this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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The phone is from 2019 and i think even back then the SoC was a compromise.
It has more quirks. There have been some hardware issues. And mainline Linux and a Linux Desktop is still struggling today with power management. Like getting chat messages while it's asleep. It's really not for use except for tinkerers.
But I'd agree. A newer, properly usable and powerful Linux phone would be great. Idk if there are good SoCs out there with fully open-source drivers and bootloader. And power consumption that lasts you a day.
Totally ! Honestly, when i first heard of a linux phone, I had stars in my eyes. I expected medium-low tier specs but that would likely more than enough to for Linux. The actual specs made me cringe because the phone was e-waste before even launch. I think I actually over exaggerated calling it a piece of garbage, I just expected too much from a small company on a niche market.
Yeah, a Nokia N950 with a proper SoC and 8GB of RAM. Or something like the APU from the Steam Deck.
That'd be great 🤗
AMD APUs are beasts !. That would be a computer disguising as a phone. Now, that's what I would call a revolutionary product. Kinda like Samsung Dex but libre.
I think back in the day, we had more diversity on the market. In the pre-smart-phone era Nokia came out with silly keyboard designs regularly. We had blackberrys at one time. And now they all look the same. Slightly different form-factor but that's about it. You can spend $1200 to get a status-symbol phone but that does practically the same my $350 phone does. (Okay, Samsung tries silly flip-phones but I don't like them.) All the more recent attempts kinda failed. Like Motorola doing attachable acessories, or Google trying to invent a modular phone. (I believe Samsung Dex, LG's WebOS etc are also a thing of the past.)
I'd like some company to be bold and try new things. For Linux it'd be probably enough if some current SoC got free software support (and drivers for the camera, peripherals etc). We could buy a standard phone then. But currently I don't see that happening. All the phones with mainline support are very old and/or severely underpowered. And there is no one phone with a big free software community behind it. Well, Pine64 tried...
Valve seems to be more successful with their Linux endeavours. Maybe we can expect more from that corner of portable Linux devices. And the Steam Deck costs like half an S23 Ultra (or iPhone).
And the really sad thing is that the power management improvements devs have been working on for the PinePhone are really very specific to that particular device and don't help mobile Linux in general (so it's basically wasted effort).
Well, to do it properly I believe we need a whole API for applications that does connected standy. (Like Android Apps have)