[Mediterraneo10]

> For some people, that's all they need.

History tells us that when you have a device that does a few things that only for a tiny minority of people – within already a tiny minority of nerds – are "all that they need", and the dev community is so small, there is no future to the device. For someone who was around in the OpenMoko and Nokia N900 days, it is hard not to see the PinePhone as a stillborn device, which will never progress beyond "pre-alpha" state. A year after I got my PinePhone, it remains just as disappointing an experience as in the beginning.

> You can also use Google Maps that way or whatever OSM provider.

Browsing Google Maps is a joke on the PinePhone's weak processor. And again, OSM on the PinePhone is vastly inferior to the OSM choices on Android. Merely showing OSM tiles does not a good map app make.

> It's the exact same Firefox that's in desktop Linux

And that is the problem. Desktop Firefox was never designed to work at those screen dimensions. Many features of the Firefox UI do not actually work on the PinePhone. (They might possibly work if you dock the PinePhone with a monitor and mouse – I haven’t checked – but they don’t work on the PinePhone as a phone.)

[fsflover]

> Browsing Google Maps is a joke on the PinePhone's weak processor.

So you probably need Librem 5 for more performance. There is also OpenStreetMap, which is much faster.

> Desktop Firefox was never designed to work at those screen dimensions.

It already mostly works. Software updates make it more usable every week.

[Mediterraneo10]

> So you probably need Librem 5 for more performance

Librem has its own set of problems and does not change my opinion that this iteration of the free Linux mobile ecosystem is stillborn. My feeling is that we'll have to wait another decade for new players to appear and try everything all over again.

> There is also OpenStreetMap, which is much faster.

The OpenStreetMap.org website is a tech demo, it isn’t really meant to be used for one's map needs. For that, apps are out there. However, as I said, the PinePhone's OSM-based apps are also little more than tech demos that just serve OSM tiles.

> Software updates make it more usable every week.

The Desktop-Firefox-for-PinePhone hack doesn’t get updated often (or possibly at all).

[swebs]

>The Desktop-Firefox-for-PinePhone hack doesn’t get updated often (or possibly at all).

I still have no idea what you're referring to. It's the same build of Firefox on your desktop. It was just updated from version 86 to 87 this week. Same as the desktop. There is no "mobile Linux ecosystem". Just 1 Linux ecosystem, with some apps supporting a 360px screen width, and some not. It is simply desktop Linux, on a phone.

[Mediterraneo10]

> It's the same build of Firefox on your desktop. It was just updated from version 86 to 87 this week

Distros like Mobian on the PinePhone don't ship vanilla Firefox. They ship Firefox along with custom UI modifications originally borrowed from the Firefox-for-Postmarket-OS project that make Firefox at least somewhat usable on the PinePhone's screen dimensions.

Even when the version of Firefox is updated, the accompanying Firefox-for-Postmarket-OS hacks do not see much improvement. The upstream Firefox devs have not put work into making Firefox’s UI fully usable at those dimensions, and so for time being phone users are stuck with the limited functionality that the Firefox-for-Postmarket-OS hacks provide.

[fsflover]

> for time being phone users are stuck with the limited functionality

This is a pretty pessimistic view. I'm sure the patches will be upstreamed soon. Even Purism works on that according to their "Fund Your App" page: https://puri.sm/fund-your-app/.

[Mediterraneo10]

The Firefox-for-Postmarket-OS modifications don’t really patch Firefox in a way that can be upstreamed. They are merely UI settings that disable some elements that would take up too much space on the screen, and much of Firefox's UI still won't work regardless. Only significant work on upstream Firefox itself would make a difference, and neither Mozilla nor Purism have the manpower for that.