"Daily use" might be a biiit of a stretch with this hardware, but it'll be functional.
I think Pinephone 2, whenever that happens, will be a much more practical convergence device. Pine64's plans to upgrade to the RK3566 SOC in their low-power devices look very promising.
I made a couple videos on convergence already (https://linmob.net, my video channels are linked). In a recent live stream (I’ll definitely publish that segment) I used Gnome 3 on the docked PinePhone and it was surprisingly good.
Yeah those are valid points about the better quality material/more capability/development/non-outsourced hardware/people. I guess that's tough though as you can get a nice Android/other phone for $800 but yeah.
Tinfoil-hat engaged... the Shenzhen thing idk while it has physical switches have I personally routed those switches to check the devices are actually off. I've kind of given up on that kind of thinking anyway since I don't tape up my phone's webcams/mic/battery off/faraday cage/led container/etc haha.
Anyway sorry tangent, I'm not really getting Linux phones with privacy as main intent just the idea of a "desktop experience" on a phone is great.
I'd like to be optimistic wrt future software performance on this model as well. Linux isn't Android where user apps are written to run under a virtual machine and development has to deal with the Java monoculture (Android still doesn't have low latency audio for this exact reason). However, some Python apps that on a powerful desktop run at high speed might be taxed by the Pinephone comparatively slow hardware, so native compiled code would be the solution to give a significant speed bump to most Pinephone userland applications.
C++ apps tax the Pinephone hardware. It's just not very fast vs user expectations today. More generally you can't just recompile desktop Linux apps on mobile and expect much in terms of responsiveness/battery life. While I'm with you re: not wanting to be stuck in a proprietary ecosystem, it does have one advantage: you must specifically target the platform in order to do much useful on it which typically includes platform-specific optimizations so it performs well.
It's an interesting conundrum: right now I can probably get 90% of Linux GUI software running on my Pinephone. The problem is, it's so slow and painful to use that I don't want to. I'd much rather see the critical 5% of the software (browsers etc) optimized for mobile. I think we'll get there in time, but it's still early days.
I think Pinephone 2, whenever that happens, will be a much more practical convergence device. Pine64's plans to upgrade to the RK3566 SOC in their low-power devices look very promising.