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.
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.
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.)
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.
- 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