[squarefoot]

One point that should be repeated ad infinitum for those reading about the Pinephone for the 1st time: it's all about the freedom, not performance. One doesn't buy the Pinephone to brag about its technical achievements with friends, but rather to contribute building an ecosystem, even just by spreading the word, of people who put freedom and privacy above everything. I also should be repeated ad infinitum why its hardware is limited compared to other devices, and I don't mean the well known ones but also those built by the hundreds of thousands by Chinese factories then relabeled under a dozen different lesser known brands. The reason is that Pine64 had to make all of it from scratch since obtaining any meaningful technical information from those hardware makers is impossible, so they had literally to pick what hardware had the most open documentation available. Supporting them is our way to send a strong message: "we've had enough of your black boxes". Big players of course won't give a flying damn since the market of privacy conscious users wouldn't represent a fraction of a fraction of their user base, but hopefully that will help convincing other manufacturers to publish their specs. Phones aside, there are other ways to help them. I'm waiting for a beefier version of the Pinetab, am considering the PineBook pro (with EU keyboard which is out of stock) and in the meantime got their mini solder iron which works surprisingly well (and I have two Wellers).

[zozbot234]

To me the PinePhone and other Linux phones are also about performance. Yes the MVP prototypes will always suck and you would only buy these for freedom's sake, but a truly unified software platform encompassing both mobile and mainstream computing all running on openly documented reference hardware, will be far superior technically to what we have today.

[m463]

As a purism owner, and a long-time linux user... I think that is a fantasy statement.

Theoretically, there could be an open platform like the PC (with usb + pcie + ATX case/power supply + etc..) with open interfaces. However the reason this came into existence was by microsoft's design to commoditize the hardware to drive software sales of its (closed) operating system.

With cellphones all of those interfaces are being subsumed so the trend is one chip + a display + a battery. The chip is IP of many vendors.

Additionally, the linux distributions have not had the highest performance. For example, frequently there is poor or no graphics acceleration.

I think Linux will always be behind commercial/proprietary platforms. One could arguably say that the iphone is a multi-billion dollar platform, with more careful engineering, development and tuning than any other device on the planet.

That said - I do believe linux based phones are nearing that "good enough" stage where dedicated users can make it work for them and people may at least have a choice.

[zozbot234]

> I think Linux will always be behind commercial/proprietary platforms. One could arguably say that the iphone is a multi-billion dollar platform

One could have expected the same wrt. proprietary *NIX workstation and server hardware in the 1980s and 1990s, and where are those today? Linux is dominating that market. Embedded brings more trouble because the hardware, far from being a "multi billion dollar" endeavor, is all-too-often entirely undocumented and sloppily hacked together, where a barely workable state is considered "good enough" for shipping. But even there, Linux is easily gaining ground over proprietary OS's. The underlying dynamic is clear enough.

[zepto]

> One could have expected the same wrt. proprietary *NIX workstation and server hardware in the 1980s and 1990s, and where are those today?

Server hardware is of course commodity and dominated by Linux.

The high end workstation proprietary workstation market seems pretty alive and dominated but a closed Unix still.

> Embedded brings more trouble because the hardware, far from being a "multi billion dollar" endeavor, is all-too-often entirely undocumented and sloppily hacked together, where a barely workable state is considered "good enough" for shipping. But even there, Linux is easily gaining ground over proprietary OS's.

This is true of ‘embedded’ but phones are not embedded.

> The underlying dynamic is clear enough.

I think this is wishful thinking. Embedded and servers are quite different from phones and workstations.

[canucker2016]

> ...However the reason this came into existence was by microsoft's design to commoditize the hardware to drive software sales of its (closed) operating system.

Don't make the tail wag the dog.

IBM was in control of the hardware design and the rest of the ecosystem, heavily influenced by their previous work on the IBM System/23 DataMaster.

Microsoft just jumped on board for the expected lucrative ride, supplying a CP/M-like OS that they purchased from a local shop (SCP's QDOS).

IBM PC history:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-part-...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/07/ibm-pc-history-part-...

Byte Magazine, Sept. 1990, "The Creation of the IBM PC"

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1990-09/page/n451/...

[m463]

IBM designed the original ISA bus PC. But with microsoft's non-exclusive agreement it was able to sell MS-DOS, and it kickstarted early clones like compaq. IBM tried to close things down with the PS/2 OS/2 and microchannel, but they couldn't close the barn door.

here's another fun article: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

[canucker2016]

Besides a license for MSDOS, the PC clone makers also needed a compatible BIOS. Compaq was the first out of the gate with a mostly-compatible IBM PC BIOS.

