So I made it 6 days using Ubuntu as my daily. Here’s what I learned (Android user’s prospective).
AT&T network connectivity is terrible:
I don’t know what causes it, but it’ll just stop receiving data and the only way I know how to fix it is to restart the phone. Also sending and receiving texts was pretty spotty. I would have switched off sooner if I knew I had a good chance of missing texts. BTW, toggling data or airplane mode did not help.
WI-FI connection is slow to reconnect.
It would take to phone anywhere from a few seconds to 5+ minutes (longest I’d wait) to reconnect. Sometimes you could toggle the Wi-Fi to speed this up.
You can’t set alarms.
This honestly makes sense to me. Ubuntu is too unstable to trust with alarms right now.
Camera is completely unusable.
I mostly use my camera to take pictures of text at work, but that’s a big nope. Super blurry, and the viewfinder runs @ like 1 fps.
GPS doesn’t seem to work
I couldn’t get the navigation app “uNav” to work at all. It would say “waiting for GPS” endlessly.
I did (surprisingly) really enjoy using the UI gestures. The task switching gesture for the previous app is the quickest and most intuitive I’ve used on any mobile device. Seriously satisfying to use.
I hated the notification shade but I liked it after I learned that dragging down on the icons gives you the page related to that icon. Still way to many pages though.
No way to go home from what I can tell.
I think it’s a tragedy that the app tray is on the left. I wish I could move it to the right. Example: use the top half for multi tasking and the bottom half for app tray.
Hide the keyboard by swiping down on it. Took me far to long to figure that out. Lol
Morph Browser is pretty good.
It’s a bit chuggy to used, but it’s usable. It surprisingly can play YT videos pretty smoothly.
Battery life was passable.
It would generally get me though a 10 hour day unless I was using it a lot (something like checking it every 10 minutes).
The phone would sometimes (like every other day-ish) crash and get stuck recovering. You have to do a hard shutdown when that happens.
Overall the lack of reliable texts and navigation is what forced me to something else. Fix those and I’d daily it.
Manjaro Lomiri is going to be my next attempt to daily.
Manjaro released a new Manjaro version for the PinePhone. Manjaro Lomiri, which has the look and feel as Ubuntu but it’s Manjaro making it an automatic winner in my book. Lol
I’m going to install it on the eMMC and throw my daily sim in it, and do some testing with it tomorrow. It looks like they might have fixed the calling and text stability issues already, and if that’s the case it will stay my daily.
I am so happy to see this since Ubuntu’s UI is the only one I want to use right now. It is far better than KDE (Plasma) and Gnome (Posh) right now.
Wife’s phone is on deaths door. I’ve been thinking about replacing the battery on mine and giving it to her. I wanted to go daily on the PinePhone (I only wanted it to reliably call and text) but it sounds like it’s not there. I think I’ll end up passing on this go around and maybe jumping on board when the next hardware release happens. I’m ok with Beta software, but alpha software is a bit too far for me.
Seems like call and text is fairly reliable (see: minor bugs, nothing game breaking), it’s the other stuff that’s not quite there. Although, @TeckMonster would be better able to comment on that.
I’ve only attempted to daily Ubuntu which don’t seem to have their priorities in line.
I’m really liking the Manjaro builds and my testing with Manjaro Posh seemed to have reliable texts. I was going to try dailying that, but when I saw this new Manjaro build with Lomiri I had to try it, and just getting it all set up it feels the most polished of all the Linux builds I’ve tried. Given how good it is in Alpha 1 I bet this is what the Manjaro edition PinePhone is going to ship with.
I absolutely need more time with Lomiri though, but I think Manjaro Posh is there, but I need to actually daily it to confirm.
As soon as mine comes in, I’ll be trying to daily it. Mostly just call/text. Maybe email/MFA/music, but those are simple things that were solved long ago.
The included camera app, Megapixels, actually works! It has some scaling issues which I think can be fixed by passing QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR, but the app loads correctly and activates the camera.
Performance is worse than standard Android cameras, of course, but it’s not demonstrating the choppiness I’ve seen other Pinephone distros have with their cameras.
The Manjaro artwork is much better than Ubuntu’s, though others might disagree.
The included setup app is a nice touch, but should be improved. It currently includes Wifi selection, time zone selection, and “customization” which I assume is setting the hostname.
Setting the name of the default user and setting a non-default password would also be useful.
I’ll play around with this a bit more now that I have a sane package manager to work with. I’d like to figure out a good screenshot tool, and I want to try taking some pictures to demonstrate the abilities of the camera.
Totaly agree. The first impressions are super good.
Did you notice that didn’t actually update the timezone
Actually you can’t seem to change it though the UI at all.
Like?
For me it’s the app tray being on the left, and the notification shade haveing far too many pages. Why does rotation lock need an intire page? Lol
Do you know about draging down on the icons in the notification bar? Give that a shot.
Also try holding the spacebar down. Gives you a decent way to move the cursor.
Try holding your finger down on the terminal and swiping up or down.
I assumed that this gesture would scroll up and down to read the output of the terminal. Nope, it emulated up-arrow and down-arrow, so my previous commands appear and disappear.
In general, I dislike swipe gestures, but Manjaro Lomiri seems to use them a lot. There’s a weird selection dialog for autocorrect that requires a hold and swipe to select; it closes if you try tapping.
The unlock screen should, IMO, pop up on power press from a suspended state. You shouldn’t have to power on the device and then swipe to unlock.
Yeah. They set it up with two finger scrolling, but I agree they should be switched. I do like gestures since they take up less room on the little screen than buttons.
Swipe to unlock is pretty standard, and I can’t think of an easier way to prevent your lag from clicking the screen if your pocket presses the power button.
Now that you mention it, I understand why I don’t like it…
The Pinephone doesn’t have a fingerprint sensor. When I said it shouldn’t make me click and then swipe, it’s because I’m comparing it to the action of my Android phone. With my Redmi Note 4, the screen is active and usable as my eyes focus on it, because I instinctively put my finger on that spot as I pick it up.
So… my comparison wasn’t exactly fair, but I’m also now finding the Pinephone’s lack of fingerprint reader to be a much bigger issue than I anticipated it would be.
So far, the lack of a smooth “out of the holster and ready to fire” feeling is the single biggest drawback I see with using this device in non-dev settings.
Can confirm, Manjaro Lomiri it the target OS for the PinePhone Manjaro edition. I imagine they’ve got pretty much their whole team working on this to get it ready.
I haven’t had enough time with mine for the novelty to wear off. I was closest to loosing interested after I tried to daily Ubuntu, and then trying to daily Manjaro Posh and realizing that OS is way too slow.
But then I found Manjaro Lomiri and I’ve been updating it every day since I’m so interested to see it develop.
I really really just want it to be reliable for text and calling and I’d be more than happy to daily.
