Anyone use one of those Linux phones like pine phone or librem.

I was looking at a few months ago but settled on a deggooled phone. Are there user friendly distros for them?

  • loopgru@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I owned a Pine Phone Pro for a while and it was a disaster. The software is still coming together, which is expected, but the hardware was also hobby project grade. As the previous poster mentioned, battery, camera, and screen were all bad, and on top of that the phone would refuse to charge with most chargers and could not charge at all while not booted, so once the battery was dead you had zero recourse beyond an external charger. The clamshell keyboard also wouldn’t work without shimming the pogo pin connectors forward, and even then it was hit or miss. The company was terrible to deal with and only finally accepted a return after escalating a dispute with Paypal. I hate dumping on a company providing hardware for mobile Linux, but these guys seriously do more harm than good.

    • Shatur@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Strongly disagree. All things you mentioned are hardware issues. And they providing a phone with a bad specs intentionally. Because no one will buy an expensive GNU/Linux phone. We simply do not have software. The idea is to provide relatively cheap hardware, so developers can start working on it. And another reason was to provide hardware that have some GNU/Linux support already to avoid asking community to start from scratch. Very few phones can run GNU/Linux because of lack of drivers.

      And yes, the keyboard is bad hardware-wise, I not satisfied with it either. But Pine did a lot for GNU/Linux on phones. Enthusiasts started writing software seriously only after PinePhone appearance.