The IBM PC-compatible BIOS from Phoenix Technologies allowed more companies to jump in the PC clone wars.

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-comp...

https://www.quora.com/How-is-the-BIOS-for-a-computer-motherb...

[znpy]

> I think Linux will always be behind commercial/proprietary platforms.

the dumb thing of this whole situation is that 50% of the "commercial/proprietary platforms" in this market are android phones, still using Linux as kernel.

[new_realist]

That's because the kernel is a commodity. Whether it's Linux or Mach, the user can't tell the difference. It's just plumbing.

[dTal]

It's not a "commodity", it's nearly 30 years of engineering that would take a multi-billion dollar investment to even come close to replicating. If it's so replaceable, why does everyone (except Apple) use Linux? When was the last time you bought an IOT device that ran, say, QNX?

All software is "just plumbing". The shiny-shiny on top is the mere tip of the iceberg and not what makes everything, you know, actually work.

[goodpoint]

This can be also phrased as: software freedom does not reach the end user.

That's why GPL and AGPL exist.

[noduerme]

it certainly touches the end user the moment they try to use the device for productivity and realize where the walls of the garden were established. But at that point maybe they're not a "user" anymore.

[lmm]

The whole phone will be a commodity soon if it's not already. When was the last time something felt like a significant innovation/differentiator in a phone?

(Personally I haven't been excited about a new phone feature since the S7's notification LED - and that apparently wasn't important enough to keep in newer versions).

[npteljes]

Cameras and the accompanying image processing software have been getting exceptionally good. Not that I'm personally excited about these, but I think it deserves recognition.

[disqard]

This is an excellent observation.

[fitzie]

totally agree. while I'm optimistic that arm chips will be more open in the data center and embedded space, looks like mobile arm id becoming more proprietary. Intel could shake things up if it starts to work on riscv and brings some of its graphics and wireless tech over to it.

while it is nice to have a powerful phone, it really doesn't need to be any more powerful than what is in a tv set.

[zepto]

> it really doesn't need to be any more powerful than what is in a tv set.

I’d like to believe this, but if it were true, the Pinephone would be super responsive, and nobody would be complaining about iOS browser performance.

[cptskippy]

> However the reason this came into existence was by microsoft's design to commoditize the hardware to drive software sales of its (closed) operating system.

Couldn't get past your rewriting of history just to paint MS in bad light because you don't like them.

[ghaff]

What rewriting of history? The PC (and then volume server) era very much saw previous vertical silos tiled into a horizontal structure with x86 at the processor layer and Windows at the operating system layer. In the 1990s, a lot of computer companies were ready to concede the OS crown to Windows.

(To the degree I'd argue with the statement, it's that it was as much Intel's doing as Microsoft's; Andy Grove even dedicated part of one of his books to this.)

[cptskippy]

Microsoft didn't design or intend the commoditization of PC hardware. It fell into their lap by happenstance and they fought to retain it.

[m463]

I was not putting down microsoft, I think they did the world a favor by bringing us commodity hardware.

fun article:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

[cptskippy]

Microsoft didn't set out to commoditize computer hardware, IBM did. IBM literally wrote the manual for IBM AT (later ISA) and then shared it with the world with the intent of commoditizing add-in cards for their PC. IBM however thought that by controlling the BIOS, they would retain control of the PC. COMPAQ reversed engineered the BIOS a year later and essentially dropped control of the PC market into the lap of the owner of DOS, Microsoft.

I think Joel is taking some liberties to push his narrative. Either that or he's regurgitating some nonsense barfed in his ear during his time at Microsoft in the 90s about how it was their plan all along. Microsoft wasn't being savvy with the way it licensed DOS to IBM, they didn't seen the coming reverse engineering of the BIOS. Quite simply, they didn't license DOS exclusively to IBM because they couldn't.

After licensing BASIC, IBM later approached Microsoft to source an OS in part because they had a deadline and because their failure to license CP/M was by virtue of the fact that they were IBM. Gary Kildall heard "IBM" and basically told them to get fucked. Microsoft became their Trojan horse to prevent another Kildall situation.

