[squarefoot]

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.

[blihp]

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.

[pjmlp]

I started coding in C++ back in 1992, with Turbo C++ 1.0 for MS-DOS, followed by Turbo C++ for Windows 3.1, with the Object Windows Library.

A 386SX running on 20 MHz with turbo mode on, with 2 MB RAM.

Something has gone quite wrong when the Pinephone hardware cannot keep up with C++ apps.

[pjmlp]

> Android still doesn't have low latency audio for this exact reason

It surely does, https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/audio/aaudio/aaudio

Also Java and Kotlin on Android are native compiled code since Android 5.

GNOME shows me where the Linux "performance" is heading.