I was going through Pine64’s page again after I found the latest KDE announcement. With that said, I seem to see a lot of issues with firmware on the Pine, whilst the Librem is just plain out of budget for me. Was interested in how many people here run a Linux mobile as a daily driver, and how has your experience been?
I’m considering purchasing the Pine but I’d like a better screen, more RAM and a better CPU. Don’t know if I should wait for a new model to be released (are they even planning to do that? Is the company active?). I will only really use it to browse the Web, and might even look to desolder a couple of parts that I know I won’t use.
Thanks.
Edit: I am willing to watch content and use banking apps from the browser. Do you think it’ll be fit for me?
Edit 2: overall, I am much saddened about the state of affairs regarding private computing on the go. I desperately hope that Linux on mobile takes off, even though its incubation looks disheartening at the moment. Thank you everyone for your comments.
Why not try lineageo OS? I’ve been daily driving it for one year now and it’s reliably if you don’t throw magisk modules at it for fun.
I threw magisk modules at it for fun and it’s still reliable.
If you have bootlop saver you can throw whatever. I have like six of them
I don’t have it, thanks for telling me about it
No problems. It’ll automatically disable all scripts so youll have to manually enable them in case of bootfail.
Doesn’t safe mode do that as well?
As far as I know no. You probably could use adb to remove the scripts tho
I second the recommendation for lineage OS. I’ve been using it since 2011 with my Nexus S (when it was Cyanogen). Works, defaults to de-googled, but easy to install gapps at the same time (follow instructions because it needs to be done before first boot).
I’ll never run a stock ROM again if I can help it, and so far…
Which recent devices other than the Pixels are supported?
A lot? They have a pretty big list and for all I know all are stable. https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/
So fucking dumb how we have to look for specific models just to get support for smartphones.
Can you image if Linux only ran on HP and dell laptops?
Unfortunately that’s moistly on maufacters. If they don’t release the kernel LOS can’t do anything. Also depending on the phone it might take a while till someone picks the phone and decides to support it. Laptops do have compatibility options. But I get what your saying, it is annoying but what did you expect from such organization?
It would be awesome if we could just install whatever like we can on pcs. On phones you still need a developer to make a specific rom for that device, we were close with Generic System Images (GSIs), but I don’t think they really went anywhere
I think you can but I’m not sure. There’s Ubuntu Touch that works on some phones but it’s really buggy
It’s just the shit design of Android: no bios and firmware must be bundled in the rom
Hopefully when RISCv gets there it won’t be so bad.
Now that manufacturers are getting called out for it they tend to follow the support cycle upstream. Now, much of it falls on the chip makers, Qualcomm specifically supports chips for 5 years iirc (and 8 years for their industrial chips).
If the manufacturers can achieve vertical integration, like Apple has, with RISCv I think we’ll see a lot more mainlined support from them.
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No. To root you need to extract boot.img, patch it in the app then flash it while in bootloader.