There's a lot of different stories about the origins of QDOS from Microsoft paying SCP to reverse engineer CP/M to QDOS containing CP/M source code. Regardless, Microsoft didn't have an exclusive license to QDOS when it re-licensed it to IBM. It wasn't a tactical move, Microsoft didn't provide IBM with an exclusive license of QDOS because at the time it simply wasn't there's to give. They managed to acquire ownership of QDOS from SCP prior to the PC launch but again that wasn't with the intent to commoditize computer hardware.

Post PC launch and COMPAQ clone, Microsoft wasn't fully at the helm either. IBM saw the error of their ways and sought to rectify it with PS/2 and MCA. If Microsoft had assumed control then IBM probably wouldn't have teamed up with them to build OS/2. Microsoft did however understand what OS/2 meant for their own bottom line and sought to subvert IBM. I would argue that up until the mid to late 90s, Microsoft was largely protecting it's own interest from IBM who was trying to wrangle back control of the PC market.

Again, Microsoft didn't design this. It wasn't their intent from the onset, the market fell into their lap and they fought off everyone else's attempts to take it away.

[squarefoot]

My hopes are that 5 years from now free hardware will be much faster than today. By then, even the bottom of the list should be able to support a working mobile environment.

[Bancakes]

It's sad to see free hardware is so comically behind commercial one.

[xhkkffbf]

To be fair, it's also priced dramatically lower. It's not fair to compare a current iPhone, priced at more than $1200 on the open market, with the Pine Phone priced at $150. This is where they chose to bring a phone to market and I think it's a smart move. They'll attract a bigger audience and make it easier for people to sim-swap and experiment.

When the distros get good enough, they can price out higher end hardware.

[eric__cartman]

I'm all for having tuxphones but even a $100 Android phone creams the Pine Phone in every aspect regarding performance. The sad truth is until the soc vendors don't start properly supporting a mainline Linux kernel and offer open source drivers we will be stuck with devices that haven't left the "wow this is cool but I wouldn't use is as my only phone" territory.

[axiolite]

> even a $100 Android phone creams the Pine Phone

That $100 Android phone is going to be carrier locked (subsidized by the carrier) and probably an older model where the R&D has already been paid-off, not an all new device. Once the Pine64 has been out for a few years, it's possible its price will drop to similarly competitive levels.

[fragileone]

Unfortunately this is even less likely in future once Fuschia matures and Google are able to replace the kernel with it on Pixel phones.

[Bancakes]

I can buy a Prestigio phone from aliexpress that far outperforms the pinephone, and is feature-complete.

[blihp]

That's a function of the state of the SoC options currently. There are very few options for an open source phone design to choose from that have sufficient public documentation. The ones that do tend to be several generations behind on process nodes and have more modest capabilities generally as they are often targeting the low end of the market.

[ocdtrekkie]

FOSS and OSH will always sit a few years behind companies which are investing billions of dollars in R&D. But we can try to lift what we can and catch up sooner or later.

[api]

FOSS UI/UX is at least two decades behind and the gap is growing.

A major problem is that people almost always underestimate the difficulty of a good UI. Good UIs can be a lot harder than the rest of a system and a modern UI toolkit has a feature set and difficulty level approaching that of a good 3D game engine like Unity.

[kazen44]

i disagree, KDE has one, if not the best ui out there. it is consistent, customizable and not a resource hog. windows's UI has been a mess since the XP days, and osx is atleast consistent, but hides a lot of functionality in name of clean design.

[mbreese]

And I disagree with you. And it’s not because I think KDE is horrible… it’s not. I prefer the Gnome style but KDE is quite polished.

But I disagree because it is really rare to have a completely unified UI with Linux. We have separate applications for Gnome and KDE for most tasks. Sometimes one is better than the other, or one has a feature you need, but you have many different competing applications. If you want to use the “best”, you end up with a mix of different styles.

Or, if you want to use an office suite, Libre Office is a different style altogether!

So, you say KDE has a unified style. That’s great. But KDE != Linux. And Linux is never going to have a unified style. That’s just the nature of the beast. There isn’t one group out there that can make UI/UX decisions for all of Linux. No group that can set priorities and make decisions about what features stay and what can be removed.

But that’s okay. That’s the trade off we get when working with FOSS software. We get to make those decisions for ourselves. But it rarely results in a “unified” UX. Powerful, yes. unified? No.

