[dleslie]

I have a Pinephone. I tried, in earnest, to use it as a daily driver; but the software stack was hideously unperformant and the camera was just too awful.

I have young kids; I need to take pictures quickly on occasion. I couldn't rely on the phone to do that, not by a long shot, and so it remains a pointless curiousity that I purchased.

[ben-schaaf]

With my recent kernel patches megapixels starts in 2s, which is less than my android phone. It wasn't too long ago the camera app ran at 2 fps and it's now at 60.

I feel like a lot of people are criticizing the PinePhone from the perspective of a product, instead of the labour of love that it really is. Things are constantly improving, but it's not many of us that are spending our free time to do so.

[bogwog]

To be fair, the Pinephone store very clearly states that this is a beta device intended for experience linux developers/early adopters only. It’s not meant to be a daily driver yet.

[dleslie]

It's not Beta. At the time I purchased it, it wasn't even Alpha. Beta, as a game developer, implies to me that there's a few outstanding show-stoppers but on the whole the product is safe to show to eager end-consumers who are willing to tolerate some rough edges. The PinePhone isn't even that, yet; I couldn't conscientiously hand it to a non-techy and ask them for feedback because I'm not even sure it would reliably respond to their touch input, let alone do anything else.

[asddubs]

Seems like you're just arguing semantics. The pinephone is very clearly advertised as aimed at developers

[dleslie]

The question was if anyone was using a Linux phone.

Did I use it to tinker with mobile Linux? Sure.

Did I find success using it as a phone? No. It's nowhere near ready to be used as a phone outside of tinkering.

[asddubs]

Well, I don't disagree with that, my point was just that you're arguing semantics regarding the word beta, because their marketing is very clear about what it is (and I'd also argue that beta for hardware is a different standard than for games, but I guess now I'm arguing semantics)

[selfhoster11]

Do you think even a developer will want to use something that falls apart in their hands like wet sawdust as a daily driver? As a developer, hell no. I'll give Linux phones a couple more years before I try that.

[asddubs]

well, the point is to develop on it so that future becomes possible.

[selfhoster11]

Yes, but if it's to address the needs of a real user and not a spherical user in a vacuum, the phone has to be able to handle some rudimentary functionality in the meantime so developers can dogfood what they made. Few developers will carry two phones all the time.

[account42]

> Beta, as a game developer, implies to me that there's a few outstanding show-stoppers but on the whole the product is safe to show to eager end-consumers who are willing to tolerate some rough edges.

I don't know what games you have worked on but as a user that description seems to match what is called "final patch" by the games industry.

[bogwog]

The Pinephone isn’t a video game.

[dleslie]

Considering that video games are usually released unfinished; if you're saying it doesn't even meet the dismal quality standards of video game development, wrt Beta quality, then I agree with you.

[taeric]

I can't rely on any phone's camera for speed. Sucks to hear this one is even worse than normal.

[dleslie]

The camera is so bad that it's even a shame that they bothered adding it. The additional cost for the hardware clearly wasn't worth it.

[ben-schaaf]

If Pine64 didn't include hardware that wasn't fully software supported at any arbitrary point in time then the PinePhone as a whole wouldn't exist in the first place.

The thing with the cameras is there's hardly anyone putting effort into them - on average around ~1 person is working on the entire camera stack in their free time (there's a number of people, but none spend their whole time on the cameras). So it's honestly pretty amazing how far we've already come.

[floren]

Seconded. It's been several years of development time and I still think I'd get better pictures with one of those cameras that saved pictures on floppy disks.

I've bought two Pinephones and I hope things go well but man, I install Mobian and wonder what exactly their long term plan is... it runs like an absolute dog, worse than a $30 Android prepaid phone. The only way to get reasonable performance has been to use sxmo, which is ok for me but not the experience normal people want.

[fsflover]

If you need a good camera, consider Librem 5 instead.

[seba_dos1]

Note that while it's already possible to get really good looking photos out of L5 camera, there's still quite a lot of software work left to do for it to work in an effortless point-and-shoot fashion. It will come, just be aware it's not there yet.

[kaba0]

Iphone’s are ridiculously good from a lock screen to shoot perspective, especially with live images.