PinePhone To The Rescue...?

Yes, I hate phones. Yes, I own a phone. Yes, it is a PinePhone.

This is Part 2 of my previous article about why phones suck, and I encourage you to read Part 1 before taking any of this as advice, since this is not quite the PinePhone review you are looking for. A lot of what I say here about the PinePhone applies to any phone running any of the Linux distros you would typically run on a PinePhone.

Introduction

The TL;DR for Part 1 is that it's bad that society expects you to carry a phone all the time and install a bunch of proprietary apps for things that shouldn't even require electricity. Therefore the answer for the title is: no, the PinePhone won't magically solve all of society's problems, but it can be quite an upgrade in terms of freedom and privacy if you are not expecting to have full spyware compatibility.

Some Positive Notes

I got carried away and ended up making this too much of a Part 2 on hating phones instead of focusing on the PinePhone, so let's insert some nice things here before it all gets ugly.

Linux phones get it right when it comes to making mobile-friendly interfaces: They run full desktop Linux systems, with a friendly mobile interface on top (optional). You still have access to all the desktop stuff you could possibly need, including root access, terminal access (including Linux virtual terminals), any desktop app that is totally not meant for a phone, SSH daemon, partitioning and mounting internal/removable storage, literally everything. Most of the "mobile apps" shipped with these distros are just desktop apps that adapt to small screens. This shows that it is possible to have a functioning mobile device without all the dumb Android limitations. Phones are computers.

Another great thing is that the PinePhone can boot from a microSD card out of the box. That means you can easily switch the operating system without having to sacrifice your child into a volcano and do the bootloader unlock dance.

My Setup

To give you an idea of the freedom you get, here is how I have my PinePhone set up:

• OS: Arch Linux ARM. There is a community maintaining a mobile friendly version that just works, but I installed it the Arch way instead;
• Window Manager: dwm. Yep, the suckless one. On a phone. To be honest I didn't think it would be usable at first, but a project called sxmo went and did it before me, and I took some inspiration and made my own build;
• Phone stuff: for calls and SMS, I wrote my own scripts that interface with ModemManager.

That's basically it, I use it as if it were a desktop and it works. Of course it is very limited by the form factor, but it's the path I took. I just do most stuff on the terminal and launch graphical programs with dmenu. To make it suck a little less, I make use of many single-letter aliases and scripts.

The point here is, although I wouldn't really recommend it, you are free to do crazy stuff like this.

Signal

There is a lot I dislike about the Signal messenger, but that's not for this post.

There are several ways to use Signal on a Linux phone. There are third party clients such as Axolotl, which support registering a new account, but using a phone as the master device is dumb (I still hate phones, remember?). I use signal-cli on the desktop for that, and on the PinePhone I just link the desktop app to it. Once again, yep, the Signal-Desktop app, on a phone. It's... usable.

Unfortunately there is no official Linux ARM support from Signal, so I use this unofficial build instead. Use it at your own risk.

Waydroid

It is possible to run Android apps on the PinePhone through Waydroid. But should you? I think that defeats the purpose of using a Linux phone. If you are going to run Android on top of it, you might as well run it natively without the extra complexity and overhead. Also the main use case for it would be supporting proprietary spyware that you shouldn't be running anyway.

Once again, this is not a review. I personally don't use Waydroid. Some people say it works great. Good for them. That's not the point.

The Paradox

This is basically how being a phone-hating-FOSS-enthusiast-PinePhone-owner feels:

• I want to build stuff from scratch and be in control of my device;
• If you've been paying attention, you know I don't particularly like phones;
• Therefore I don't feel like wasting time improving my phone;
• I end up with a worse experience than I would have if I put a little more effort into it;
• Even considering switching to a "just works" distro is too much of a chore since I really don't care enough, and also because this list wraps around.

And Now Some Negative Notes

Before that let me emphasize that some of the bad stuff here might be specific to my setup, and not to the PinePhone in general. Also I can't comment on other Linux phones.

• The camera sucks: I haven't been keeping up with the latest development, but last I checked there was only one specific app that knows how to access it. It is not usable in web browsers for example. The supported camera app always crashes for me when I try to take a picture. I think it only crashes on X11 (biggest mobile-friendly UIs use Wayland). Also the image quality isn't great;
• The modem can be unstable sometimes: The thing that makes the PinePhone a phone is not very reliable. There have been improvements but I'm still not confident in its ability to do a bunch of tasks without a reboot;
• Call audio sucks: It's too quiet on my end, and sounds like shit on the other end;
• Battery life isn't great. That's not much of a problem for me because I keep it powered off all the time.

That being said, I do appreciate all the work that volunteers are doing to improve things.

And now back to why all phones will always suck.

Crippled Pocket Computers

Let me elaborate on this quote from Part 1:

phones will always be crippled pocket computers, either because there is too much abstraction in order to fit the form factor, or because there isn't.

You can absolutely do computer stuff on the PinePhone (or other Linux phones, or even Android to some extent), but computer stuff usually requires a larger screen and a keyboard. So if you treat a phone like a computer, it's powerful but hard to use, and if you abstract away all the mobile-unfriendliness, you end up with a frustratingly limited toy with a cute shiny UI.

Virtual Keyboards

They always suck:

• They cover a significant portion of the screen, giving you even less space to work with;
• You can't feel the tiny keys on your fingertips going down and up as you press them. The best you'll get is an artificial vibration;
• Typing should be done with 10 fingers, not just 2 thumbs;
• Layouts suck, either because they only show a small subset of the keys on the main layer or because they show too many and it gets all cluttered.

Keyboard-driven workflows are just superior on the desktop, but painful on mobile. So you can either get used to it or give in to the high level toy interfaces.

Conclusion

I still hate phones. Linux phones are great for what they are, but they are still phones. You get a whole lot more freedom from them compared to Android and iOS phones, but freedom always comes at the cost of not being spoon-fed stuff that just works for the average blue pill junky, and instead having to make choices and set things up yourself.

If you are a FOSS enjoyer, and you think my opinions on phones are too extreme, then by all means give Linux phones a try. If instead you totally agree, then take a step further and go phoneless.

Now I can hopefully quit yapping about hating stuff and write about some more joyful subjects. Hopefully.