I am interested to see how the new KDE/pine64 relationship plays out though. Hopefully it will be great. And maybe I’m just a bit pessimistic after the last time with Nokia/Qt.

[2pEXgD0fZ5cF]

> it is really rare to have a completely unified UI with Linux

I mean neither does Windows 10, which basically does a split between at least 3 different styles. Tacked on top of everything sits the metro post Windows 8 style, but is a toy UI for many aspects, click on a random setting and it is likely you will then encounter settings in the windows XP/7 style.

The third one is the older Windows XP style UIs, which you still encounter once you have to venture outside of regular user territory (registry editor and the like).

[lmm]

> So, you say KDE has a unified style. That’s great. But KDE != Linux. And Linux is never going to have a unified style. That’s just the nature of the beast. There isn’t one group out there that can make UI/UX decisions for all of Linux. No group that can set priorities and make decisions about what features stay and what can be removed

You can run a complete desktop on KDE and have a good, well-integrated experience. Maybe some people will try to tell you that Firefox would be a better browser or whatever, but as long as Konqueror is good enough for you then why do you care? (Personally I actually think it's significantly better, and a lot of the KOffice tools are better than their LibreOffice counterparts, but taking it as a given that there are "best" versions of some things that are not on KDE).

Maybe you value one particular tool that doesn't fit into your integrated desktop, but that's a common experience on other platforms as well. But if a unified UI is what you want, you absolutely can have that.

[heavyset_go]

Plasma Desktop comes with adaptive theming for GTK that makes it match the rest of the UI.

[meibo]

Open any actual application on a pinephone and you'll see that whatever fanciness/usability KDE has falls short instantly. There's quite a way to go still.

[int_19h]

I would argue it's the other way around - FOSS UI/UIX is two decades ahead, because it didn't participate in the UX regression that has plagued us in those past two decades.

This isn't entirely true, because e.g. Gnome has been an enthusiastic adopter of all those anti-patterns. But, unlike other platforms, you still have other DE options to choose from.

[Valkhyr]

We can all discuss whether or not a certain UI/UX pattern is appropriate or not (and I certainly agree that many of the changes Apple have made in the last decade have been for the worse). But all personal preferences aside, Linux UI/UX feels to me at less consistent than macOS - both aesthetically/visually (between different UI toolkits etc) and in terms of behaviour (keyboard shortcuts, how well they work with touch screens, etc).

[int_19h]

I would agree with this sentiment across different DEs/toolkits, but the reality of the modern Linux desktop of a normal user is that it's just not that common. And within a single DE, they're plenty consistent. More so than Win10, say.

[testific8]

I think the new GNOME is pretty comparable to the Windows and MacOSX interfaces. Is there something I'm overlooking?

[noduerme]

So currently, it's a couple days after police and intelligence agencies worldwide raided the owners of ANOM-using phones that were allegedly private and built to exclude common hardware/software that's used for tracking. I'm not saying the governments of the world were wrong to bring those people down. But do you really expect anyone to buy a phone - with any combination of hardware and software - and retain any expectation of privacy whatsoever? Am I paranoid to think that this sounds like a continuation of the ANOM project... selling a supposedly secure, home brew and private device to the gullible who desperately want a secure channel?

Here's a secure channel: Dump your phone. There's no personal security with a device like that if you live in a state that might use your affiliations against you.

[Darvokis]

> Am I paranoid to think that this sounds like a continuation of the ANOM project... selling a supposedly secure, home brew and private device to the gullible who desperately want a secure channel?

The difference being that the point of the PinePhone is that the whole stack, from the hardware up to everything software, is open source or runs on open source firmware.

The Anom was a completely closed-source solution which required a large amount of trust in a single entity. The Pinephone (and by extension every other Linux phone, whether it exists yet or not) leverages the strengths of the Linux community and is in no way comparable.

[amelius]

> in the meantime got their mini solder iron which works surprisingly well (and I have two Wellers).

Looks interesting, what temperature can it reach?

[squarefoot]

Didn't test its maximum temp, however connected to a laptop power supply (from memory: about 20V, 4A) it reaches enough temperatures to do clean shiny solder joints on fairly big contacts compared to its size. I think it's mainly conceived for portability and soldering small parts, however it seems powerful enough to be used as a general purpose solder iron as well.

edit for more information: all tests done with leaded solder.

[jascii]

In all fairness, My personal PinePhone running SXMO is a lot snappier and performant then my Android work phone with all its bloatware...