels like it compares favourably to, say Galaxy S4 vintage “flagship phones”.

And yeah, that row of hardware switches was a very powerful deciding feature for my purchase.

> How's the driver situation? Lots of proprietary blobs?

Interestingly enough, no, the drivers are all open source and mainlined. There is even a work-in-progress driver for hardware video decoding.

There are a couple proprietary firmware blobs that have to be loaded at boot time but that is just like on a laptop.

> Interestingly enough, no, the drivers are all open source and mainlined. There is even a work-in-progress driver for hardware video decoding.

That's amazing. So unlike Android phones I can actually use a stock kernel. I think I'm gonna buy one.

> There are a couple proprietary firmware blobs that have to be loaded at boot time but that is just like on a laptop.

So the kernel itself is not tainted? I'm fine with that.

> How's the driver situation? Lots of proprietary blobs?

Even if this is the case, what are you going to do? Buy a normal phone? That will just get you even more proprietary blobs.

You shouldn't let aversion to proprietary blobs put you off getting a PinePhone if all the other options you'd consider contain more proprietary blobs.

> Buy a normal phone? That will just get you even more proprietary blobs.

Google's apparently trying to get all these manufacturers to contribute their drivers to the kernel. Not sure how successful they've been.

I was hoping the situation would be better here. Proprietary Linux drivers suck. Even nvidia drivers have caused instability in my system before, switching to nouveau fixed it. I hate those things so much.

Use Mobian

I ordered the pinephone when it was first announced. I think it’s a really good first step. The hardware is extremely lacking though. It’s not nearly powerful enough to make this a daily driver for me. Way too much lag and stuttering. Every couple months I will flash a new or updated distro and play around with it for a day or two, and the software side has definitely improved a lot in the last year. I’m hoping that the next generation comes with better, more usable hardware. Super excited to see the progress that comes for this product

The hardware specifications are really disapointing. I'm used to buying top end hardware, desktop and mobile. The Librem 5 isn't any better and it's a $900 phone!

I suppose this market is still too new. I'm hopeful things will get better in the future as well. I'm very impressed by the fact the pinephone can run the upstream Linux kernel. Maybe that wouldn't have been possible with higher end hardware. I'm not sure.

I own a Pinephone. I use jmp.chat so messing around with the phone doesn't effect my ability to use the phone network. It's gotten a lot better, I would recommend running a lightweight X11 WM (I like fluxbox and fvwm) rather than a fat DE like phosh or kde.

> I would recommend running a lightweight X11 WM

I'm not used to the notion that X11 even supports touch events. I wonder what the experience is like. Will I need mobile versions of Linux software or can I expect existing desktop software to work?

Honestly I'd be satisfied if I could have a fully featured terminal and browser. Looks like the pinephone even supports physical keyboards!

The only thing you really miss is right clicks. The Gnome (not phosh) keyboard supports some of that but I prefer xvkbd.